Midweek Musings

Tomorrow is getaway day, so forgive a little brevity....

Rut Roh - The thing about living in the public eye is that, well, you're in the public eye:

Dustin Johnson Tuesday issued a statement about his relationship with fiancée Paulina

Gretzky, days after she deleted multiple images of the couple from her Instagram account and amid reports that he had an affair. 

“Every relationship goes through its ups and downs, but most importantly, we love each other very much and are committed to being a family. Thank you for your love and support,” Johnson wrote via Twitter.

 At the risk of sounding like my grandmother, that commitment to being a family hasn't led to them, you know, actually becoming a family.... This is the kind of story that calls for maximum sensitivity, rendering it entirely inappropriate for this blog.  But, given my lack of any self control, see how you react to this profile of party of the second part:

Gretzky, who is a model, singer, celebutante and daughter of hockey Hall of Famer Wayne Gretzky, has yet to issue a comment.

Personally, I think of Paulina first and foremost as a singer.... But, joking aside, it's always been a matter of when, not if, DJ would screw this up.  

More than anything, this smells to me like the ghost of Danny Willett's brother, threatening to overshadow that little exhibition outside of Paris.  Thank God we have those fourteen Vice Captains, because we might be down one WAG.

The Prime of Mark Broadie - Josh Sens with a good profile of stats guru to the stars Mark Braodie:

First adopted by the PGA Tour in 2011, “strokes gained,” Broadie’s breakthrough

analytics tool, has become a fixture in golf’s Moneyball age. Though he was not alone in seeing the shortcomings of old-saw categories such as greens-in-regulation and putts-per-round (which, beyond being unhelpful, can be outright misleading), he was the first to do something about it. With strokes gained, Broadie was able to set the data straight by placing it in proper context. It allowed him to measure a player’s performance against the rest of the field while providing an isolated view of specific aspects of their game. 

What started out in 2011 as merely a strokes-gained putting stat has, in the past seven years, spawned many other categories in the Tour’s ShotLink database, including revelatory strokes gained measures on tee shots, approach shots and shots around the green. Their combined influence on golf have been likened to the sway of sabermetrics over baseball, changing how Tour pros play and practice, how coaches coach, how caddies caddie.

I had the pleasure of sitting with Mark at a Met. Golf Writers Awards dinner a few years back, and had an interesting conversation with him.  He was surprisingly interested in my early appreciation of Bill James' work in baseball, a man to whom he's often compared.  

I, on the other hand, was most interested in the availability of data, which has always been the limiting factor.  Here's his take on the most interesting question, what comes next?

As for future projections for golf analytics, Broadie sees nearly boundless opportunity for exploration, limited only by the availability of good data. One area he has in mind is strokes-gained categories that account for factors such as wind, turf conditions and the contours of a shot. Another is quantifying performance under pressure, a topic Broadie has been working on of late. He believes he’s onto something. 

“For mental toughness, the only stat that attempts to measure it is bounce-back,” he says. “And I think there are better ways.”

That bit about pressure reminds strongly of James' work on clutch hitting, still the great white whale of baseball research.  We saw one effort from Broadie on that subject, a fledgling attempt to measure which players perform best at the majors.  In my humble opinion that didn't lead anywhere useful, though no artist should be judged by their demo versions....

Though before I leave, in Geoff's post on Braodie he shares this quite dramatic data from keegan's surprise win this week:

Our Keegs kicked butt on the greens this week, though that performance only boosted him to 174th in Strokes Gained: Putting for the year.  The lesson for those advocating for Bradley to have received that last captain's pick is that everything regresses to the mean. 

Ryder Cup Leftovers - Ryan Lavner with the trite yet appropriate all-American story of Tony Finau:

Tony Finau, the most improbable U.S. team member ever. 

Improbable not because of his record – with 11 top-10s and major cameos this year, he is certainly deserving of the final pick on an already-stacked squad. 

