Federer's dominance is positively Sampras-like

	Not since Pete Sampras left the court has tennis seen the type of domination Roger Federer has produced of late. AP
	MAILBAG Jon Wertheim will answer questions from SI.com users in his mailbag every Wednesday. Your name: Your e-mail address: Your home town: Enter your question:

After yet another thoroughly dominant season, can we just get it over with and crown Federer the best of all time (with or without the French title)?
 -- Michael, Los Angeles

The view here has long been that while Federer is making a rapid ascent, Sampras is still atop the Mount GOAT (Greatest of all time). But Federer isn't far from the summit. He still trails Sampras in Slams, obviously, but that's just one metric. Sampras never had a season like this: a 92-5 record and a few loose sets from winning the Grand Slam. Plus, Federer will soon set the record for consecutive weeks at No.1.

If Federer completes the career Slam, I think you have to confer him with the GOAT honors. But even if he falls short of that quest, I'm prepared to say that another year sustaining this level of dominance and he'll have my vote.

By my unofficial/unscientific calculation, Roger Federer could have lost his Wimbledon semifinal match to Jonas Bjorkman and stopped playing the rest of the year and still finished with more ranking points than Rafael Nadal. Had he done that, other players would likely have gotten the points he won, but it still provides some context for the year he just had.
 -- Robert, Washington, D.C.

We could devote an entire Mailbag to these fun stats. My favorite: the points differential between Federer and Nadal is greater than the points differential between Nadal and No. 30, Stan Warinka.

One of the wonderful aspects of tennis is how truly international the sport is, and the recently completed Masters Cup in Shanghai illustrates the point beautifully. The 12 semifinalists (four in singles and eight in doubles) represented 12 different countries from A (Argentina and Australia) to Z (Zimbabwe).
 -- Scott Humphrey, Austin, Texas

Great observation. Thanks, Scott. Just when your confidence in tennis starts to waver, you read something like this, which ought to be a clip-and-save in the WTA and ATP home offices. In some ways, the flatter the world gets, the better off tennis is.

All right, I give: what was the spelling error?
 -- Phil Nichols, Jacksonville, Fla.

Enough of you wrote in that I have to believe the error was fixed. At one point the "B's" in Boris Becker's name had been replaced by P's.

I think it's a joke that Mauresmo finished third after having won two majors in one year. I think this flaw in the ranking system could be fixed if the WTA handed out bonus points for each additional slam you win in a year, say 1,000 extra points. So if you win two or three slams in the same year you earn enough bonus points to pretty much guarantee the No. 1 ranking at the end of the year.
 -- Bob Romero,  Monee, Ill.

I agree there's something counterintuitive in the system. But it's not as though Henin-Hardenne gamed the system by playing tons of events. (She only played 13.) Player A wins two Slams, reaches the semis of one and flames out in the fourth. Player B win one, reaches the final of the other three and beats Player A at the year-end championships. If B is ranked marginally higher than A, doesn't that sound right?

Here's a Linda Richman discuss-amongst-yourself topic: If the WTA increases the points value for Slam results, doesn't it devalue the tour's own events in the process? Seems to me there's a real conflict here.