ESPN Golf Blog

Posted by Nathan Easler

Every golfer and every golf fan knows the sport is a game of numbers. One of the most distinct characteristics of golf is that any player's efforts are summarized by an absolute and final statistic: his or her score. However, as any visitor to the 19th hole knows, the story of the game cannot be told in full by the tally at the end of the round.

Golf Stats: The Numbers That Matter will be your weekly source of insight into the numbers that make a difference in golf, focusing on the PGA Tour. Whether you're looking to wow your buddies in your Saturday foursome, get a little extra help for your fantasy team, or you're just a stats junkie, this blog is for you.

Every week this parcel of the Internet will be your one-stop shop for the unique and significant golf stats that best tell the stories beyond the scores.

And so, without further adieu …

The inaugural edition of this blog consists of three sections.

1.) A few telling numbers from the 2008 golf season
2.) A closer look at the top 10 in the world rankings
3.) A 2009 Mercedes Benz Championship preview

Looking back at 2008
The past golf season was a year of remarkable events, the most notable being Tiger Woods' miraculous one-legged, season-ending playoff victory over Rocco Mediate at the U.S. Open. We'd be remiss if we didn't also mention Padraig Harrington's major victories at the British Open and the PGA Championship plus Annika Sorenstam's announcement that she was stepping away from the game.

So here's a look at some fascinating numbers you may have missed over the long golf season.

• Cream, get on top: Playing in only six PGA Tour events, Woods collected four wins and finished second on the money list with $5,775,000. This comes out to $962,500 per event played. A distant second in the same category was Harrington with $287,570 in 15 events. And that's for a guy who won two majors.

On the other end of the spectrum sits the recently suspended John Daly, who played in 17 events and averaged just $3,295 in winnings.

• Player of the Year: For just the ninth time since 1960, a player won consecutive majors in the same calendar year. The other eight occurrences before Harrington's feat? Woods in 2000, 2002 and 2006, Nick Price in 1994, Tom Watson in 1982, Jack Nicklaus in 1972, Lee Trevino in 1971 and Arnold Palmer in 1960. Not too shabby company.

• Youth is served: Thirteen different players in their 20s won events in 2008. The most notable young guns were 23-year-old Anthony Kim, who moved from 75th in the world rankings up to 11th during the course of the year, and 26-year-old Camilo Villegas, who moved from 56th up to seventh during the same time span.

• Forever young: At 48, Kenny Perry rocketed up the world rankings in 2008, ending the year in 14th place. How far had he fallen? At one point during the 2007 season, he was 173rd.

In 2008, Perry also moved from 79th to fifth on the money list with $4,663,794. Most remarkably, Perry did this without winning a dime in the major championships. He only competed in the PGA Championship, where he withdrew with an eye injury after the first round after shooting a 79.

• The first cut is the deepest: When Woods returns from knee surgery in 2009, he may no longer have the longest active streak for most consecutive cuts made. The current rankings are:

1.) Tiger Woods (29)
2.) Robert Allenby (27)
3.) Phil Mickelson (18)
4.) Anthony Kim (15)
5.) Four players tied (13)

Woods holds the PGA Tour consecutive cut streak record with 142 (1998 Buick to 2005 Byron Nelson). Back then, Allenby was impressed by Woods' accomplishment, saying after the streak ended: "It was always going to come to an end, wasn't it? Obviously it was a hell of a feat. That record will never be broken."

Allenby himself has a strong streak going. After he missed the cut in his first tournament of 2008, the Sony Open in Hawaii, he proceeded to make 27 straight. Robert, that is a hell of a feat as well.

• I don't know why we're saying good-bye: Sorenstam announced she was stepping away from golf in 2008 while she was still very competitive. The Swede finished fourth on the 2008 LPGA Tour money list with $1,735,912 and owns the LPGA career earnings mark with $22,573,192.

Sorenstam has 72 career LPGA Tour wins in 303 events; a winning percentage of 23.8. To put this into perspective, 2008 LPGA Player of the Year Lorena Ochoa has won 24 times in 168 career events -- a 14.3 winning percentage -- while Tiger has won 65 of 236 career events -- earning him victories at a 27.5 percent clip.

• Dominating the field: Looking at only the past three years, Ochoa has won 21 of 72 events -- a 29.2 winning percentage. As for Tiger the past years? He's taken home the first-place check at an astonishing 19 of 37 events -- 51.4 percent of the time!

• Huston has no problems with the 4-pars: John Huston was the only player to play the par-4s under par on the PGA Tour in 2008, finishing 4 under on them in 56 rounds. Second on the list was Justin Leonard at 10 over in 101 rounds, followed by Kenny Perry at 11 over in 97 rounds.

How is this possible? Note the common thread between Huston and Perry: They have one round of competition in the 2008 majors between the two of them. The par 4s in majors continue to be stretched and tipped out, with 500-yard par-4s becoming more and more commonplace. The other factor to note is the small sample size for Huston takes away from the power of this result (only 56 rounds, nearly half the other par-4 leaders).

