Introducing The Stats Project: Hoping to Create a Brave New World of Golf Metrics
by Ryan Ballengee on Aug 20, 2010 3:21 PM EDT
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PrintOne of the affectionate names given to me here at Waggle Room is Statman. (Don't confuse it with Tony "Statboy" Reali. I don't trip girls when I play soccer.) I have a lot for numbers, plotting them, visualizing them, and making them meaningful. Right now, it's tough in golf to explain the vagaries of the game through statistics.
As Slate's Moneygolf series demonstrates, there is a conversation happening and work being done to change that. Like the statistical evolution in baseball that can truly break down the game, golf also can un-deify the uncertainties of the sport and translate them into measurable realities.
Waggle Room definitely is not the only entity looking to do this. The Rexford Buzzsaw blog is making headway in the evolution of golf statistics. I have had conversations with several golf writers in the past about the inadequacy of golf stats compared to other sports, and wish there was something done about it. Enter (the tentatively titled) The Stats Project.
Hopefully, The Stats Project can be an "open source" conversation about how to evolve golf statistics. TSP should be a conversation about ideas. In the same way mathematicians have contests to solve obscene math challenges, TSP hopes to wiki-fy the creation of meaningful golf metrics. The ideas won't and shouldn't be from one person, and should be validated by a group of peers who love and understand the sport AND data.
I'm officially inviting anyone interested in the conversation to join Waggle Room, post on the subject, shoot me messages with ideas, and participate in the dialogue. It may never get as cool as FanGraphs, but we can try.
The idea here is that anyone can introduce an idea for a golf statistic in a single post. Tell us:
- What the problem is that we're trying to solve
- What you would call the metric
- How it would be measured, and
- What additional data would have to be collected that isn't today to make this work (if necessary)
We'll officially begin the project next week. I hope you'll join.
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Before we get to the "important" golf stats.....
one stat I would interested in is………how many articles and fan posts does Courtgolf get the first comment??? I know it has to be between 99.996% and 99.998%…..could you zero in on this stat for us…….inquiring minds want to know….:).
The Saints ARE the SUPER BOWL CHAMPS....WHO DAT!
Zeroing in em,
It’s 99.997%. I thought I had beaten him once, but he posted the first comment on his own blog, the blighter ;o)
Court usually gets in the first word ...
and almost always gets in the last word.
I snuck a last word in once
by stealth – had to wait weeks – I daren’t go back & check now though – would be crushing if I had failed. Don’t worry, I’m going to “get a life” possibly as soon as next week,
Ummmm – I know you don’t like thoughts like this, RB, but stats will NEVER explain the vageries of any sport. That’s why we love them so much. The statistical “evolution” of baseball, as you call it, isn’t really an evolution – it’s just an expansion (to the level of incredible annoyance) of the number of stats that can be called up at the click of a mouse.
No matter how many terabytes of information you feed a computer – you will never explain how a guy hitting in the 8 spot in a lineup hitting .150 hits a rocket into the upper deck for a walkoff home run. And they definitely won’t explain the brain fart Dustin Johnson had in that bunker last Sunday.
Stats can be fun…until some goober starts feeding lame brained TV guys a constant flood of them, which get read ad nauseum during a broadcast – or worse – put on the screen and THEN read by said lame brained TV guy. But statistics can be spun in a hundred directions to make a lot of different contradictory points.
We love sports because you never know exactly what’s going to happen at any given moment. If they were all about statistics, we could just feed them into the computer and let the computer decide who’s supposed to win every week.
"this ball will fit in that fairway"
There is only one stat that really matters in golf......
Wins
Fight for your opinions, but do not believe that they contain the whole truth, or the only truth.
Charles A. Dana
Pretty simple
Last I checked the “winner” gets the biggest check.
Fight for your opinions, but do not believe that they contain the whole truth, or the only truth.
Charles A. Dana
yes – but not the ONLY check. You don’t have to win to make a really good living on the PGA Tour.
"this ball will fit in that fairway"
Agreed court
and perhaps I didn’t express my opinion fully. You can track all of the stats you want, but for me, they only attempt to tell the story of how well a player is playing, or why he is or is not winning. It’s probably just me, but I don’t care exactly why a player wins or how many fairways he hit, or how many feet of putts he made in doing so. It only matters that he shot the lowest score and won. And speaking along those lines, I guess if I were going to throw something else in, I would say scoring average probably tells the best story.
Fight for your opinions, but do not believe that they contain the whole truth, or the only truth.
Charles A. Dana
Yeah.....ole Tiger really knows how to score!!!
Sorry Tigerhead…..just couldn’t resist…..lol
The Saints ARE the SUPER BOWL CHAMPS....WHO DAT!
Indeed he does
which is why he’s won the Vardon Trophy a record number of times and I believe holds the record for lowest scoring average in history.
