Friday, August 21, 2015

Short Game: When is a missed green NOT an ERROR?

Shot By Shot was the first statistical program to recognize the importance of errors in the short game and enable our users to record them 25 years ago.  When we launched a simplified, web version of the program in 2005, we had users record when their short game shots were successful (hit the green) or missed the green (errors).  The subsequent putting distance recorded revealed the exact level of success but we did not know the exact extent of the mistake.    The percentage of misses (or errors) has been a valuable component in our short game handicap determinations - a proprietary balance of three factors:
  1. Average putting distance when the green was hit;
  2. % of attempts hit close (to within 5 feet for Chip/Pitch, 8 feet for Sand);
  3. % Errors (shots that missed the green).  
The PGA Tour data does not include errors or missed greens in the 409+ ShotLink stats.  I had my my programmer extract these important pieces of data from ShotLink for use in my work with Tour players.  As one can see above, in 2014 the PGA Tour player on average MISSED greens with 7% of their Chip/Pitch shots (within 50 yards of the hole) and 11% for Sand shots from within the same range.  If you think these numbers, when viewed as errors, seem high - I agree. 

A post-round discussion with my genius programmer led us to the solution of this dilemma.  Why not see what percentage of the missed greens actually took the players more than 3 strokes to hole out?  Three strokes from a short game situation is not a SAVE, but it is certainly not a stroke lost. The save %'s are:  Chip/Pitch - 65% and Sand - 50%.  But four or more strokes to hole out is definitely an ERROR.

Once the programming was done, the answer confirmed that "These guys really are good!In 75% of their missed greens with Chip/Pitch attempts, and 73% of missed Sand shots, the Tour holes out in 3 strokes or less.

How does your game compare?  Just stay tuned.  Now that we have been collecting score by hole since last October, we will be able to exactly match our new Tour calculations.  I plan to wait until we have a full year of new data but am very anxious to see the results.