now you can safely call [the field] WEAK. Of my soon-to-be-updated Top 30 players, only nine are in attendance. Lorena Ochoa can make any field look strong (until she wins by 10+ shots) and she is joined by Seon Hwa Lee, Stacy Prammanasudh, Jeong Jang, Angela Stanford and Hee-Won Han. The missing stars allow lots of non-exempt and conditional players to tee it up. In fact the cutoff point this week came after Amy Yang, who is the final Conditional Player (#35). All told, about 50 LPGA exempt players are bypassing the event plus several non-exempt and conditional players who didn't bother making the trip.
Putting aside my curiosity over whom his other three Top 30ers are (Jee Young Lee, Laura Diaz, and Laura Davies, I presume!), I hasten to concur that only 9 of the top 31 in my most recent Best of the LPGA ranking will be playing tomorrow, that Ochoa's closest competitor Jang at #8 is only in my system's 5th grouping, and that the majority of her top challengers this week come from its 6th grouping (and the rest from even lower). So, yeah, based on most any ranking system out there, the field will no doubt be one of the weakest on paper of any in 2008.
BUT, a surprising 5 out of the top 10 in scoring average this year are playing, as are 8 of the next 10 and 6 out of the next 10 (including Moira Dunn!!). About the same is true of the money list: 7 of the top 10, 4 of the next 10, and 6 of the next 10 are playing. And for the stat Hound Dog considers the second-most relevant, top 10 percentage, 16 of the top 30 are in this week's field. So, going by most recent performances, there are roughly 15-20 players who have a decent chance to beat Ochoa this week.
Another way of making this point is to say, sure, Sorenstam and Creamer are off to a great start in 2008, and Momoko Ueda, Angela Park, and Webb are off to good ones, but, really, nobody else among the big names skipping this tournament were playing consistently or even particularly well coming into it. Diaz and Jang came close to knocking off the former pair, and Prammanasudh, Stanford, and Jane Park stack up pretty well against the latter trio. So if you're looking for the players most likely to put up a good fight against Ochoa, this field is about as good as any we've seen this year.
One last try, this time focusing on Hound Dog's observation that more than 50 of the world's best women golfers won't be playing this week. Given the depth of women's golf and the strength of the younger players on tour, I'll venture to suggest that replacing 30 or so non-elite players with a different mix of non-elite players won't make as much of a difference as he might think. Since the Bosque Real course was the site of a then-unknown like Meaghan Francella taking down the world #1, we can't discount the possibility of an as-yet-underperforming New Super Soph like Song-Hee Kim, Charlotte Mayorkas, or Su A Kim pulling off a dark horse upset, not to mention a few of the dozen or so rookies in the field making some noise.
Having spent this time defending the field, I'll turn around now and criticize the tournament organizers. If you look at the most recent Pakpickers entries, you'll see a lot of overlap with my picks, suggesting that it's not that hard to figure out who the favorites are this week. But apparently when a tournament is not being televised, you don't need to group the favorites together. In fact, to boost attendance, it's probably best to spread them around. That's the only principle I can guess is shaping the pairings this week. Besides the somewhat-prime-time pairings going off #1--
Start Time: 8:40 AM
Meaghan Francella
Lorena Ochoa
Laura Davies
Start Time: 11:40 AM
Pat Hurst
Jeong Jang
Laura Diaz
--the rest of the favorites are scattered around the course. Also going off #1 are In-Kyung Kim (8:00 am), Jee Young Lee (12:10 pm), and Hee-Won Han (12:20 pm). Off #10 are Stanford (8:10 am), Seon Hwa Lee (12:10 pm), and Prammanasudh (12:20 pm). My own feeling on pairings and starting times is that you want the people with the best chance of winning the tournament playing in relatively similar, or at least offsetting (if you keep the same pairings the next day but reverse the starting times and sides), conditions. I admit that it's difficult to stick to this principle in 54-hole tournaments, so I'm hoping they reshuffle the groups based on Friday's scoring for Saturday's round. But even if the organizers are planning to do this, would it have killed them to pair Kim and Stanford, the fighting former Super Soph Lees, and Han and Prammanasudh?
Just kvetching! Can't wait to see what happens....
4 comments:
You presume correctly on the other three of my Top 30 (assuming nothing changes this weekend).
You are also correct in your statements about a good number of the 2008 scoring average, money list and Top 10% leaders are at the MasterCard. The only problem is - they've only played 2 or 3 events. It takes many more than that to establish the true level of a player's ability. Some of them will stay high on those lists but a lot will fall in the coming weeks.
I do agree that replacing 30+ non-elite players with a different group of non-elites won't make much difference. But replacing 21 of the Top 30 players with non-elites will.
Except, except, except--relative to Ochoa, even the elites are pretty damn far behind far behind. And some of the new non-elites are future elites in the making--we just don't yet know which.
In the end, yeah, I know, you have to value momentum way way way over recent and longer-term history for my argument to even have a hope of success. But who knows, maybe playing the contrarian this time will end up with a lucky result. Not that I didn't pick Ochoa for the win! Just that the end result could be a lot closer than people expect. That's really all I'm hoping for in the "I told you so" sweepstakes. What I'm really hoping for is to see Moira in contention (virtually, that is)!
BTW, I'd love to see you comment on the relative distances between Ochoa and your #2, and your #2 and your #30, for instance. You can kind of eyeball this with both Rolex and Sagarin, but not with your system....
I don't list the players' scores from my system mainly because I don't strictly adhire to its results. If Player A is a point or two behind Player B, I might still put Player A in front. About 95% of the time, I do follow the system's output.
At this moment, Ochoa has a 22-point lead over #2 Pettersen while Pettersen is 22 points ahead of #5 Mi Hyun Kim. Remember that Suzann won five times last year so the gap shouldn't be too huge. Last September before Pettersen went on her three-win binge, Ochoa had a 36-point lead. At that time, Juli Inkster (#22) was 36 points out of second place.
Wow! Thanks!
I can see why not listing raw scores is a good idea, but giving some sense of the overall spread in the top 30 in the list itself would be very cool.
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