I often mention during my recaps the player (or players) who posted the lowest score that day as having the "Round of the Day".  My curiosity led me to go back and document the players who have accomplished that distinction so far this year.  From this information, maybe we can identify those players who have a knack of going low more often than do others of similar ability.

Here are the players who have finished with the day's best score (or tied for it) the most times in 2008:

It's no surprise that Ochoa has 50% more of these than anybody else, nor is it surprising that Lorena is one of only five players who have registered the Round of the Day on Sunday while winning the tournament.  Helen Alfredsson did it just yesterday (I'll save the other three for later in the post).  That's Surprising Trend #1 - only five times in thirty events this year has a player played the best Sunday golf and won the event.

Eight times this year, one player has collected ROTD honors twice in one tournament.  Amazingly, only four of those times did that player win the event - Ochoa twice, at HSBC (where she actually scored lowest in the first THREE rounds) and Corona, Creamer at Farr and Kerr at the Safeway Classic.  Surprise #2 - topping the scores twice in an event doesn't guarantee a win.  If you can't play decently each of the other days, that great accomplishment gets wasted.  Sophie Gustafson at the Ginn Tribute, Sun Young Yoo at Corning, Yani Tseng at the Canadian and Kelli Kuehne at SBS (a three-round event, amazingly enough) all led the scoring twice yet did not win.  Even more astounding, Kuehne didn't finish Top 10 (T12 with a second-round 79).

There's a bit of luck in this stat, of course.  With up to 143 opponents on a given day, the chance that somebody might beat your 64 with a 63 is always present.  The other side of that coin is, a 70 in a wind-swept round in Northern California (Parmlid and Stupples at Longs) can count just the same as a 60 in pristine Ohio summer weather (Creamer at Farr).  The average Round of the Day score through the Grand China Air LPGA is 65.68, more than seven strokes under the seasonal average.

Kerr's presence is the number two spot is not surprising - Cristie is well-known for her "go-low" ability and is having a good year to boot.  Seon Hwa Lee is somewhat surprisingly tied for third - I often think of her as a steady week-in week-out player but this year, her performances have swung more wildly than in her first two years on Tour.  Seon Hwa used one of her ROTDs that Sunday in Charleston when I watched her come from behind to win the Ginn Tribute.  Kerr is another player whose Sunday ROTD propelled her to victory, at the Safeway Classic.  The fifth player to do that this year was Louise Friberg in her ten-stroke comeback victory at the MasterCard.

I was shocked to see 12 players with more ROTDs than Annika Sorenstam.  If I were to research past seasons, I guarantee Annika would have topped the list most years through 2005 and might have even beaten Lorena in '06.  Paula Creamer's total of four didn't really surprise me - her Farr performance aside, Paula's game fits the "slow and steady" model more than the "all or nothing" one.  Missing from the above list is Na Yeon Choi, who has only one ROTD all year.  The players listed above who might not have been expected to place so well relative to their overall results are Song-Hee Kim, Hee-Won Han and Juli Inkster.

The final trend I spotted - in the 30 events that have been played so far in 2008, 19 times the player who won them had Round of the Day at least once that week.  The surprise there is that the percentage isn't higher.  I would have expected at least 80%, not 63.

I'm going to file this topic under "information marginally worth having", at least until I discover that the trends seen here hold up over time.  In the meantime, consider ROTD Leaders to be another stat you can only get here at Hound Dog LPGA!