The Stats Project, Volume 3: Spray Tendency

Every player has a common miss. For most right-handed amateurs, it is a fade to the right. But few people empirically know where they tend to put the ball off of the tee - regardless of strategy or best of intentions. 

A simple statistic to first identify a player's tendency off of the tee is important. That statistic is Spray Tendency. There's no graphic needed to explain the computation. It's simple: measured from a hypothetical center cut, how many yards off of the middle of each fairway does a player miss, as measured in feet or yards.

Here's an example. You are a righty golfer and hit five drives off of the tee and they land like this:

• 5 yards right
• 3 yards left
• 20 yards right
• 15 yards right
• 7 yards left

Your Spray Tendency is 6 yards right, or expressed against a righty's tendency to go right: +6. Ok, that's great and all, but what does that tell us? Spray Tendency is a base level statistic intended to inform other figures to give us a picture of how a player's tendency does against a particular hole or course setup.

Everyone knows Jack Nicklaus courses favor a fade by a right handed player to that side of the fairway. In other words, it would be beneficial for a player to have a positive spray tendency - albeit a slight one. This is helpful for knowing the kinds of players that might thrive off of the tee, especially at "target golf" courses like those designed by the likes of Pete Dye. His courses are defined largely by prescription and a lack of options, meaning Spray Tendency has more relevance than at, say, St. Andrews, where options overwhelm the player.

The important next step with Spray Tendency is when we couple it with a concept introduced in Moneygolf known as Shot Value. Shot Value is a stat that tells us how much closer we are to the hole based upon a slew of shots from around the course. An example definitely helps picture this.

Say I'm playing a par 5 with a stroke average of 4.6. I hit a 300 yard drive down the fairway about 5 yards to the right. From there, players take an average of 2.7 strokes to finish the hole. The Shot Value is determined as the start number (4.6) minus the average strokes from the new position (2.7) minus the actual shot taken (1). My shot value is 0.9 off of the tee. 

But what if I landed the ball 300 yards in the fairway 3 yards left of center? Would my Shot Value have improved? Does my tendency work against me in this case? 

Or, we can even compare players in a funk with their form compared to them at their best. Until this year, Tiger Woods has been known as a terrible driver of the golf ball, but a great recovery artist. He has found ways to win from the fairway and in the middle of nowhere. The question for him, then, would be the difference between the value of his shots using his normal Spray Tendency against what he is doing for a round of tournament. How much impact does Woods getting "stuck" for a whole round or event have on his game? We can now measure that more effectively, down to the hole.

In addition to weighing in on this concept, I also want some feedback on other statistics we can couple with Spray Tendency to inform the importance of driving.