No, Finau’s inclusion is improbable because of his all-American backstory, because he had no business growing up to become one of the dozen best U.S. players. He’s the son of a Tongan immigrant. The precocious talent who learned the game from a novice. The tenacious product of Rose Park, the hardscrabble neighborhood just outside Salt Lake City. That area has produced NFL and NBA stars, but world-class golfers, with just a par-3 course and rundown muni to offer? Never. 

“I’m still in shock,” says Finau’s father, Kelepi. “Seriously, what are the chances? What are the odds?” 

One in a million? Worse?

 We're pretty much all the descendants of immigrants, though Tonga is a unique source for sure.

Thomas Pieters joins in the competition to play the role of Peter Willett, though with this a home game there won't be any ramifications.  First, on the crowds:

On multiple occasions, the heckling of the European players – particularly Rory McIlroy

and Sergio Garcia – fell unacceptably short of common decency, never mind good sportsmanship.

Speaking in Issue 166 of bunkered, which is on newsstands now, Pieters says he escaped most of the boorish vitriol but, playing alongside McIlroy three times, he still heard plenty of it. 

“For me, it wasn’t that bad because they didn’t know who I was,” he says. “They didn’t have any dirt on me or anything like that. But for Rory, yeah, it was pretty hostile. 

“They shouted stuff at him that you shouldn’t shout at anybody anywhere. Maybe that’s because they sell beer at 7am and Americans can’t drink. 

“But to be honest, you don’t really hear the words most of the time. It’s just a big wall of noise.”

Hopefully they'll be Wisconsin-nice at Whistling Straits, but I'm plenty worried about Bethpage in 2024.  

He wasn't the a of the set-up as well, though that was a reaction to Sunday pins on Nos. 17 and 18 at Medinah.  he's also too young to remember the rough on the 17th hole at Valderama in 1997, the low water mark in this genre.

The most curious item of the day is from Shane Ryan.  I agree with his basic premise, but his piece is littered with curiously revisionist history:

A similar dynamic, though far more muted, played out in 2016. Davis Love III (who did a terrific job four years earlier as U.S. captain at Medinah and was very unlucky to lose) stuck to a solid game plan and a boring demeanor, while Darren Clarke made a controversial experience-first friendship-first captain’s pick in Lee Westwood (sound familiar?), panicked with lineup decisions almost from the start and earned a good deal of criticism that even his allies on the team couldn’t stifle. 

In 2008, the same could be said for Paul Azinger and Nick Faldo, and that example (Azinger’s pods vs. Faldo’s chaos) is particularly instructive. Perhaps there’s another way to put this: When it comes to Ryder Cup philosophy, the system beats the individual.

Obviously that Westwood pick didn't work out, but is it fair to trash him without acknowledging that he had a team long on rookies and no viable alternatives?  And really, did Phil ghost-write this piece?  Because I thought we had gotten over the pod thing....

And this on Furyk seems at best premature:

Now, let’s be fair: Jim Furyk had a very easy task with his picks, and it would have taken a Watson-level of incompetence to screw it up. Furyk did avoid a few traps, though—he could have made the mistake of leaving Mickelson off the team, which, though form may have half-justified such a move, would inevitably brought an unwelcome focus to his captaincy and risked planting the seed of future mutiny. Then, at the conclusion of the BMW Championship, Furyk could gone overboard with recency bias and done something silly like select Keegan Bradley or Xander Schauffele. He didn’t—he gave a deserved pick to Tony Finau.

He went full chalk for sure, and we'll see how that works out.  But we'll also see who's actually in charge when we see whether Phil suits up for alternate shot play.

But here's his basic premise as captured in the header: 

Ryder Cup 2018: Jim Furyk has done everything right, and Thomas Bjorn has put himself squarely in the hot seat

I do agree that the Sergio pick will be a major factor in evaluating the Bjorn Enigma, though he lumps in Casey as well.  He seems to believe that Pieters and Rafa deserved picks, which I see as a respectable opinion, though highly arguable.  Neither played well enough to make their selection inevitable, and clearly Bjorn wanted Sergio in this team.  It's a ton of pressure on Sergio, so we'll see how he responds.

