Yesterday, I posted about the APBA ratings for the 2021 season player cards. One of the rating categories I discussed is Sand Points. In this post, we’ll look at some preliminary data to see if Sand Points make a difference in terms of sand saves or scoring.
Here’s what the distribution of Sand Points looks like in the 2021 80-card set:
As you can see, the majority of players have no Sand Points, but a few have up to four. The dataset for this analysis is relatively small at the moment, covering only 129 rounds of golf–all but one of which was played at Peachtree–under mostly Calm conditions. Because of these limitations, it’s not clear how generalizable the findings will be, but onward and upward!
Here is a breakdown of what I found:
As expected, most of the rounds played (72) were with players having 0 Sand Points. They averaged 0.88 Sand Saves per Round and a Round Score of 71.2. (Peachtree is a par 70.) The overall Sand Save percentage (SS%) for that group is a dreadful 38.7%. SS% is a tricky stat to work with (especially with such small sample sizes), since it doesn’t really tell you how many opportunities for Sand Saves there were. Sand Saves per Round (SS/Round) would appear to be a better measure in this case.
While players with four Sand Points had 1.67 SS/Round, this is based on only four rounds. There are only three players with a Sand Point rating of 4 (Brooks Koepke, Xander Schauffele, and Cameron Smith), which could cause this number to be inflated at the moment.
The scatterplot and regression line shown below suggest that more Sand Points mean more SS/Round, but this “trend” is not statistically significant. (Overlapping data points are not shown.)
What about the relationship between Sand Points and Average Round Score? Do more Sand Points translate to fewer strokes? Not really. Although there is a weak “trend” in that direction, this finding is not statistically significant either.
Does this mean that Sand Points don’t matter? Not necessarily. These are really small sample sizes, making any kind of robust analysis on Sand Points with the 2021 season impossible for now. As I gather more data or include rounds I’ve played with golfers from other years, that may change.