16.  Eun-Hee Ji  (13-8-9)

This U.S. Women's Open jinx is getting ridiculous.  Beginning with 2003, let me count the ways this championship has body-slammed its winner:

Granted, a couple of those wins have shaped up to be Flukes and Annika and Cristie both returned to form but we've got a real pattern happening here.  If Once is Happenstance, Twice is Coincidence and Thrice is Enemy Action, what the heck is seven times?  Like Kerr, Ji ranked higher the year before she won the U.S. Open than in the year she did.

17.  Brittany Lang  (31-24-17)

Slowly developing into one of the best in the game.  Brittany ranked in the Top 5 of both Total Driving and GIR (only Kerr did the same) after ranking in the Top 10 of both last year.  The putter is all she has left to improve on (#59, up from #77).

Lang seems to be one of the streakier players on Tour.  The last two seasons she reeled off sizeable Top 10 streaks down the stretch - four in a row with two runners-up this year and five in a row to finish 2008 (a streak she extended to seven over the first two tournaments in '09).  Something tells me that streaky putting is behind those results.

18.  Kristy McPherson  (45-NR-17)

In last year's profile, I said Kristy wasn't a great candidate for improvement because she was already pretty good in each of the Big Three Stats and didn't have one area she could specifically work on to get better.  Wrong again.  She got better across the board - up from #46 to #14 in Total Driving, from #40 to #16 in GIR and from #51 to #44 in Total Putting.  So now she does have one area to concentrate on, the flat stick.

19.  Sophie Gustafson  (37-NR-19)

The first half of 2009 was a disaster for Sophie.  After collecting a Top 10 in Thailand, she endured five missed cuts (four of them consecutive) in a six-tournament span ending with the U.S. Open.  She immediately turned it around at Evian, losing in a playoff to Ai Miyazato.  In September she rattled off four straight Top 10s including her first win in six years at the CVS.  Despite all the missed cuts it was Gustafson's first Top 20 season since 2003, a level she frequented over the first five years of her career.

One of the LPGA's longest hitters, Sophie drove the ball about the same this year as she had in 2008.  Her putting took a turn for the worse as she dropped from 30^th to 72^nd but she apparently made up for it with her improvement in GIR, up from 70^th to 18^th.  I'll go out on a limb and say that (like Brittany Lang) the good performances came when the putter was working and the missed cuts came when it wasn't.

20.  Lindsey Wright  (39-NR-15)

If Lindsey had her way, the LPGA would take all of its events held in the fall and move them to the spring.  The last two years Wright has really tailed off as the days get shorter - otherwise she might be a Top 10 player.  From August 1 on, she has one Top 10 and five missed cuts in 18 starts over the two seasons.  Prior to August 1, her numbers are seven Top 10s (four of them Top 5s and two of those in majors) and two missed cuts in 30 starts.  Altogether, Wright is still a darned good player whose results have been improving every year she's been on Tour.  This, despite the fact that her stats weren't significantly different from '08 to '09.  Her driving was up slightly this year (#50 to #41), her GIR was about the same (#42 to #39) and her putting was down slightly (#32 to #42).

Now that I think about it, Lindsey's model is actually the one you would want to follow if you were a not-quite-upper-echelon golfer.  Say you are a player with good but not great numbers like Wright.  If it were possible to choose how to distribute the 83 rounds you played in a season (the number Wright played in 2009), which distribution would maximize your value?  The obvious answer is to bundle the good rounds together in the same weeks to collect a few Top 5s and 10s (or maybe a win once in a while) and scatter the bad rounds to minimize the number of missed cuts.  That way, your less-than-stellar scoring average and peripheral stats would earn more money and ultimately rank you as a better player than if your results were randomly distributed.

Before you blow off this notion as complete nonsense, take note of this - all sports have players who get labeled as ones who "get the most out of their talent".  Laura Diaz is another player who's had multiple seasons which exceeded the sum of her stats.  Obviously Diaz and Wright don't really get to pick and choose when they play their good or bad rounds, but it seems that they do have some ability to keep a few good ones bunched together and maximize their earning potential.  Two years ago during her rookie season, Song-Hee Kim exhibited the opposite trait - she nearly lost her Tour card despite numbers which suggested a much stronger game.  One year does not establish a trend - Kim played up to her numbers in '08 and '09 - but two or more years certainly does.