Player Profiles - Part 1

As is my annual habit, I will be profiling the Top 30 players in my final 2010 rankings in groups of five.  Selected others will follow the Top 30.  The numbers in parentheses after each player's name indicates her ranking at the end of 2009, her preseason ranking and the highest position she attained during the 2010 season.

1.  Yani Tseng  (8-11-1)

Despite being based on two very different methods, the Rolex system and HD system have agreed on the Player of the Year for 16 straight years.  In 1994 Rolex picked Beth Daniel while my system picked Laura Davies and placed Daniel third.  Two years later, Rolex modified their points system to the current one and it's agreed with mine every time.  If 2010 didn't snap that streak, I don't know what will.  Tseng held off four serious challengers to secure the first POY for an Asian since Ayako Okamoto in 1987 (in case you're wondering, my system picked Jane Geddes that year).  Yani definitely earned it with two major championships and three victories total along with seven total Top 5 finishes.

What made the HD POY race close was this - Tseng had only one other Top 10 aside from the Top 5s (eight players had a better Top 10%) and a fourth-place finish on the money list.  She missed one cut which isn't so bad but her closest competitor Cristie Kerr didn't miss any.  Yani finished outside the Top 20 seven times in 19 starts - of her competition, only Ai Miyazato did worse (nine in 21 starts) but Na Yeon Choi only failed to make the Top 20 four times while Jiyai Shin did it three times and Kerr just twice.  I've occasionally gotten flack about "devaluing" major championships in my system but the truth is Yani barely did enough otherwise to avoid having both me and Rolex declare her not the POY.

2.  Cristie Kerr  (4-4-2)

Twelve months ago I wrote that 2009 was the year that Kerr should have won either POY or the money title, inferring that she probably wouldn't ever get a better chance.  Shows what I know....  Cristie won twice (seven straight years with at least one), gave us our most dominant major championship performance in 56 years, finished third on the money list, and collected 13 Top 10s in 21 starts - 11 of those 13 were Top 5s!  Reflect on that a moment - if you saw Kerr in an LPGA event this year, the chance of her finishing in the Top 5 was greater than 50-50.  That's not quite as often as Ochoa or Sorenstam were in their heyday but, damn!  She wasn't the only player to accomplish that feat this year, either (check out Players 4 and 5).  Cristie also extended her streak of consecutive made cuts to 86, the fourth-longest streak on record.  If she can keep it going, she'll pass Lorena for second place early next fall.

Looking only at the raw data, it would seem obvious that Kerr was the best player in 2010.  Finishing third in Total Driving and fourth in both GIR and Total Putting, she is the only player to rank in the Top 5 of all Big Three stats.  Nobody else ranked as high in even two of the categories and only three other players made the Top 20 of all three.  I'm not saying we need to override the Rolex and HD systems by using this method but if you want to argue that Cristie's 2010 was better than anybody else's, this is a great place to start.

3.  Ai Miyazato  (3-5-1)

I mentioned my supposed bias against major championships in the Tseng profile - here I'll tackle my "anti-victory" bias.  Ai-chan won five times this year (two more than anybody else and three more than Kerr) yet finished third in my rankings.  If you think that's unfair, Rolex listed her fourth.  Two missed cuts hurt some but the fact that she finished sixth on the money list probably did the most damage.  Nine times in 21 starts Miyazato failed to finish in the Top 20 and six times she didn't make the Top 30.  Two of those sub-30 finishes came in majors (KNC and U.S. Open), which cost her lots of money relative to Tseng and Kerr.  It was a great year for sure - five win seasons don't come easy - but I'm sure it's disappointing for Ai to know that she would have won Player of the Year had she only converted a couple of those poor outings into Top 10 finishes.

4.  Jiyai Shin  (2-2-1)

Shin won twice - Evian and Mizuno - while finishing second on the money list, collecting 14 Top 10s in 18 starts (the best percentage on Tour), 12 of them being Top 5s.  That's a recurring theme for all five of the POY candidates - at least two-thirds of their Top 10 finishes were in the Top 5 and Miyazato was the only one of them below 80%.  The average should of course be around 50%, give or take a couple of points due to various numbers of T5s and T10s.  When these players got in contention, they fared exceptionally well.

Jiyai's Performance Record at LPGA.com shows her with one missed cut, at the Tour Championship.  Which is absolutely ridiculous.  She made the second-round cut but missed the special third-round cut, earning $3359 by actually finishing T64.  A quick glance at the complete 2010 Performance Chart shows every player in this situation with an MC.  In every other tournament played, any player who misses the official cut earns zero money and there is no reason here to deviate from that standard.  I can assure you that my spreadsheet lists Shin with zero missed cuts for 2010.

5.  Na Yeon Choi  (5-7-4)

I've talked before about how the word "consistent" is used in the sports vernacular - people really mean "consistently good" when they use it.  NYC was as "consistent" in 2010 as anybody could reasonably hope for.  She struggled only in late June, finishing T59 at ShopRite and missing the cut at the LPGA Championship (snapping a string of 63 dating back to before her rookie season).  Other than her first-round defeat by Karine Icher at the Sybase Match Play (much less surprising in hindsight considering Icher's Top 30 season) and a T27 at the Kraft Nabisco, those were the only Choi finishes of 2010 outside the Top 20.  It all added up to first on the money list, the Vare Trophy for lowest scoring average, two wins, 12 Top 5s in 23 starts and 15 total Top 10s.