Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Recommended Reading: Ruthless Golf's Scrambling Stats

For the statistically-minded, I strongly recommend Mike Southern's invention of three stats that track how well a player recovers after missing a green in regulation. The key one is "scramble putting," which he demonstrates by comparing Rory McIlroy's weekend to his Thursday and Friday results. Nice stuff from Ruthless Golf--check it out!

1 comment:

Mike said...

I had to make a small change to the post, TC. I had accidently put a "plus .1" on the end of the Scramble Putting stat description, left over from some of my earlier experiments. That .1 had kept things from working out the way I wanted, which is why I added the note about not being able to put a 0 in for MG. The figures in the post didn't use the .1, so the text has been corrected in the post now.

I was wondering what you and HoundDog thought of it. I was trying to get a stat that not only tells how well the player putted on those missed greens, but showed a penalty when the player missed a lot of greens. (For example, one-putting on 10 missed greens gives a higher number than one-putting on 6 missed greens.) I see why you guys struggle when creating these stats -- I would have liked to see 7 missed greens with 9 putts rate worse than 3 missed greens with 5 putts, but those smaller numbers cause bigger variations than the larger ones do. (I mean, of course, that 7ths are smaller than 3rds.)

This post came out of those conversations we had a few weeks ago about how to compare GIRs when a bomber missed the fairway. While it doesn't exactly do that, it does help quantify what happens when they miss greens.

BTW, I also considered a Putts per Missed Green (PpMG) stat, which was simply DP / MG -- it would look like PpGIR, numbers less than 1 would indicate chip-ins, and the stat was a bit more linear (for more direct comparisons) -- but I felt I was starting to get bogged down with too many stats.