This is the first in a new category of posts you’ll find on this site: Golf History & Research. As a long-time baseball fan and member of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), I am dismayed that something similar doesn’t exist for golf.
Not only does baseball have the wonderful SABR website, where among other things you can find more than 5000 biographies and an extensive oral history collection, there is Baseball Reference with its humongous statistical database that is (mostly) free. I would be remiss if I didn’t also mention Baseball Savant’s StatCast and Retrosheet, the latter of which has play-by-play records for every game since 1974 and most games since 1920.
Of course, there are also several, high-quality subscription services that provide insights on the numbers behind the game for a monthly or annual fee, such as: StatHead, FanGraphs, and Baseball Prospectus. These sites will even let you run your own searches and perform some limited statistical analyses.
With pro golf, it seems to be a different story. There are some free websites, such as PGA Tour, CBS Sports, and ESPN that provide golf stats but at nowhere near the detail or ease of use that you see with baseball. I know I’ve often had to piece together information from multiple sites for certain historical golf data, and the PGA Tour site is absolutely labyrinthian.
One of the cleverest freemium sites, Data Golf, offers real-time predictive modeling of tournaments in progress. For a fee, you can upgrade to gain access to a host of statistical tools aimed mostly at gamblers.
Other pay-for-data sites like GOLFStats.com and RickRunGood are also geared more toward gambling than appreciation of the game.
Anyway, the purpose of adding this new category of posts to this site is to share what I uncover about pro golf along the lines of SABR. That is, I’ll be looking for articles (or other media) that delve into the history of golf and our understanding of how the game is and has been played.
In many cases, I’ll give you a sample take on what I’ve found and a link to explore the topic further, if you wish. Occasionally, I may share my own perspective or attempt to draw a connection between the subject of the post and APBA Golf. But mostly I’ll be pointing you in a direction (i.e., to another URL) I think you’ll find interesting.
On that note, here is a 2018 article from Golfweek on the increasing importance of analytics in golf. It’s a fascinating read. The article does a nice job of explaining strokes gained, and what we’ve learned since its implementation and the advent of ShotLink data in 2003.
For example, did you know the average difference between playing from the fairway and hitting the rough is about a quarter of a shot? PGA golfers at all levels average under par when they hit fairways.
Here’s another factoid: When it comes to putting, it’s not the number of putts made, per sé, that predicts how well pros do. It’s distance. Tournament winners almost invariably make an inordinate number of putts between 11 and 20 feet.
I hope you enjoy this new feature.