Thoughts on Historical Ratings

In the next couple of days, I will be posting a list of the greatest LPGA players of all time.  At different times over the last two years, I've been working toward this goal.  It started by researching individual seasons (going back to 1950) to rank the best players in each.  Then, surprisingly, came the difficult part - determining how to turn those results into a comprehensive ranking of players across all eras of the LPGA's history.

When you're trying to figure out who is better than whom, Bill James taught me that you must first decide if you are trying to rank players by their peak ability or by the value of their career accomplishments.  I decided that for golfers, the best method to use would be the latter.  A player's peak season would often be very difficult to nail down (try doing that for Juli Inkster or Joanne Carner) and even if you managed to do it, you would wind up trying to convince people that Debbie Austin was as good "at her peak" as Pat Bradley or Donna Caponi.  The golf world already looks at career totals above single seasons to identify the greats anyway, so swimming against that current would be more than futile.

I started by taking my yearly player rankings and awarding points for where each player finished.  I've awarded points down to position #30 in the past and decided to stick with that method.  While this is a logical process, there are a couple of problems with applying it across so many seasons: 

First - as you go back in history, the amount of available data diminishes.  Going back to 1963, I was able to find all five stat categories necessary for my system.  As I went back further, information started to disappear - missed cuts went first, then scoring averages and finally the money list aside from the yearly champion.  I had to develop an alternate system using the info I did have.  Consequently, I was winding up with very few players to rank at all - with just victories, major titles, top 3 finishes and the money champ to go on, some years had data on only 10 players.

Second - There are signs in the data that absolutely prove the position that the LPGA has gotten more competitive over the years.  Because of this, my original process of awarding points by seasonal position resulted in the rankings being totally dominated by the stars of the ‘50s and ‘60s.  This point is not even debatable - more than twice as many players register at least one Top 10 in a season now as compared to back in the ‘60s.  The players who rate around #30 for a given season now generally collect four or five of them.  The players around #30 in the mid-60s were lucky to have more than one.  In the ‘60s the typical season would see 10 different winners.  Now we regularly see 17 to 20.  One stat The Constructivist came up with shows this same trend - the percentage of the total Tour purse that players at #30 now win is much higher than the percentage those players won forty years ago.  You can make these same comparisons at position #20, #40, wherever you like - the results are the same.  The only part of this subject worth debating is how much value we should give to each position in the seasonal rankings as we go back through time.

Third - that last sentence.  I will NOT completely wave off the accomplishments of Kathy Whitworth, Mickey Wright, Betsy Rawls or Louise Suggs just because they didn't have thirty extra players around who had the ability to compete with them.  In 1968, Kathy Whitworth had probably her greatest season with 10 victories and 29 Top 10s in 30 starts (read that twice for full effect).  She did not run unopposed - Carol Mann also won 10 times with 27 Top 10s in 32 starts while Mickey Wright won four times in only 12 starts.  I certainly think Whitworth earned her #1 ranking in 1968.  I also happen to believe that #1 ranking wasn't as difficult an accomplishment as Lorena Ochoa's #1 in 2008, nor as difficult as Dottie Pepper's #1 in 1992 or Nancy Lopez' #1 in 1979.

To reflect this in my all-time rankings, I started with my 30-player 100-point scale.  As I went back into each previous decade (except at 1962 when the loss of data forced me to roll back there), I either eliminated five slots at the bottom or subtracted points from Player #1 and adjusted the scale accordingly.  The net result is that Mickey Wright's #1 in 1958 is worth only 80% of a #1 in the 1990s or 2000s and only ten players that year received points.  In between, I could have picked other boundaries to make the changes besides the decades' ends or could have made more of them to lessen the blow of each but I believe the scales are fair.

This method has one noticable shortcoming.  If a player dominates the season finishing miles ahead of her nearest competitor ala 2005 Annika Sorenstam, she still only gets 10 (or in early seasons, 15) more points than Player #2 - the same as if the margin were miniscule.  I don't believe that the rankings would come out much different but perhaps in a future version of this list, I'll address that issue.

To sum up - after determining the points for each season for each player, I've simply added them up to generate the list of the greatest.  You'll find that it matches up well with the selections of the LPGA Hall of Fame.  The exceptions are for players like Babe Zaharias and Betty Jameson, ones whose careers began prior to 1950 or even the founding of the Tour.  Their positions on my list are not meant to make light of their abilities or their importance in the development of the LPGA.  I'm sure there will be others you disagree with - isn't that what making these kinds of lists is all about?