Who Will Reach $10M First--Pak or Ochoa? How About $2M?

There's only so many boxes of mail you can rummage through and updates to your software that you can do before you need a short break. Knowing me, you wouldn't be surprised that I started looking over the LPGA's Career Money List to prepare for my August Super Soph ranking (coming after the Safeway this weekend). In so doing, I was struck by an interesting question: can Lorena Ochoa reach the $10M mark before Se Ri Pak does? What makes it so compelling to me is that even though Ochoa is almost exactly a million dollars behind Pak, and, more important, Pak only needs about $292K to get to $10M before her, the way Ochoa's been playing this season, she could well do it.

There are other interesting races--Cristie Kerr is only a couple of hundred thousand dollars ahead of Mi Hyun Kim, Jeong Jang is within $15,000 of Hee-Won Han (thanks in part to Han's maternity leave for most of this season), Paula Creamer is about $500K ahead of Natalie Gulbis, Jee Young Lee is almost within $300K of Meena Lee, Morgan Pressel is only about $50K ahead of Ai Miyazato--but the only one that I find almost as interesting as the $10M question is the $2M one. Julieta Granada is only about $3450 shy of following Stacy Prammanasudh in breaking that barrier. But the way she's been missing cuts this year (even after I proclaimed her sophomore slump to be over), Shi Hyun Ahn and Seon Hwa Lee have a decent chance to beat her to $2M. Brittany Lincicome would, too, but she's not playing in the Safeway.

So you heard it here first: Ochoa beats Pak to $10M and both Ahn and Lee beat Granada to $2M.