Introductory Links
by Ken Pomeroy on Thursday, June 16, 2011
This page is for those that aren’t subscribers, but still want to learn more about the data available on this site.
More explanation on the ratings
Other team/player advanced stats
Height, experience, and bench minutes
Height and Other Stuff page
by Ken Pomeroy on Wednesday, June 15, 2011
The Height and Other Stuff page contains data on a team’s height at each position and statistics that describe a team’s experience and bench usage. All of these are estimates dependent on certain assumptions.
Height data
- Overall average height is computed by taking the average listed height of every player on the team, weighted by minutes played. Players that have played less than 10% of their team’s minutes are not included.
- To calculate the positional height data, the minutes played for each team are ordered by height. Thus the 20% of minutes played by the tallest players are assumed to be center minutes, the next 20% are assumed to be power forward minutes, etc.
- Effective height is the average of the center and power forward position. The rationale for this is described in more detail here.
Experience
The case for Tiger Woods
When Tiger Woods announced he was not competing in this week’s U.S. Open, a collective nation wrote the obit on Tiger’s career. All of a sudden, the notion that Woods will challenge Nicklaus’s record of winning 18 majors is the contrarian point of view.
The piece by the AP national sports columnist Tim Dahlberg seemed to get the most visibility and the gist of his column was this:
The golden era of Tiger Woods is over, done in by both scandal and injury. He’s not going to win five more majors, might not even win five more tournaments.
I’m no Will Carroll and there’s not a lot of precedence for a golfer with a bad knee. Most golfers are struck down by neck, back, shoulder, or arm injuries, so who knows if Tiger will be healthy enough to…
How many majors will Rory McIlroy win?
by Ken Pomeroy on Tuesday, June 14, 2011
When a young player comes close to winning, it’s inevitable that a comment will be made, most likely by someone who has won a lot of money playing golf, that the young golfer in question is primed to win a bunch of tournaments in his career. Whether young golfers are really guaranteed future success can be examined through the lens of GPR.
First, let’s look at the best seasons by a 21-year old since 1960. (Thanks to Neil Paine at sports-reference.com for supplying me with earnings information for previous seasons, yesterday’s chart has been updated to include golfers from the ‘60’s. You should visit sports-reference.com for your historical sports data needs, including college hoops.)
1973 Ben Crenshaw 429 1981 Bobby Clampett 202 1990 Robert Gamez 149 1997 Tiger Woods 473 2001 Sergio Garcia 350 2010 Rory McIlroy 213 2010 Rickie Fowler 136
Seven golfers…
The best seasons by age on the PGA Tour
by Ken Pomeroy on Monday, June 13, 2011
A while back, I tried my hand at some golf ratings. (Back in the day when Sergio Garcia was playing good golf.) It was a fun experiment, but ultimately it was such a task to gather data for such a project that it was impossible to maintain. At any rate, there are still fun things to do with golf stats and with the US Open days away, it’s a good time to explore some of these things.
Unfortunately, the PGA Tour is far too possessive with its data to tackle a lot these things. However, the money lists are fair game and easily accessible. While there’s a limit to the information that comes from the money that a player earned over the course of a golf season, the primitive state of golf analytics is such that there’s some valuable info to be mined from…