petergeorge13/visualizing_strokes_gained_data

Topic

Data statistics has become a rapidly expanding field for many sports, one of those being golf. A major point of interest for those analyzing golf statistics has become a metric called strokes gained. This metric attempts to show how well a specific player does against a set of other players on a given shot. If the numeric value for strokes gained is positive, that indicates the player did better than the rest of the field on that shot and the other way around if the numeric value is negative. These shot-by-shot numeric values can be summed over an entire round to show total strokes gained. Once again if that number is positive the player did better than the rest of the field and the opposite is true if the number is negative. There is debate as to how accurate the criteria for strokes gained is per shot, but it is the best system so far developed for analyzing a golf round shot by shot.

Motivation

Personally I play varsity golf at Harvard so I'm interested in anything that has to do with golf, especially ways to improve my game. I'd always heard from coaches and peers that if you increase your strokes gained then your scores would go down but I never really knew what that meant. I figured studying strokes gained would give me more insight into what the metric stood for and how it can be reflective of how well players score. I found that it is an incredibly accurate measurment and from now on I will not take any one shot for granted because I know if I can come out with a positive strokes gained at the end of the round I will be doing well. Unfortunately, outside of the PGA Tour data collection can be scarce so I might not know exactly what my strokes gained per shot is.

Background

Strokes gained first began to be measured in 2003 when the PGA Tour invented a new type of data collectiong called Shotlink. This system was able to give more measurements than ever before about lie, swing speed, spin, distance, proximity to the hole, etc. Then Mark Broadie, a business professor at Columbia, developed a standard benchmark for strokes-to-hole from every distance and lie possible once given all of the Shotlink data. Once the benchmarks were made, all that was needed to determine strokes gained for any shot was the pre-shot lie, pre-shot distance to hole, post-shot lie, and post-shot distance to the hole. Because many factors can be incorporated into these measurements such as course conditions and weather along with the fact that strokes gained measures actual strokes, it the most comprehensive golf statistic developed.

This repository was created by Peter George as a Gov 1005 final project