How do you know Buzzfeed did not use a random salt along with the hash?

They have used a salt, they mention it on the repo.

Yeah I saw that. I'm brute forcing it now... perl is a bit too slow for 12-16 chars, so I'm rewriting it in pony. I assume a known plaintext of a popular player who should be in the top 4. And I'm assuming the spelling from the ATP rankins.

A much simpler way of de-anonymizing the results would be to "match" (lol) the stats to real players. For example, which player who first appeared in 2005 and has played 15 matches, faced off against another player who first appeared in 2007 and has played 5 matches?