pgatour.com

The PGA Tour announced a new and improved way to diffentiate between the best putters on Tour and players who simply have a solid short game.

The Strokes Gained-Putting stat was developed by Professor Mark Broadie of Columbia Business School and studied more at MIT led by Professor Stephen Graves. The new stat will use the ShotLink technology that the Tour implemented in 2004.

The point of this new stat is to better understand who the top putters on Tour have been. In the past, we have only had a putts per round stat to tell us who is putting well. As anyone who has played golf knows, that stat can sometimes be misleading.

Players who scramble well as a result of a solid chipping game have lower putts per round, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they are putting that great, they just have shorter putts to hole. While players who are striking the ball well and hitting more greens usually have longer putts, meaning they are less likely to make the putts, resulting in more putts per round.

Knowing that, we judge the best putters on Tour primarily by the eye test. Who seems to make the most putts, who has the best stroke, et cetera.

Now, with this new stat and the help of ShotLink, the PGA Tour can quantify how many strokes a player can save or lose to the field.

Using the example from the PGATour.com announcement, ShotLink shows that in 2010 the average putts it took the pros to hole out from seven feet was 1.5. So, hypothetically speaking and using Camilo Villegas as our guinea pig for a visuals sake, say Camilo holes a seven foot putt. He gains 0.5 strokes on the field for making that putt. If he were to require two putts, he would lose 0.5 strokes, or if he were to three-putt, he would lose 1.5 strokes to average.

After his round, against the average, say Camilo has gained 3 strokes compared to the putting averages on the distances of his putts. Now, you have to take into account how the rest of the field putted on that day to make the stat comparable. Say for the day, the rest of the tournament field averaged gaining one stroke on the putting averages. Camilo would have gained two strokes against the field.

Hopefully that explanation made sense, otherwise you can read the gibberish written in the PGA’s release and decipher it that way.

The bottom line is that instead of believing Luke Donald is the best putter on Tour, we have a stat to prove how effective against the field he truly is. Here is a link to the rankings through this year. It truly is a telling statistic.

It’s no surprise that Luke Donald is in the top-10. Also not surprising, Ernie Els is DFL.