The World We Live In: Crunching numbers, hitting the links

What’s Happening in the World Today?

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Rory McIlroy blasts out of the sand trap on the eighth hole during the final round of the World Golf Championships-Bridgestone Invitational golf tournament Sunday at Firestone Country Club in Akron, Ohio. Phil Masturzo/Akron Beacon Journal/MCT

By Akron Beacon Journal, adapted by Newsela staff

BETHESDA, Md. — For the modern champion golfer, statistical analysis — number crunching — is just as important as choosing the right club. Every move on the golf course is recorded and analyzed, with the goal of improving a player’s game.

More numbers became available after ShotLink, a computer-based system for gathering and storing information on golf games, was conceived in 1999. Since then, volunteers equipped with lasers — with about 350 needed at each event — have been measuring booming drives and tap-in birdies. In 2008 a program known as ShotLink Intelligence was introduced, to help analyze all those numbers.

Now some players, including Jason Day, Zach Johnson and Brandt Snedeker, rely on a person in their inner circle to crunch those numbers. They do it as adeptly as Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane did in the baseball movie “Moneyball.”

However, that doesn’t mean the players listen to what the numbers say and adjust their practice routines accordingly.

“Some people don’t like to know what their weaknesses are,” said Colin Swatton, Day’s coach and caddie since the 26-year-old Australian was 12.

Eagles, Birdies And Bogeys

Swatton has been analyzing Day’s stats since 2007. He doesn’t rely on ShotLink because as industrious as the volunteers are, he said they’re not always accurate. So Swatton himself notes the details and distances of all Day’s shots as he follows him around the course, caddying for him.

“I maintain all that, put it into my spreadsheets and my database and cross reference it with ShotLink,” Swatton said last month. “Every round we analyze it, put it all into a folder and then we break it down per hole, per course.”

Day said that before every tournament, Swatton hands him a piece of paper that tells him what he has to do to win the event. It summarizes what the winner has done over the years — how many eagles, birdies, bogeys and double bogeys he had, along with averages on the par-3s, par-4s and par-5s.

“Sometimes it can be information overload,” Day said — but it’s still worth it to him.

“I need to stay ahead of the curve, make sure that I’ve got that extra step over the next person,” he said. “Whatever I can do to help me win, that’s legal, obviously, I’ll do.”

Snedeker has been using statistics for five years and believes that’s why he had his top two years in 2012 and 2013, when he totaled four victories and 16 top-10s.

He gave a dramatic example of how the analysis helped him.

Previously he wasn’t getting at all close to the hole when shooting from 125 to 150 yards, Snedeker said. “It was way out of whack from where I was from 150 to 175, 100 to 125. I looked at my bag setup, ended up putting a different wedge in and pulling everything back to where it was supposed to be. Little stuff like that you can catch if you’re paying attention to it.”

When To Practice Putting

Tim Clark also credits statistics for a turnaround in his game. “I looked at my stats a few weeks ago to see where my game was sort of wrong and I was about 180th or something on putts from 10 to 15 feet,” he said Tuesday. “I knew I was struggling, but it was interesting to suddenly see it in writing.”

He added, “It was something I started to work on a little bit — I putted better at the John Deere, finishing fifth.”

Sweden’s Peter Hanson is even more of a devotee than Clark and has “a professor in putting” to crunch his numbers. However he primarily uses them to make his practice time more efficient.

“I spent way too many hours on things that didn’t have as much of an effect on the game as I thought,” Hanson said.

Hanson believes number-crunching in golf is the wave of the future.

“I spent hours and hours working on my wedge game,” Hanson said. “Then in the end you see between 30 and 80 yards you hit 3 and 4 percent of the shots. All those hours, you can spend those hitting 6- and 7-irons, which is really the key.”

Interpreting the Stats

Day said that at the end of the year, he sits down for a meeting with Swatton and the other members of his team. Swatton lays out what Day needs to improve on in the next 12 months and presents a practice plan to “maintain the strengths and improve the weaknesses.”

Johnson does the same thing in what he calls a “team summit.”

“Those magnify and pinpoint aspects that we can really attack in my game,” he said.

Justin Rose, who won the Quicken Loans National and Scottish Open back to back, doesn’t focus as deeply on statistics as Day and Johnson.

“The ShotLink stuff is so in-depth now,” Rose said. It shows “my putting from 6 feet, 7 feet, 8 feet, 9 feet, 10 feet. I might be 30th from 6 and 7 feet, and 180th from 8 feet and 60th from 10 feet. You can’t really then go out and practice 8-footers because that’s what you’re 180th at. How you interpret stats I think is very, very important — but I don’t get that in-depth and detailed on it.”

Still, Swatton believes that more and more golfers will come to see the value of statistical analysis — especially as they starts to see the benefits, as Snedeker and Day have.

“I think people will get more into it,” Swatton said.