As for Furyk, We'll see if he has the cujones to say No to Phil.  

Is This Wise? - Tiger is already looking past the Ryder Cup, but alarms are flashing for this observer:

Following his final round at the BMW Championship, Woods was asked what's next for him after East Lake and the Ryder Cup, and what changes he has in store for his game.

His answer was unexpected. 

"I'm going to take a long break after the Ryder Cup and we're going to evaluate things but, more importantly, I need to start really lifting and getting after it and getting stronger in certain areas because playing every single week seems like every single day is maintenance at this point, war of attrition," Woods said. "What you do in the offseason is what allows you to maintain it through the year especially on the backside of the year and I really didn't train for all this. Because I didn't know how much I was going to be playing. I was just trying to play. 

"So, next year I have a better understanding of what I need to do and this offseason will be very different than it was last year."

On the one hand, his inability to finish rounds and tournaments could be indicative of a need for improved conditioning.  But the heavy lifting seems unnecessary and risky to your humble correspondent.

Nothing To See Here - Shack takes on the latest driving distance numbers with this perspective:

To recap: the triathletes of the PGA Tour head to the 2018 finish line with their foam rollers and four-hour workouts fueling distance gains. However, as any player paid by Titleist will tell you, it’s not the amazing equipment advances made by engineers and coaches cleverly using launch monitors to improve their students, but instead the purity of athletes who may get called at any time by NFL teams looking for mid-season injury replacements. 

In May 2002, the USGA and R&A drew a line in the sand and said any distance increases, no matter the cause, were not sustainable.

The PGA Tour driving distance average in 2002 was 279.84 yards.

279.8. 

Since then, the governing bodies have eroded their credibility by claiming their rules have capped distance and things have flatlined. 

The 2018 PGA Tour Driving Distance average heading to East Lake is at 296.0 yards, up over three yards from the 2017 numbers and over 16 yards from the sand-line drawing.

296.0.

 And Rory is poised to finish his season with an average driving distance of over 320 yards.  

The scarier thought is that these numbers might understate the gains in that the guys are hitting less than driver with greater frequency, as well as the fact that we've had unusually soft conditions for much of the year.

But after raising alarms last season, the lack of support from the PGA Tour and PGA of America seems to have quelled any motivation to do anything....

Cabot On Our Minds - Employee No. 2 and I leave tomorrow for Cabot Links, the relative newcomer built on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia.  It's very much one of those can't-get-there-from-here kind of places:

One of my new golf buddies was there last week, and had a delightful time.  However, he shouldn't have been surprised to find a large Scottish population in the region:

4. If these courses remind you of Scottish links, well, remember: Nova Scotia is Latin for New Scotland. And then there’s this: geologists have determined that eons ago, Scotland and Nova Scotia were physically connected, then went their separate ways through continental drift.

There's that, but also that it's located near the town of Inverness and you drive from Halifax through New Glasgow..... 

There are two courses, the original links designed by Canadian architect Rod Whitman:

It's often compared to Turnberry, which you'll see in this photo:

Authentically linksy for sure.....

Cabot Cliffs, designed by Coore-Crenshaw, is the newer of the courses, on bluffs overlooking the Atlantic Ocean:

Dramatic, eh?

I'm most interested to see how linksy the Cliffs plays, as we'll have two rounds on each (though I'm already conspiring to attempt to shoehorn a fifth round in on the day of our arrival).

The laptop is about to be packed and the trip will be blogged, subject to the usual caveats related to time, WiFi and inspiration.  Our first round is currently scheduled for Saturday morning, so check back early and often to follow our progress.

Oh, and if you wouldn't mind, a prayer to the weather gods wouldn't hurt...