Winning Isn't Everything, Is It?

Our good friend Thomas Atkins recently posted his findings on LPGA tournament winners (I was wondering what he'd been up to lately!).  It's so chock-full of information, your eyes might go blurry trying to bring it all in.  Now that mine have cleared up, I have a few comments I'd like to make on the conclusions he drew.

We've long known that the pool of talent on Tour has gotten deeper through the years and Thomas delivers even more evidence.  From only 30 regular touring professionals in the 1950s to 45 in the ‘60s and 80 in the ‘70s, there were 150 LPGA pros by 1983.  Of course the deepening of the pool didn't stop there, the Tour merely set that as the boundary because there aren't enough hours in the day to let 200-300 players get in 18 holes (maybe a July event in Anchorage could pull it off).  Since 1983, the number of professionals has continued to grow and only the top 150 get enough chances to play for us to consider them having played full schedules.  I don't know how many women touring professionals there are in the world today - Rolex ranks 700 of them but I wouldn't be surprised if there are more than 1000 - but the larger that number grows, the better the Top 150 get.  It is debatable how much better each section of the Top 150 gets as the pool grows larger (I believe most of the boost affects the bottom half of the group but all are boosted somewhat) but there is currently no evidence to the contrary.

I am not forgetting that the LPGA does not have the market cornered on the best 150 players in the world - certainly some of them are playing in Japan, Korea or Europe.  But even if I were to concede that 150 of the 200 best players in the world are LPGA members (it's more likely 150 of 180), the logic would still hold - that the larger the number of touring professionals, the greater the collective ability of any number of players at the top of that group.

Thomas obviously comprehends this logic in the historical sense but in the fourth paragraph of his post, he surprisingly abandons it:

Since the 1980's a top player has to have at least 10 wins....The 1990's produced only 4 players that have won at least 10 times and they averaged 36.5 wins per player....My conclusion is that the 1990's did not produce as many top players as should have been expected. When I calculated the top 50 LPGA players of all time, I found that there were less players from the 1990's than I expected. Winning or in reality a lack of winning is the reason. Annika Sorenstam, Karrie Webb, and Se Ri Pak all deserve to be in the LPGA Hall Of Fame, but a lack of top level competition certainly made it easier for them to win and obtain the required points.

After the number of Tour regulars topped out at 150 in 1983, he stopped adjusting his standard for the number of wins required by "top players".  I believe this is a big mistake.  The depth on Tour is surely greater now than it was in 1983 yet he is holding Paula Creamer and Mi Hyun Kim to the same standard as Jane Geddes.  In my yearly rankings Geddes only finished in the Top 10 three times in her career (she did rank #1 in 1987, albeit just barely).  So because she won 11 times in her career, she is a "top player" while Creamer with five Top 10 seasons and nine wins and Kim with seven Top 10s and eight wins are not?  I'm using my rating system which figures in much more than victories to make these comparisons but this isn't exactly apples and oranges.  And what about when Creamer collects her next win - why should she suddenly jump from "pretty good" to "top player" when it's obvious that she already is the latter?

I agree with Thomas that there appears to be a shortage of players whose careers began in the 1990s on the various "top players of alltime" lists.  I totally disagree that there was a shortage of top level competition in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s.  Using my rankings and starting with 1998 - the first year that Sorenstam, Webb and Pak were all regulars - the other top level competition was Donna Andrews, Liselotte Neumann, Brandie Burton, Pat Hurst and Juli Inkster.  The next year it was Inkster, Dottie Pepper and Meg Mallon.  In 2000 it was Inkster, Mallon and Hurst.  In 2001 it was Rosie Jones and Lorie Kane.  In 2002 it was Inkster and Mi Hyun Kim.  Just because some of those players (in this case, the ones who began their careers in the ‘90s) haven't gone on to HOF careers or win enough tournaments (yet) to surpass a certain level doesn't mean they weren't top-level competitors in the year in question.  Thomas states that it's too early make a call on the players whose careers began in the 2000s but I can tell you this right now - if he sticks with his 10-victories-make-a-top-player standard for the 2000s and the 2010s, the 1990s group won't look bad at all.

In the comments of his post, Thomas confirms that he values victories as the most important factor in rating players.  So do I.  My system uses five categories to rate players and a victory helps a player's standing more than any other single component.  I think the difference here is that he uses victory totals as the overriding factor in rating players and I believe that stance, while widely supported, has its drawbacks.  Using victories alone to rate players would tell you that Se Ri Pak has been a Top 10 player in 2010.  Suzann Pettersen didn't win any events in 2008 and hasn't won so far in 2010.  This method would tell you that Louise Friberg in 2008 and Pak in 2010 were better players than Suzann in those years.  Compare the rest of their records in those seasons and you'll quickly see why I disagree with using only victories to judge ability.  I could cite a dozen other examples off the top of my head where this conventional wisdom fails.

I don't know why the 1990s players as a group aren't well represented on the historical lists of alltime greats.  Maybe they tended to have shorter careers.  Maybe some of them (Kimmie?  Hurst?  Hetherington?) aren't done winning yet.  Maybe they tended to lose time for medical reasons at a greater rate than in other eras.  Maybe it was just dumb luck.  It wasn't because the Tour took a five-year dip in top-level ability from 1998-2002 and we certainly shouldn't diminish the accomplishments of Sorenstam, Webb and Pak because of it.