GOLF BY NUMBERS
Analytics craze is hitting the links
Golf, as a competitive endeavour, has been around for several hundred years, from about the time, as writer Dan Jenkins once put it, “Mary Queen of Scots found herself down three at the turn and invented the back nine.”
So perhaps it’s not surprising that, as team sports have undergone something of a data revolution in the past decade, fusty old golf has been slow to catch up. At the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, the annual sports-nerd Woodstock, golf rarely warrants more than a passing mention and as terms like WAR and Corsi and PER work their way into the sports mainstream, people don’t talk much about golf stats. That is finally changing. There’s another reason why golf hasn’t lent itself to a data revolution when compared with other sports and it’s due to the nature of the game. Where baseball was able to identify new strategies to increase win probabilities — more emphasis on getting on base — and basketball teams started taking more threepoint shots and hockey clubs emphasized puck possession, it seemed like there was only one way to play better golf: get the ball in the hole in fewer shots. There was never going to be a Moneyball for golf, a new way to play the game more efficiently.
Unless, sort of, there was. Data, as applied to golf, can help in a few ways. Jason Gore, the longtime
pro, describes himself as a feel player who was never much for statistics. But a few years ago, after he lost his PGA card, he had a caddy who studied the numbers. He realized Gore was weakest, relative to his peers, in short putts and putts from about 15 feet. He started focusing his practice almost entirely on those parts of his game and ended up with a strong season on the Web. com Tour that got him back on the PGA Tour.
“Most golfers don’t really know what the strengths and weaknesses of their games are,” Gore said Friday at the Sloan
conference, which finally put a golf panel on the program. “They think they know, but they don’t.”
Golf’s version of wins-above-replacement is strokes gained, a statistic that tells pros how they performed in each facet of their game relative to other players in the same tournament or over a whole season. So while a touring pro would know pretty clearly they have been X number of shots worse than their rivals, strokes gained gives a window into why their scores are worse. Their glaring weakness might not be driving or putting, but approach shots of between 175
and 200 yards. Instead of bashing drivers on the range or making hundreds of short putts, a player who worked on that specific shot could see major overall improvement from correcting for it.
“Golfers overestimate their ability,” says Sal Syed, chief executive of Arccos, a golf analytics firm. “Data brings a sense of reality to their game.”
Syed with the truth bombs there.
Data can also tell players how to attack a particular course. Particularly at venues where the Tour returns every year, there are thousands of data points about scores achieved with different strategies on a particular hole, such as hitting an iron off the tee on a short par-4. There could be clear evidence that attacking the hole with a driver is more likely to lead to a lower score.
Gore, though, says data has its limits. He points to the 10th hole at Riviera Country Club, a famous short par-4 that has many strategic options. A data analyst once insisted a driver was the only club to use off the tee, but Gore says “I’ve hit driver there before and my stroke average is about 7.9.”
“There are stats you can use, but you have to know your own stats,” Gore says.
This, obviously, applies to the recreational golfer, too. There might be an on-average advantage in hitting driver on a particular hole, but if you don’t carry your driver very far, don’t do what the stats suggest.
In the coming years, the most data-savvy pros will also use information not to tell them just how to play, but when to play: the optimized schedule. A clever pro could set up his or her year based not on the high profile of events, but on courses that suit their game and a travel schedule that will allow them to have good rest and recovery times. There are also events that have prize money and ranking points that are out of proportion to the strength of the field; a wise pro would make a point of never missing one of those.
In a sport that is still cranky about the use of cellphones on its courses, one question is whether pros will start to use technology when they are playing: gathering feedback from sensors, using apps with 3D modelling of greens or even digital yardage books.
“I’m sure we’ll be using e-yardage books soon,” Gore says. “But pros are idiots. Someone will forget to charge their yardage book overnight and there will be trouble.”