LIV Golf, The PGA Tour Responds, Pitching Dispersion Patterns
LIV Golf
A week ago, Matt Fitzpatrick hit one of the best shots of the past ten years to win the U.S. Open by one stroke:
Golf is at its best when it is consequential. Had Matt not struck this ball absolutely perfectly, he’d likely have gone to a playoff hole. Perhaps he wouldn’t have fulfilled his lifelong dream of hoisting the U.S. Open trophy. We watch golf for shots like that. We watch golf for meaningful moments.
Anyway, like everyone else, I’ve spent a lot of time recently thinking about the future of golf globally. What should LIV, the Saudi-backed rival golf league, do to compete with the PGA Tour? How should the PGA Tour respond?
To answer both questions in one fell swoop:
Attract the best players in the world to play meaningful golf.
“Yeah, no kidding.” I know. But currently neither Tour has an infrastructure that satisfies every condition in that sentence. This past week, both Tours took steps in the right direction.
LIV announced that Brooks Koepka (USA) and Abraham Ancer (Mexico) would be joining LIV Golf. Maybe this was a bit hyperbolic, but I’d tweeted this and I stand behind it:
My tweet elicited some well-measured, thoughtful replies calling me a clown, but I doubt those people have stood alongside me in an Abraham Ancer crowd at the PGA Tour event in San Antonio (or at like, the Mexico Open).
In the Official World Golf Rankings, 43 of the Top 100 players are American. Just one is Mexican: Abraham Ancer. He’s with LIV now. Oh by the way, the second best Mexican player, Carlos Ortiz, is also joining LIV this week. The population of Mexico is ~130M. That’s a huge market. Zoom out!
The current team structure of LIV Golf does not have legs. Each tournament, 12 LIV players draft three teammates to round out their “teams,” which change every week. With all due respect to such historic franchises, nobody cares about Team Cleeks or the Smashers or the Majesticks.
However…people would care about Team Mexico versus Team Australia versus Team USA. A 12-year-old golf fan from Mexico probably isn’t tuning in to the PGA Tour’s RBC Heritage. She might watch Team Mexico streamed live on YouTube.
Four-man teams by country competing in 10-15 events per year across the globe could be meaningful golf. Everything until that structure is a noisy, cash-filled means to an end. That is the path to success for LIV.
I’m paying attention to their international signings.
The PGA Tour Responds
Threatened by the Great Resignation, the PGA Tour has announced changes to its structure. Under the PGA Tour’s current structure, 125 players make the FedEx Cup Playoffs each year. Seventy players make the second round of the Playoffs, and 30 players make the Finals. By making the Playoffs, players have job security for the next year.
Well starting next season, only 70 players will qualify for the FedEx Cup Playoffs. Fifty players will make the second round, and 30 players will make the Finals. Also, the PGA Tour is juicing the purses of big tournaments and adding three international cash-grab events in the fall for the top 50 finishers from the previous season.
This is good!
Top players are being rewarded more heavily. Players will have to battle more fiercely for status on Tour, elevating the importance of each tournament in the season.
This could be better!
The Playoffs are still not compelling to watch, which is a strong indictment of a sport’s season. Year in and year out, the Tour Championship in Atlanta lacks juice. It is not must-see television. In nearly every other sport, fans eagerly anticipate the championship at the end of the season. This problem has gone unsolved.
Instead of having 70 players → 50 players → 30 players in the Playoffs, what if the PGA Tour had 70 players → 30 players → 16 players, culminating in a match play Tour Championship?
Stroke play tournaments enable the possibility of a blowout tournament in which there is little drama or excitement. You cannot have that. You have to maximize your chances of having an exciting finish for the season finale. Under a match play format, the scoreboard resets each day. Let players battle head-to-head to determine the champion of the season. That’s far more thrilling. This is an entertainment product.
And maybe can we consider moving the Tour Championship around the world to appeal to a global audience? Imagine watching Hideki Matsuyama take on Jordan Spieth in Japan for the Tour Championship.
Nah, we’ll just do it every year in Atlanta, Georgia.
Zoom out!
Pitching Dispersion
I highly, highly recommend this episode of The Brandon Adams Podcast. The interview is with Kyle Boddy of Driveline Baseball. Baseball is the primary sport discussed, but golf (among other sports) is referenced, both explicitly and implicitly. It’s one of the most insightful sports podcast episodes in my recent memory.
Kyle Boddy has a data-driven approach to helping professional pitchers. His perspective is that professional baseball pitchers are not nearly as accurate with their pitches as many would suspect. Boddy leverages pitching dispersion patterns to inform areas of development and optimal pitch location strategy.
On the podcast, he used Justin Verlander as an example of sharp strategy. With no baserunners, Verlander throws pitches mostly down the middle. He is unafraid to give up home runs in these situations since only one run will score. But he does not want to give up walks.
Once runners are on base, Verlander goes into Disaster Avoidance Mode. He gets craftier with his pitches, is more willing to give up walks, and is intent on avoiding home runs, which are now more costly with runners on base. Boddy likes Verlander’s approach.
If pitchers are not as accurate as they’d like to think, how should batters exploit their inaccuracy? They should probably be selective about when they swing.
Kyle Boddy explains that many of the best hitters in baseball swing the least often. Juan Soto, one of the best hitters in baseball, doesn’t swing very often! In fact, nobody swung on a lower percentage of pitches in 2021 than Juan Soto:
In 2021, Soto got walked 145 times, 45 more times than anyone else in the league. He finished runner up for the National League MVP. His strategy appears to be working.
Last newsletter, I’d written about optimal NFL punting strategy based on an analysis of punters’ dispersion patterns. And I’d included this plot of PGA Tour player Cameron Smith’s dispersion pattern with long irons to Back Left pins:
Across sports, leveraging dispersion patterns to develop optimal strategies seems to be the stuff people are looking at. For many fans, the data-driven approach might be dulling the game. I get that. As Kyle Boddy points out, do you really want to watch more MLB hitters embrace the strategy of swinging less often? Do golf fans want fewer and fewer golfers to attack pins with a long iron and instead aim closer to the center of the green?
Independent of what fans want, athletes who refuse to leverage this type of information will underperform the athletes who leverage it.
In completely unrelated news, pay attention to what happens (over a large sample!) when Rory McIlroy tries to hit high, hard-peeling fades. Spoiler alert: The dispersion is wide. In other words, it doesn’t go well…
UFC 276
If you’ve never watched a UFC card before, give next Saturday’s fights a try. Buy the card and enjoy a presentation that actually puts the viewer first. Should be an amazing night :)
Contact/Feedback
Twitter: @JosephLaMagna
Email: Joseph.LaMagnaGolf@gmail.com
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