The Golf Club: Mark Broadie, Creator Of Golf Sabermetrics
BOSTON (CBS) - Business professor Mark Broadie joined Hardy on The Golf Club to talk about his new book Every Shot Counts.
With this book, Broadie is trying to do for golf what Bill James did for baseball, and that is finding a numeric way to evaluate the game. Broadie said his approach is very similar to James' sabermetrics, saying, "We're both trying to take the information and data that's out there to try and understand the sport a little better."
Hardy agreed that a statistical analysis makes even more sense in golf than it does in baseball, because there isn't a team factor involved in it.
Broadie said that he has two goals with his book:
1. For fans to be able to understand the game a little better
2. For readers to understand their own, or other players' strengths and weaknesses.
Broadie believes the current statistics golf has tell you what happened on the course, but not why it did. His book looks to explain the why.
Rather than just the traditional Strokes Gained Putting statistic, Broadie has established a way to calculate Strokes Gained Driving, Strokes Gained For Approach Shots, Strokes Gained For Short Game, as well as Strokes Gained Putting. This way, you can look and see how a golfer won by five strokes.
Pretty interesting stuff.
Listen below for the full interview:
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