We've spent quite a bit of time on the statistical revolution in golf, and I'm sure you're all quite sick of it by now. Hey, nobody put a gun to your head to read this blog, so I might as well write about what interests me.
Dave Dusek is on the same wavelength and offers an interesting summary of the year-end stats:
Making putts is great, but with the 2013-14 PGA Tour season in the books, the PGATour’s newest ShotLink-based statistic, Strokes Gained: Tee-to-Green, indicates that if you want to be an elite player, excelling with the long clubs will give you a better chance than shining with the flat stick.
Now, thus far the stat is fairly simplistic, as Dusek explains:
Strokes Gained: Tee-to-Green is calculated by taking a player’s score and comparing it to a field’s average score to create a Strokes Gained: Total number. For example, if a player shoots 69 and the field average is 71, his Strokes Gained: Total would be +2. Those two strokes the player gained against the field are equal to his Strokes Gained: Putting and the new category, Strokes Gained: Tee-to-Green. In the example, if the player’s Strokes Gained: Total was +2 and his Strokes Gained: Putting was +.6, then his Strokes Gained: Tee-to-Green would be +1.4.
Rather than simply list the top ten in the category, he lists the top ten in the world rankings and gives their rankings in Strokes Gained: Tee-to Green and Putting.
That weird formatting is in the original, so bear with us. But it's pretty interesting, no? There's of course some problems with the data, the most serious being the absence of ShotLink data for any of the majors. In the real world one has to assume that Rory would look better on the greens if we include Hoylake and Valhalla, since he didn't miss anything those weeks. Of course he'd also project higher in the tee-to-green category, as he missed as many fairways as putts.
Here's how Dusek sums it up:
Unfortunately, ShotLink stats from the major championships are not available. However, what the data indicates is that over the past three seasons, the game’s elite putters (based on Strokes Gained: Putting) are not the golfers who are most likely to achieve the highest rankings or win tournaments. Instead, the winners are more likely to be elite ballstrikers who have a hot putting week.
That sounds about right to me and Dusek uses a Justin Rose example to good effect, as the week he won at Congressional he was his usual superior ball-striker but was also 37th in Strokes Gained: Putting.
Now we've also seen that Mark Broadie and his ilk are taking these numbers further, computing Strokes Gained for each individual component of the tee-to-green game, which is where it gets really interesting (Ed. You're playing kind of loose with the term "interesting"). In the very near future we'll be able to see how each player ranks in the differing components of the game, which has profound implications for the players' allocation of practice time.
But I can also see the relevance of this to the arguments we had back when the USGA and R&A implemented the anchored putter ban. There was a body of thought that anchoring couldn't be a competitive advantage because anchorers weren't amongst the statistically best putters on Tour. True that,as Dusek provides the list and none of the top ten anchor, but it's faulty logic. The poster boy for anchoring is Adam Scott, a superior ball-striker who was a somewhat less dreadful putter with a stick jammed into his belly. And in the weeks he goes from less dreadful to average he's a threat to win.
All of which raises the existential question of whether Justin Rose has tried anchoring, because it's hard to believe he could get less out of his tee-to-green game that way.
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