ABSTRACT
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In principle, the scientific analysis of golf should be similar to baseball. As both games progress, competitors move from one discrete state to the next. But whereas modeling and measurement are well developed in baseball, that effort is just in its infancy in golf. It is only recently that golf has begun to record the data in a way that enables some useful modeling and analysis. The PGA Tour’s pioneering ShotLinkTM system∗ records data for each shot a PGA Tour player takes.† Basically,
of Methods and
these systems record two critical items of information for each shot:
1. The location of the shot 2. The condition of the current location (tee, fairway, rough, recovery, sand, green)
The shot and hole locations allow the distance to the hole to be measured for each shot. At this writing, the PGA Tour’s ShotLink system has recorded data on more than 15 million shots.
