Tuesday Trifles

Just a few items for your delectation today....

Don't Leave Home Without It - New life for perhaps the weakest event currently on the Tour's schedule:

Imagine sitting down to lunch and hoping for a nice gourmet hamburger or perhaps a chicken Caesar salad. And instead the waiter brings you a perfectly grilled ribeye steak, baked potato with butter and sour cream, steamed vegetables and apple pie a la mode for dessert. 

That kind of upgrade is what desert golf fans are receiving with news that American Express, one of the world’s most recognizable corporations, will be taking over as title sponsor of the desert’s PGA Tour event, known in 2019 as the Desert Classic.

Fair enough, though now I'm hungry....

 Though this might be asking a lot of the Company:

--Worldwide recognition: American Express will do more with the tournament than just advertise during tournament week. Expect to see ads during other PGA Tour events and even other sporting events mentioning that American Express is the title sponsor in the desert. 

--A push for membership perks: They call it experiential marketing, the idea that through sponsoring an event, a company can give its own employees or clients special

treatment. For American Express, which has sponsored the PGA Championship and the Ryder Cup in the past and is a U.S. Open sponsor for the past 13 years, that can mean a special hospitality tent open only to American Express card holders, for instance, or perhaps special card member parties during tournament week. It’s an elevated concept for fans who might be tempted to travel to the tournament from outside the area.

--New life for the event’s pro-am: Yes, there are golfers who don’t come to the desert event because it requires them to play side-by-side with amateurs during competitive rounds. Some have even lobbied for the end of the pro-am, which began with the tournament in 1960. But American Express can use that pro-am to reward customers and clients across the country with a trip to the Coachella Valley in January to play golf with six different PGA Tour professionals over three courses on three days. The pro-am isn’t going anywhere now. 

--A better field: Okay, this is a bit of a stretch. After all, players will do what players want to do. But American Express is one of the biggest companies in the world. Can the PGA Tour and American Express flex a little influential muscle and get even one or two more top-name players to commit to the desert event? Players like Phil Mickelson and Jon Rahm seem certain for the field. One or two more names like that couldn’t hurt.

OK, but what's in it for AMEX?  It's a backwater event these days, with coverage confined to Golf Channel.   This, to me, is the relevant part:

Make no mistake, what Humana and CareerBuilder did for the desert’s PGA Tour event in the last decade was important. Humana stepped in as a sponsor for 2012 when the very existence of the event was in question after three unsponsored years. When Humana left four years into an eight-year deal, citing among other things how the Affordable Care Act – Obamacare – had changed the way the company needed to promote itself, CareerBuilder stepped in to maintain the event’s course.

The PGA Tour would have allowed the Desert Classic to be played in 2020 without a sponsor, but that probably would have been the end of the tour’s million-dollar commitment to the event. The old Bob Hope Classic needed a sponsor, and instead they found a blue-chip mega-company to put its name on the tournament.

Good call to elide the event's brief dalliance with the Clinton Global Initiative.  But can AMEX make it work when others couldn't?  Do they have a keen eye for value, or is it just another case of a golf-mad CEO wasting his shareholders' money?

A Solheim Primer - Hey, it's team match play.... what more do you need to know?  A Golf.com primer here:

What is the Solheim Cup? 

The Solheim Cup is a biennial event between the best female pros in the world from America and Europe — the women’s equivalent of the Ryder Cup. This year it’s held at

Gleneagles Hotel in Scotland. Players on each team qualify via a points system throughout the season and the 12-player rosters are completed with captain’s picks. 

Solheim Cup format

 The Solheim Cup has changed its format several times, but it’s been consistent since 2002 (and is the same as the Ryder Cup). The first two days consist of four foursomes and four four-ball matches (one in the morning and one in the afternoon) while the final day is 12 singles matches.

