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At the Valspar Championship in 2019, Dustin Johnson had just finished his pre-tournament news conference when a media member asked him if he could guess each of his Strokes Gained season rankings without looking at the writer’s computer.
Johnson, who wouldn’t be anyone’s first pick as a golf data nerd, already knew where he stood. In the span of no more than a minute, he spit out a handful of numbers that nearly matched his rankings on PGATour.com perfectly, taking particular pride in his putting marks being within the top 25 players at the time.
He isn’t alone in understanding the value of Strokes Gained. The term has become ubiquitous in the golf lexicon, the primary tool for evaluating the best players in the world. Where proximity to the hole, scrambling percentages and greens in regulation once ruled, strokes gained now dominates every relevant category of statistic in the game.
Players gear their offseason evaluations around it. Swing coaches can get fired because of what it exposes.
“I’m a big believer in this stat and using objective data to improve your game and using statistics to influence your practice,” Rory McIlroy said during a recent media session. “Strokes Gained is the best stat, by far, that has come into our game for the last … well, ever, really.”
And yet, despite its overwhelming importance and popularity, Strokes Gained remains an elusive concept for even knowledgeable fans of the game. Sure, when Collin Morikawa ranks first in Strokes Gained: Putting at the PGA Championship, it’s obvious he’s enjoyed a phenomenal putting week compared to everyone else – but Morikawa gaining exactly 8.076 strokes on the greens for the tournament isn’t intuitive and it doesn’t translate easily in conversation.
It can be argued that every shot in golf is not created equal, that it’s a different experience for each player in each moment. Tracing parts of the game down to decimal points is counterintuitive for the there-are-no-pictures-on-the-scorecard type of mentality many have when it comes to numbers and golf.
There is a good reason for it, though, and the explanation isn’t nearly as complicated as it sounds.
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