The most powerful application of Data Analytics in Sports - Strokes Gained in Golf

The links of Puerto Vallarta witnessed last week during the Mexico Open a nice rivalry between two good friends. Tony Finau and Jon Rahm.

At the end both did achieve a great objective. Tony clinched his first win of the 2023 season while Jon did something truly remarkable.

He (Jon) broke the records of most winnings (in USD) in a single season with $14.4 million with still 8 months more ahead to play.

The record was held by Scottie Scheffler with USD 14 million for the entire season last year. And we all know how solid golf Scottie did play in 2022.

But now coming back to the main character of this newsletter edition which is Tony, let's analyze his performance during last week’s tournament by using a very powerful tool.

Data Analytics.

Most of us enjoyed the movie MoneyBall where Brad Pitt as Manager of the troublesome Oakland Athletics had to discover a different and innovative way to manage the team because the traditional way was simply not working for them.

Yes!, I am finding inspiration in Baseball to share with you a concept that all Pro Tour players pay close attention to.

Strokes Gained.

Strokes gained uses a simple formula to figure out whether a shot was better or worse than average, and then how much better or worse it was, before producing a +/- number for that shot when comparing every aspect of their performance with other players within a particular dataset.

Ok… before diving into the data stats of Tony Finau, if you are not familiar with the term Strokes Gained and how it works, I strongly recommend you to watch this brief video where I explain the concept with a real example using Jason Day’s performance in Hawaii.

Even if you are an avid golfer but do not work frequently with Strokes Gained, I believe that this video will be also very valuable for you.

My end goal here is to provide you with sophisticated but easy to use tools to improve your game.

Tony Gained these number of Strokes on each of the following categories:

Off The Tee (OTT) = +1.22

Approach (APP) = +1.30

Around the Green (ARG) = +0.77 and

Putting (PUTT) = +1.06?

for a Total of = +4.34 for the Tournament.

Basically what this means is that Tony was approximately 4.34 strokes better during the tournament than the rest of the players.

If we divide 4.34 between 72 holes (this is not exactly how it's happened) we will get 0.06 Strokes gained per hole.

This may not seem to look much for you but in aggregate these little numbers add up and a single Stroke Gained consistently during the season could mean several positions up in the leaderboard every week representing hundreds of thousands of additional dollars in prize.

Another interesting outcome of this analysis is the proportion of Strokes Gained on each of the four subcategories:

Off The Tee (OTT) = 28%

Approach (APP) = 30%

Around the Green (ARG) = 18%

Putting (PUTT) = 24%

As we can see, the figures are fairly even. However when it comes to Tony’s numbers in particular, what 's interesting is that using the results of his most recent 25 tournaments, Putting is by far his weakest area.

During the press conference after the event, this topic came to the table on how he did manage to improve so drastically his putting performance.

Tony responded that thanks to this type of analysis, it was clear to him which area he needed to focus almost exclusively.

He then made a reference to Bruce Lee when he did mention that he used the 10,000 practice method in a single task to achieve great results.

10,000 practice putts for Tony.