And the rosters:

Solheim Cup rosters 

U.S. PLAYER, OVERALL RECORD

Juli Inkster (team captain)

Lexi Thompson, 5-2-4

Nelly Korda, N/A

Danielle Kang, 3-1-0

Lizette Salas, 4-4-2

Jessica Korda, 1-2-1

Megan Khang, N/A

Marina Alex, N/A

Brittany Altomare, N/A

Angel Yin, 1-1-1

Annie Park, N/A 

Morgan Pressel, 10-7-2 (Captain’s pick)

Stacy Lewis, 5-10-1 (Captain’s pick)

EUROPEAN PLAYER, OVERALL RECORD

Catriona Matthew (team captain)

Carlota Ciganda, 5-4-2

Anne van Dam, N/A

Caroline Hedwall, 7-3-1

Charley Hull, 7-3-1

Georgia Hall, 2-3-0

Azahara Munoz, 4-6-1

Caroline Masson, 3-6-2

Anna Nordqvist, 11-7-2

Bronte Law, N/A (Captain’s pick)

Celine Boutier, N/A (Captain’s pick)

Jodi Ewart Shadoff, 3-4-0 (Captain’s pick)

Suzann Pettersen, 16-11-6 (Captain’s pick)

Sorry, Blogger is being weird with the formatting above, and I'm out of patience in trying to fix it.  But of greatest importance is that both of the protagonists of gimmegate, the clueless Charlie Hull and the villainous Suzann Pettersen, are with us this week.

A couple of unfortunate news items from early in the week.  First, this inevitable (it seems) aspect of the ladies' lives:

As if preparing to play in the Solheim Cup didn't come with some inherent nervousness,

imagine how European team member Jodi Ewart Shadoff is feeling after arriving on site to compete in the biennial matches for the third time in her career, only for her golf clubs not to have accompanied her? 

As was the case earlier this summer when when Ryann O'Toole's clubs were lost before the Evian Championship, Shadoff flew a commercial flight to Scotland and checked her clubs with the airline. 

Shadoff's husband, Adam, told Golf Digest that Shadoff flew Aer Lingus from Orlando to Dublin, then Dublin to Edinburgh. “She looked out the window in Dublin and saw that her golf clubs weren’t getting loaded onto the plane,” Adam said via Instagram direct messaging. “She told the flight attendant and they assured her that they’d be loaded.”

How did Lexi manage it this time?

But at least things even out:

Amazingly, though, Shadoff isn't the only golfer competing in the Solheim Cup facing the same unsettling situation. Angel Yin, a member of the American team, had at least two bags go missing from her Aer Lingus flight, including her clubs, en route to Scotland. LPGA officials say that a clothing bag has since arrived, but that Yin's clubs have not.

So, a good week for Aer Lingus, since I've been reliably informed that there's no such thing as bad publicity.

This is unfortunate as well:

On Tuesday morning, United States captain Juli Inkster announced that Stacy Lewis would not play for the American Solheim Cup team at Gleneagles. Lewis, who Inkster

had chosen as a captain's pick, suffered a back injury a the week prior to the competition. After attempting to manage the injury while traveling to Scotland, Lewis was forced to make the decision to sit out what would have been her fifth Solheim Cup.

When Solheim Cup captains make their captain's picks, they also choose an alternate. The alternates only become known if someone on the team cannot play. This happened in 2017, when Jessica Korda's forearm injury forced her to withdraw. She was replaced by Paula Creamer. This year, Inkster's alternate pick was Ally McDonald. McDonald is onsite in Scotland, and now officially a member of the American team.

Good thing she didn't fly Aer Lingus...

Less Is More, Except When It Isn't -  Shane Ryan takes us on a spin on this interesting subject:

Should golf's majors matter less?

In which he uses a couple of quotes from Rory to...well, make the case for Rory:

Joel Beall already made the case for Rory’s candidacy, so I won’t repeat his good work, but I’ll just lay my cards on the table: To me, Rory was the best golfer on the PGA Tour in 2019, and the numbers don’t leave much room for interpretation. The PGA of America already gave its year-end award to Koepka, which seems understandable since he won the association’s flagship event. But I believe it would be more than fair for the PGA Tour to make this the first year since 1990 with a split decision, since Rory won both of the tour’s flagship events, including the year-end title.

Although Shane can't be bothered with the little detail of the meaning of "on the PGA Tour."  If you define it narrowly as only those events owned and controlled by the Tour, sure...  The problem is that if you look at the Tour's own schedule, it includes those four pesky events Shane wishes to minimize, and his horse came up lame in those...

