Interestingly, sjm said he disagreed with this, that Shane had the best performance this year, and of course, he was there on site.
I had remembered Atlarge did the stats for Mosconi Cup. So when I went to look at them, sjm was correct. Shane had fared better than Earl this year, statistically speaking.
JAM -- I'll again explain the numbers you quoted for Earl and Shane.
First numbers:
0-1, 1-2, 0-1, 1-4.....Strickland
0-1, 2-0, 0-1, 2-2.....Van Boening
This first set of numbers essentially answers the simple question: "In how many winning and losing matches was each player involved?" I showed four win-loss numbers for each player: singles matches, then doubles, then team, and then total.
So, Earl played one singles match and lost; he played three doubles matches, winning one and losing two; he played one team match and lost. So, in total, he played in 5 matches, winning one and losing four. His overall winning percentage, therefore was 20%, winning one match out of five.
Shane lost his only singles match, won both of his doubles matches, and lost his team match. So, in total, he won two and lost two, for a 50% winning percentage.
On this basis, Shane did better -- he won 2 out of 4 matches, whereas Earl won 1 out of 5.
Second Numbers:
Strickland: 0.5 - 2.2
Van Boening: 1.0 - 1.2
With the first set of numbers, a doubles match gives a full win to each player on the winning team. But the match really gives only one point to the winning side, not two. So I just split the point, giving half a point to each of the two winners (and half of the loss to each of the two losers). The team match also counts as just one point toward the Cup scoring. So I gave each of the five members of the winning team one-fifth of a point for winning instead of a full point. So these numbers essentially answer the question: "What numerical contribution did each player make to the overall Mosconi Cup scores?" [Adding up all the numbers this way, you get the actual Cup results of 2-11 for the USA and 11-2 for Europe.]
Earl's only win was in a doubles match, so he got half a point for that. His losses were in a singles match (full point lost), two doubles matches (half a point lost for each), and the team match (one-fifth of a point lost). Therefore, in total, he contributed half a point on the win side and 2.2 points on the losing side. In other words, he won 0.5 points out of a possible 2.7, or a 19% winning percentage.
Shane's only wins were in two doubles matches (plus half a point for each). His losses were in a singles match (a full point lost) and the team match (one-fifth of a point lost). Therefore, in total, he contributed one point on the win side and 1.2 points on the loss side. In other words, he won 1.0 points out of a possible 2.2, or a 45% winning percentage.
On this second basis, as with the first, Shane did better.
Caveat to these numbers:
Neither of these sets of numbers gives a full picture of how Earl and Shane actually played. For example -- in the team match, both players played in just 2 of the 9 games of the 3-6 loss. Earl won both of his games, ran 9 balls and out in both of them, and made no errors -- he was "perfect." Shane lost both of his games, made only 2 of the 18 balls, and made 4 errors -- not good at all. But in the two sets of numbers above, Earl and Shane are treated equally for this team match -- a full loss (1 point) in the first set of numbers or a 0.2 point loss in the second set of numbers.
To really answer the question of who
played better, we need to look at something like an Accu-Stats Total Performance Average (TPA), that derives a numerical "batting average" from all of the shots. I haven't done that in detail, but a quick tally indicates that Earl and Shane both made about the same number of balls in total and both committed about the same number of errors, so I'd expect their TPA's to be not greatly different.
But a caveat to the caveat is that TPA's don't correlate perfectly with wins and losses, and it is the latter that is more important to most people.