• Things that make you go hmmm: Can you guess who finished No. 1 in 2008 in the PGA Tour's All-Around ranking statistic? The prize goes to those of you who guessed Pat Perez.

The All-Around ranking is calculated by adding up a player's rank in the following eight categories (Perez's rankings are in parentheses): driving distance (44th), driving accuracy percentage (97th), greens in regulation percentage (43rd), putting average (66th), eagles (6th), birdie average (16th), scoring average (22nd) and sand save percentage (29th).

Perez's total for the eight categories is 323; he is followed by Kim at 393. A statistic calculated in this fashion over so many categories will not necessarily give you the player with the best "all-around" skill set. Rather, the all-around ranking awards the players that prove somewhat consistent across all categories without having any truly awful rankings in any single category. Perez was solid but not spectacular across the board.

U.S. wins Ryder Cup, but Europe surges in the Top 10 of the world rankings
The Tiger-less U.S. Ryder Cup team prevailed for the first time since 1999. However, the European players can take solace in the fact they were part of the biggest shakeup in the world ranking's Top 10 in the past five years. At the end of 2008, half the players in the top 10 were not in the top 10 in 2007. In the five years prior to '08, there was only one occasion where fewer than seven players retained their top 10 status.

What really stands out from the 2007 to 2008 top 10 comparison is the U.S. went from having four players in the top 5 in the world rankings to only having Mickelson and Woods in the Top 10. Though the U.S. came away with the Ryder Cup, it appears the European players are becoming much bigger contenders individually.

To quantify this gain, the U.S. players in the top 10 in 2007 lost a cumulative 545 total points (306 were Tiger's), whereas the European players in the top 10 for 2007 and 2008 year end netted 287 total points added. For Europe, the most significant gains in total world ranking points were made by Garcia with 178 and Robert Karlsson with 124.

When analyzing these results, the first item to mention is that having Tiger gone for the last half of the 2008 season allowed for a much sweeter pot of points. To give an idea of the stranglehold Tiger previously had on the world rankings, you could cut his points in half in both 2006 and 2007 and he still would have been the No. 1-ranked player in the world.

Woods' knee injury opened up many points for the field, especially when you consider that he plays in the majors and other high-point events with great success. May I remind you Tiger has won 51.4 percent of his tournaments played in the past three years.

That said, let's not take too much away from the emergence of Garcia, Villegas and Kim. Sure, their path had less resistance without the world's No. 1 in the mix, but these 20-somethings made huge strides this past year.

Kim just missed out on the top 10, finishing 11th. The U.S. contingent will cite the world ranking points gains made by Kim (plus 159) and Perry (plus 129) as evidence there are players other than the Europeans that are gaining confidence and rank in Tiger's absence.

2009 Mercedes Championship Preview
The 2009 PGA season kicks off Thursday with the Mercedes Benz Championship on the Plantation Course of the Kapalua Resort in Hawaii. Being the first event of 2009 is far from the only distinguishing characteristic of the tournament on the par-73, 7,411-yard venue.

First, the only players eligible to compete are those who won an event in 2008. Currently it appears 33 players will be in the field. Despite this competitive and prestigious field, many consider this one of the year's "most winnable" tournaments. But why?

The obvious first answer is Tiger and Phil won't be there. The next argument is the field is limited significantly, as opposed to a normal-sized event of 144 or 156 golfers. Working on the assumption that all competitors have an equal chance of winning (which we know not to be true), each player is approximately five times more likely to win this week (3.3 percent versus .67 percent).

The odds of victory for the relentless guys like Vijay Singh can be further increased considering there will be eight or nine players who enter the week without having played competitively in weeks. This quartile of the field has been enjoying their time off and will be using this event as a warm-up.

While shaking off the rust in Hawaii, the 2008 champions can relax a bit in knowing the Plantation Course's fairways are the widest they will play all year. The fairway landing areas average 57.6 yards in width, a nearly 90 percent increase over the average tour width of 30.6 yards.

Kapalua seems like an easy place to win, right? Not so fast.

As anyone who has had the fortune of playing in Hawaii will tell you, the grain of the greens is an astonishing and confounding force. In 2008, the Plantation Course ranked the most difficult of all non-major events in the following statistical categories: overall putting average (1.733), putts per round (30.56), putting from 10 to 15 feet (24.44 percent) and putting from more than 25 feet (3.14 percent).

This is no one-year anomaly, since the Plantation Course was also the most difficult in these same categories in 2007, as well as two additional putting categories.

We will have the pleasure of tracking 33 champions from 2008 on a course that played the fifth easiest relative to par of all the 2008 PGA Tour venues. Considering these Numbers That Matter, we can look forward to some excitement and fireworks in Maui.

I hope this installment gets you fired up for the 2009 season. I welcome your comments, suggestions, and corrections for any Golf Stats: The Numbers That Matter at Nathan.J.Easler@espn.com.