Stat Deprivation
by hound dog on Apr 29, 2009 2:00 PM PDT
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PrintDuring last night's Inside The LPGA show Karen and I talked for a moment about the disappointing Corona performance of Brittany Lincicome, coming as it did on the heels of her win at the Kraft Nabisco. This morning I decided to look at Brittany's stats from this past weekend to see if she had reverted to her previous norm in any categories where she had excelled at KNC.
Couldn't do it. The stats weren't collected at Corona. No fairways hit, no GIR, no putts, no driving distance. I shouldn't have been surprised. Mike Scanlan told me last fall that for most international LPGA events, the Tour doesn't have the on-site personnel to collect those numbers. Of the seven events played so far in 2009, at least three did not have stats collected.
Knowing me as you probably do, my next sentence may surprise you. If the LPGA isn't going to make any effort to paint a better statistical picture of its players, they may as well give up publishing these numbers entirely. Grossly incomplete data leads the public and the media to ridiculous conclusions like "Jiyai Shin's putting has been terrible" when the numbers you're looking at don't even include the week she won in Singapore. And as the Tour keeps decreasing the number of domestic events (involuntarily, I must admit), the erosion of available data keeps getting worse. Do you think baseball fans would accept only having batting averages and home run totals available from 57% of the games played?
Most American companies are aware of a phenomenon called "outsourcing". Perhaps the LPGA could learn how that works and allow a group of locals at each event tally those stats up for them. Numbers, unlike language, are somewhat universal around the world. Otherwise, by 2015 I'll be analyzing numbers that represent less than 30% of the total schedule.
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amen, brutha!
I’m sure the players and their caddies are keeping stats for themselves. Why not just collect the data from the caddies?
by The Constructivist on Apr 30, 2009 7:17 PM PDT reply actions
Let me clear things up a bit on stats. The stats are usually kept by the scorers in each group who are volunteers. Sometimes, especially when we travel to foreign countries, they may not be quite up to snuff on the game and it may become confusing to them. In fact, the guy we had the first day in Morelia couldn’t even get the score correct. He would have never been able to handle the other stats. As far as the caddies and players, some keep stats but many don’t and if everyone doesn’t do it, the info collected is pretty much useless.
Veteran LPGA caddie and host of lifeontour.com. An insightful and often irreverent look at the LPGA caddies and their players.
by Life on Tour - Larry on May 6, 2009 5:10 AM PDT reply actions
Note
All stats from the Duramed Futures Tour are kept by players except Long Drives.
thanks for the info, guys
That gives me a better perspective on things. However – the point remains that the Tour either needs to address the shortcomings in its stat-gathering process or stop gathering them at all. Perhaps the Futures Tour standard should be adopted for the international events, or even all events to keep from confusing players about whether they need to keep their stats this week or not.
It optional
on Duramed, my guess is most players do. I shall pay more attention at future events for the futures tour.
by Phil E. Blunts on May 6, 2009 8:18 PM PDT up reply actions
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