The whole piece suffers from this muddled thinking, such as this graph:

The major championships are the major championships because of age and circumstance—they’ve either been around the longest under the umbrella of some very old and powerful organizations or, in the case of the Masters, they were really good at marketing. Yet suspend belief for a moment and consider these events without thinking about their names. Their fields are strong, because everybody wants to win, but they’re not that strong. Koepka himself is the first person to express a surprising take, which is that in some ways, for some players, majors might be the easiest tournaments to win. From a pure degree-of-difficulty perspective, Rory’s win at the Players Championship was more impressive than Tiger’s at the Masters. Without the pre-baked conceit of what these events are supposed to be, would they really be the four tournaments by which you’d judge immortality? Would any four?

A lot to unpack there, beginning with his assessment of The Masters.  Does he really view it as merely a marketing gimmick?  Is no credit due Jones and Roberts from creating the club and event that became the most popular event in golf?  I've often made the same point as Shane about the Masters being surprisingly easy to  win, because of the small field, can he not admit that Rory's FedEx Cup suffers from the same defect?

It's a strange column, as he seems to be making a case that the greater availability of data should change how we view the majors... I don't get his point there, but he keeps using baseball analogies that he similarly misinterprets:

Winning a major comes down to many factors, two of which are luck and timing. To use one more baseball parallel, modern analytics birthed a statistic called “batting average on balls in play (BABIP)” that looks at how often a player gets a base hit when a batted ball goes into the field (i.e., it’s not a strikeout, walk or home run). What they found is that this average, for almost every player, is just a measure of luck, and both high and low BABIPs tend to regress to the mean no matter how skilled the player might otherwise be. This stunned many experts and helped change how we think about batting average.

They're only a matter of luck when you're dealing with small sample sizes.  This is a point he continually trips over... as he does here as well:

Some players, like Adam Scott, take an opposite view of Rory’s recent quotes. “History

has shown that the greatest players have ended up accumulating the most of these [major] tournaments,” he told me in 2014, “and I think it’s probably a fair assessment of who the greatest players over time have been in each decade and each era. So I’m happy with the way everyone sees that.” Coming from someone whose career probably merits more than the one major he’s captured, that carries some weight. 

And it might be true in the case of those like Woods and Nicklaus and Hogan, but I’d argue that it doesn’t hold up on a smaller scale. Who would argue that Andy North and his two majors represent a “better” career than Scott, or Justin Rose, or Sergio Garcia, or Dustin Johnson? That’s an extreme example, but it shows the pitfalls of over-valuing major championships.

He's made quite the compelling case demolishing an argument that exactly no one has ever made.   

Over the long-term, majors define careers.  Not exclusively, but to a great extent....Over the short-term, such as his POY argument, not so much.  But his real argument is that the POY award is relatively meaningless, and finally we've found common ground.

More Stats? - Golfweek continues to dissect 2019 results:

Who made biggest improvement, and drop, in strokes gained approach the green in 2019?

Just yesterday we had the Golf Magazine writers touting Lefty and Jordan as headed for better days in 2019-20.  Not sure I see that happening, but at least we can be clear on how they got where they are:

On the other side of the ledger, the players on the bottom of the chart saw their performance from the fairway drop. Among them is Phil Mickelson, who went from being a strong iron player with an average of 0.555 to a player who gave away shots and

averaged -0.065. Lefty made the second-largest drop in strokes gained approach the green last season (-0.62). Only Tyler Duncan’s drop of -0.628 was worse. 

Jordan Spieth struggled nearly as much as Mickelson, finishing the year down -0.607. He ended the year ranked 145th in strokes gained approach the green and for the first time since he has played enough to have official year-end stats, Spieth finished with a negative average. 

Other well-known players who experienced drops in strokes gained approach the green last season were Brendan Steele (-0.559), Dustin Johnson (-0.541), Patton Kizzire (-0.513) and Rickie Fowler (-0.336).

Come to think of it, one of those guys was plugging Rickie as well.... At least this spotlights what to look for early next year.