By Andrea Scaglione The Catcher on The Line on Substack Dec 16, 2025
Tennis has the perfect alibi: “you play with the ball you are given”. It is a phrase that shuts down every discussion, transforming a choice into destiny. The problem is that the ball is not background noise. It is the object that traverses every rally, the single physical element entering every single point, hundreds of times a match.
If such a frequent element is unstable, the match doesn’t just change “a bit”. It changes the economy of decision-making: when to attack, when to take a risk, when to approach the net, and how much margin is needed just to stay in the rally.
At the turn of the century, the issue was sold to us as a series of dials: Type 1 to speed up slow courts, Type 3 to slow down fast ones. In theory, it is all very linear. In high-level tennis, it is substantially irrelevant, because almost the entire “business” is played within a single category, Type 2, and within that category, the “real” speed is not decided by the ITF label; it is decided by the product.
The Type 3, the one supposed to slow the game down in an obvious way, is also the easiest to spot: it is larger (7.00–7.30 cm in diameter versus 6.54–6.86). If it were truly the lever used by the Tour, you would see it. But you don’t. And this pushes the conversation to where it hurts: the circuit does not slow down through a declared oversize ball; it slows down, when it slows down, through industrial and operational variations within Type 2.
So, the ITF aimed—after slowing down the grass at Wimbledon—for a homogenisation of the game: no more extremely slow courts or extremely fast ones.
The Pivot: Accelerator and Brake
One element of context forces us to reckon with reality: from the early 2000s until roughly 2019, data indicates that match duration in Grand Slams increased significantly (particularly in the men’s main draw best-of-five sets), a trend often quantified around 20% by historical series analysis.
It was not a coincidence. It is the physics of compensation: while racquets were becoming (uncontrollably) more forgiving and polyester strings allowed players to generate insane spin—effectively pressing the accelerator on the game—the authorities needed a brake.
If the available power increases, something in the system must make the points more “defendable” to prevent the sport from becoming a shooting range. The dimensions of the court have not changed, so one of the few available levers, and a plausible reason, is the ball. It is the usual suspect: it is in every rally and changes dynamically with wear.
Slowly, but not too slowly, Type 1 and especially Type 3 (to date, there are no manufacturers of ITF-approved Type 3 balls) never truly arrived, leaving the vast majority of tournaments to Type 2. So why has the game slowed down and have rallies increased in duration?
The Real Point: Regular Duty vs Extra Duty
Within Type 2, the distinction that counts is not a number, it is the felt. Regular Duty tends to remain more compact, cleaner, livelier. Extra Duty is built to survive hard courts, with a more robust and synthetic felt.
The price to pay is often what happens over time: the felt fluffs up, the ball “grows”, creates more drag, and loses penetration. The category does not change, the economy of the point does. If the ball “cuts through” less, the defence gains useful time. If the defence gains useful time, approaching the net costs more. And when that happens, and players don’t like it, the game converges towards the solution that best tolerates uncertainty: baseline depth, margin, repetition. Hence the disappearance of great attackers and, with them, the one-handed backhand at the highest levels.
It is not an aesthetic judgment. It is a rule driven by risk. Translation: they slowed it down too much, wiping out a consistent part of tennis.
Roland Garros, the Turning Point: The Babolat Era, Nadal, and the Last of the Great Type 1s
One case deserves to be put on the table because it is the only segment of recent history that introduces a credible rupture: Roland Garros until 2019. For a decade, the tin explicitly read “Babolat”.
Around those balls circulated a very specific reading: they were perceived (and in some years explicitly declared Type 1) as distinctly livelier, aerodynamically faster. In any case, the practical data was stable: it was a livelier ball, quicker through the air, and on clay, it changed the tournament’s tactical manual. It has often been said that this profile was particularly well-suited to Nadal, but the most important thing is that it allowed the ball to travel through the air despite the slow surface.
Then the supplier changed: Wilson Type 2 arrived, and with it, the air changed. There is no need to act as notaries on exact specifications; the point is that a Grand Slam changed supplier, and changing supplier meant rewriting the tournament’s tactical manual.
Slams Today: Four Tournaments, One World, Type 2
Look at the top of tennis in 2024–2025 and the picture is consistent: different suppliers, different names, but always Type 2. The few Type 1 products are used neither in the Masters 1000 nor at Roland Garros, where Wilson and Dunlop Type 2 dominate, shaped by felt and durability. It is here that the rhetoric of the “standard ball” collapses. The standard is a regulatory window, within which products move with different behaviours, especially over time.
The Politics: Without Transparency, the Lever Remains Out of Control
What we see from the beginning of the century to today, as a “plan on paper”, is a tendency towards homogenisation and slowing down (like the Type 3 project after the slowing of the grass).
Here, we do not want to go so far as to say that ball management (alongside the complete lack of sensible control over other materials) has knowingly favoured the obliteration of a large part of tennis playing patterns. Here, we are saying perhaps something worse: the idea, right or wrong, of the ITF has been lost in translation from standardisation to productive and commercial reality.
When a system realises that constant ball changes have become a problem, the natural response is to centralise (theoretically this happened in 2025, but the players do not seem to have perceived it…), to make oscillations more coherent, to reduce perceived variability.
5-17-2025 from Bublik IG
But the real knot is not technical, it is one of governance: as long as the ball is treated as an opaque contractual supply, the circuit can shift the balance without ever having to declare it, and without allowing for clean comparisons.
That is why the conclusion is direct: if the object appearing in every point is selected and managed without publicly comparable criteria, tennis remains exposed to a “silent” manipulation, in the absence of a written plan. And in an era where Slams last longer despite there being more power available, that opacity is no longer sustainable.
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