Fight for your opinions, but do not believe that they contain the whole truth, or the only truth.
Charles A. Dana
And yes
I got the joke, just chose to ignore it…lol
Fight for your opinions, but do not believe that they contain the whole truth, or the only truth.
Charles A. Dana
lol
I’m with you that the most interesting stat is wins. It’s tougher to be that single minded in golf because there is only one winner for each tournament and 150 guys starting. Other sports are one on one or team on team, so you have winners and losers every day.
Wins and losses in golf doesn’t always tell the whole story of how well someone was playing. Take Appleby’s 59. He wasn’t playing the best through three rounds, but he put together that phenomenal round and took the victory away.
"this ball will fit in that fairway"
But
he played the best for the “four” days which is what mattered in the end. I agree it doesn’t tell the whole story and I’m definitely not taking the “second sucks” stance here. I’m just not sure we need a bunch of new stats to tell us things we already know in a new, different, or more detailed way. I’m just not a stat guy I guess.
Fight for your opinions, but do not believe that they contain the whole truth, or the only truth.
Charles A. Dana
I agree 100% – we don’t NEED them…but they’re going to be generated regardless. It’s a bizarre mindset these days – thinking that everything can be predicted mathmatically – and human error can (and should ?) be eliminated.
Maybe we DO live in The Matrix :-)
"this ball will fit in that fairway"
I'm not buying in on enhanced golf statistics
Enhanced baseball stats are used to find a common ground while comparing wildly different players. For example, WHIP (walks and hits per innings pitched) can be used to compare a guy who tops out at 100mph with a knuckle ball thrower.
With golf, everyone is assigned a number; the number of strokes used per round. Boom, easy comparison. And we already have a baseline called par.
Not to mention most other sports referred to are team sports, where some sort of statistical analysis is needed to weed out the effect teammates have on your performance. Golf is a singular sport, if you miss a 3 foot putt, it isn’t because your wide receiver dropped the ball through no fault of your own.
This is not to pooh pooh the stats currently available. I just don’t think there is a statistical revolution around the corner for golf.
Oh, my.....TXQ will have a field day with the "pooh pooh the stats" comment.......
Quick, hide the women and children……the funny man cometh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The Saints ARE the SUPER BOWL CHAMPS....WHO DAT!
No pooh pooh comnents left behind ...
except this one.
But I’ll say this: My last Mother’s Day card read:
“Thanks so much, Mom, for everything you’ve taught me over the years, especially that toilet -training thing. I can’t tell you how many times that’s come in handy.”
Sorry to scare everyone......I forgot that I gave TXQ the weekend off.......that means
Diane will have to take over the “funny quips” for the weekend……go ahead D……throw out some of your best groaners……:)
The Saints ARE the SUPER BOWL CHAMPS....WHO DAT!
Everybody knows I enjoy comparing stats but...
I just enjoy seeing how the players compare. Stats tell you everything and nothing all at once… and different people put more value on different stats — number of wins vs. stroke average vs. world rankings vs. money list, etc.
And you can always argue whether the stats have any real meaning. For example, with so many courses having drivable par-4s, does par really mean anything? Some might say you could tell as much merely by comparing the stroke totals. (I actually made that argument in one post, I think.)
But it’s human nature to try and find some way to “get control” of the game. It should be interesting to see what kind of stats we end up with. Remember that commercial where Tiger misses holing out from the fairway because he forgot to account for the rotation of the earth? I’m expecting a stat for that next. ;-)
Mike Southern
www.ruthlessgolf.com
by Ruthless Mike on Aug 20, 2010 11:51 PM EDT up reply actions
I applaud your enthusiasm but
I’ve often marveled at the ability of people to come up with stats on just about anything, in any sport, but stats are all totally wasted on me. I’m into the moment, as I’m watching. I don’t think about the statistical probability of the outcome.
Have fun gathering.
Agreed, TGC. Stats come in handy mainly at bars when tipsy patrons wanna display to each other
their ability to memorize stats.
Well, at least I know have some healthy cynics in front of me for this project. I think you’ll see with some of the things that I’ve cooked up that it won’t necessarily explain the game, but the many different ways that players can be successful.
Find me! Email: ryan@thegolfnewsnet.com, Twitter: http://twitter.com/waggleroom, or Facebook: http://facebook.com/waggleroom.
Here's a distinct advantage to NOT being a stat geek:
I’m now watching a replay of the Tiger Woods/Steve Scott 36-hole Amateur Championship match on the GC. It’s close on the last nine and I don’t know who wins, especially if I don’t read the very next comment on this blog, no doubt.
I forget whether Tiger won 3 amateur championships or not, so it’s exciting to watch.
I hope ESPN replays last year’s World Series soon.
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