The second part of this book focuses on the professional game. The PGA Tour’s ShotLink system provides detailed (to-the-inch) information about the location of the ball before and after each shot, and a statistical analysis of this data informs us about what it takes to succeed professionally.
The data may be summarized by various statistics for the Tour. These statistics give information about which skills (putting, driving, and so on) are the keys to success and which skills are strengths or weaknesses for the various players. The individual skill ratings are combined into an overall rating system for professional golfers. Among the questions addressed:
• “Drive for show, putt for dough” implies that putting is more important than driving. Is that true?
• Which basic statistic is the best predictor of a final score?
• At what distances do the pros make fewer than half of their putts?
• Do the pros have more success putting for par or for birdie?
• Do the pros get the ball closer to the hole from the rough or from bunkers?
• How much accuracy is lost when hitting from the rough compared to the fairway?
• Does the average score on a hole depend on the length of the hole?
• Which players are the best at hitting different types of shots? Do the same ones dominate every year?
• How much better was Tiger Woods than everybody else in the 2000s?
To answer these questions, the data for each shot by each player are analyzed to compute how much better or worse than average the individual shot is. The resulting values for all shots of a given type (putt, chip, approach, and so on) are then added to obtain ratings for each player for that skill. The players can then be ranked on individual skills, and an overall rating is obtained by adding the skill ratings.