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- Lou Stagner's Newsletter #144
Weekly Quiz!
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Good luck! 😀
From 120 to 129 yards in the fairway, a scratch player will get down in two shots about 9% of the time. What percent of the time will they get down in four or more shots from that distance in the fairway? |
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How Bad is Being Long of Back Pins?
I caddied this past week at the US Amateur. Unfortunately we didn’t get through to match play but it’s always fun to be at high level events!
After our round at Merion I had an interesting chat with Steve (who subscribes to this newsletter) and his friend Kurt. Thanks for introducing yourself Steve and thank you again for the chat and the question!
Steve and Kurt were wondering about short pins versus long pins.
The question:
“is it better to be short of a front pin than it is to be long to a back pin?”
This touches on the old adage that you are often better off being short of the hole rather than long because a lot of greens tend to be higher in the back and lower in the front. The “uphill” shot when being short will be easier.
Off to the Arccos database we go for a nice deep dive! (DATALOU15 saves 15%).
Here are the shots that were used in this analysis.
The original approach shot started from the fairway or tee and was between 125 and 175 yards to the hole
A front pin = the pin was less than 10 yards from the front edge and at least 20 yards from the back edge
A back pin = the pin was less than 10 yards from the back edge and at least 20 yards from the front edge
To front pins the approach shot had to finish in the rough and be between 5 and 25 yards short of pin high. The ball also needed to be no more than 25 yards from the hole. (this eliminated shots that were 5 yards short of pin high but WAY offline).
To back pins the approach shot had to finish in the rough and be between 5 and 25 yards long of pin high. The ball also needed to be no more than 25 yards from the hole. (this eliminated shots that were 5 yards long of pin high but WAY offline).
I limited situations to where approach shots finished only in the rough so we could be comparing apples to apples as much as possible.
Using the shots from the criteria above, I looked at the average number of shots to get the ball in the hole from where the approach shot ended up. The table below has the results.
As you can see, it’s very close for both situations. All skill levels except scratch are marginally better when they go long of a back pin. This does NOT mean I want you intentionally blasting it over back pins!
Are you surprised at the numbers above?
Obviously golf holes, greens, green surrounds, etc. are all very different. This was a generalized look across all situations (HUGE sample size) to see if anything bubbled to the top. Different situations will change these numbers a bit.
In the future I am going to single out a several holes where Arccos has many many thousands of rounds played and isolate to specific situations to see what the data looks like. I would have liked to do that for this issue but it has been a crazy busy week!
If you have any questions about Merion and the US Am, or anything else you would like me to cover in a future issue, please feel free to reach out!
Email me or submit ideas here.
Finally...
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Have a great week!
