The relativity of par

[Jeff_Brauer]

JK, not sure your logic in that pithy statement really follows.....


Statistically, even Phil M needs to get the chip to within 8 feet JUST to have a 50-50% chance of saving par.

[John Kavanaugh]

I'm talking about being the best putter who ever lived every hour and every second of every day. Putts per round would still be dependent on how close the ball is hit to the hole. I supposed van de Velds made that putt on 18 so it really is just a stupid fantasy.

[Ira Fishman]

Right...but we don't need to add 400 yards to the course because you chip in once in a while.

We don't even have to do it when a kid hits it 330 on his way to 75.

I think the exact opposite. If par was significantly lowered, maybe the "need" to mess with courses is reduced.

Besides, back in the day, level 4s was a good score. Today, level 4s is rarely a good score from the best 50 players in the world...which really should be the standard because these are the true experts. The idea of par as 70 or 71, for a score an expert player can shoot when he executes properly is laughable.

Ciao

I do not think Pros are relevant for architecture and probably are counterproductive. But the facts do not fully support your conclusions. Golf Digest did a calculation for 2018-19 that a Pro who played in every tournament except the Majors and WGCs and averaged 1 under par would have ranked 86th in FedEx. Throw in those events, and he would have ranked 26. Even more dramatic for -1.5 and -2. The pros are indeed terrific players but even the best of the best do not consistently shoot lights out. As noted above, the average score for a year has not been below 71.


Ira

[Sean_A]

Right...but we don't need to add 400 yards to the course because you chip in once in a while.

We don't even have to do it when a kid hits it 330 on his way to 75.

I think the exact opposite. If par was significantly lowered, maybe the "need" to mess with courses is reduced.

Besides, back in the day, level 4s was a good score. Today, level 4s is rarely a good score from the best 50 players in the world...which really should be the standard because these are the true experts. The idea of par as 70 or 71, for a score an expert player can shoot when he executes properly is laughable.

Ciao

I do not think Pros are relevant for architecture and probably are counterproductive. But the facts do not fully support your conclusions. Golf Digest did a calculation for 2018-19 that a Pro who played in every tournament except the Majors and WGCs and averaged 1 under par would have ranked 86th in FedEx. Throw in those events, and he would have ranked 26. Even more dramatic for -1.5 and -2. The pros are indeed terrific players but even the best of the best do not consistently shoot lights out. As noted above, the average score for a year has not been below 71.

Ira

Forget individual averages. Par should be about winning scores because that reflects expert play when they are on song. That's how it was originally, but over time that element has been lost. I find it incredible that folks can argue 71 is par for tour pros when we see weekly scores miles under 71. I simply don't buy that. Meanwhile, courses are altered to maintain the crazy illusion that par is 71.

Ciao

[Mark Pearce]

Right...but we don't need to add 400 yards to the course because you chip in once in a while.

We don't even have to do it when a kid hits it 330 on his way to 75.

I think the exact opposite. If par was significantly lowered, maybe the "need" to mess with courses is reduced.

Besides, back in the day, level 4s was a good score. Today, level 4s is rarely a good score from the best 50 players in the world...which really should be the standard because these are the true experts. The idea of par as 70 or 71, for a score an expert player can shoot when he executes properly is laughable.

Ciao

I do not think Pros are relevant for architecture and probably are counterproductive. But the facts do not fully support your conclusions. Golf Digest did a calculation for 2018-19 that a Pro who played in every tournament except the Majors and WGCs and averaged 1 under par would have ranked 86th in FedEx. Throw in those events, and he would have ranked 26. Even more dramatic for -1.5 and -2. The pros are indeed terrific players but even the best of the best do not consistently shoot lights out. As noted above, the average score for a year has not been below 71.

Ira

Par should be about winning scores because that reflects expert play when they are on song. That's how it was originally, but over time that element has been lost.

When has par ever been about the best score of the very best players in the world?  This thread also ignores the fact that par is a score for a hole.  And it needs to be an integer.  How many par 3s should actually be par 2s?  Are there really many par 4s that should really, even for the top pros, be par 3s?  How many par 5s, in tournament play on the major tours, actually average below 4.5?  For a bunch of people who claim not to care about par, or to know that it's just a number, there's a lot of people trying to reinvent the wheel here.

[Sean_A]

Par has always been about expert play. Hence the reason why par and bogey score existed at the same time.

Ciao

[Mark Pearce]

Par has always been about expert play. Hence the reason why par and bogey score existed at the same time.

Ciao

But expert play didn't then and doesn't now mean the very best of the very best.  And you haven't addressed the integer score by hole point.  What you and David are doing is talking about the modern concept of a course rating and ignoring handicaps.

[Sean_A]

Par has always been about expert play. Hence the reason why par and bogey score existed at the same time.

Ciao

But expert play didn't then and doesn't now mean the very best of the very best.  And you haven't addressed the integer score by hole point.  What you and David are doing is talking about the modern concept of a course rating and ignoring handicaps.

I don't know how else explain it. My argument has nothing to do with handicap golf and only the very best players in the world.  IMO, par should be based on what happens in tournaments when the best players turn up.  Who cares about how a scratch player plays when it comes time to set the expert score...and the expert score should be based on the best players when they are playing well...in other words...playing to their expectations. 


Ciao

[Thomas Dai]

A debate for across a socially distanced table on the patio at Kington in Sept?
atb

[Peter Flory]

I don't know how else explain it. My argument has nothing to do with handicap golf and only the very best players in the world.  IMO, par should be based on what happens in tournaments when the best players turn up.  Who cares about how a scratch player plays when it comes time to set the expert score...and the expert score should be based on the best players when they are playing well...in other words...playing to their expectations. 

If we want par to be an accurate reflection of how the pros are going to play the holes, then why not just use the actual historic scoring averages?  e.g. Hole #1: par 4.1378. 

If we want to round to the nearest integer, then they got it exactly right at Harding Park since the field scoring average on every single hole rounded to what the pars were on each hole.  That means that for each hole, par would have been the best predictor for what a contestant was going to make on the remaining holes.  For leaderboard status and viewer expectations, that seems like the perfect outcome. 

[Kalen Braley]

The problem with that Peter:

5 guys can play a par 5:
4 of them make birdie 4
1 makes double bogey 7

Hole Average is 4.6 which rounds to 5, but does that really tell the story?

[Peter Flory]

The problem with that Peter:

5 guys can play a par 5:
4 of them make birdie 4
1 makes double bogey 7

Hole Average is 4.6 which rounds to 5, but does that really tell the story?

It does if you're trying to predict where an average player in the field stands with say 7 holes to play.  After all, if another player made a double, then there is some odds that he will as well. 

Otherwise, a fix would be to use the median score for each hole.  I bet that the median and the average- rounded to the nearest integer are going to be exactly the same at Harding.  If not, then maybe 1 hole like the 16th toggles from an easy 4 to a hard 3.  But the difference would be really insubstantial from a viewership standpoint.   

----
I recently played in the WI state am as an example of how meaningless par is.  They modified par from 72 to 70 for the tournament by labeling 2 of the par 5, par 4s.  So, they made the course a par 70.  The field average for the 1st round was 77.09.  The average handicap for the field was probably around 0.0.  On the 2 par 5s that they changed to par 4s, the field average was 4.5 (470 yards) and 4.26 (476 yards).  But the 9th hole was 325 yards and averaged 4.69 due to a tucked pin.  If this would have been a televised event with a leaderboard, it's not like you'd want them to call the 9th hole a par 5.  Still, in this event, there was only one hole where the median score was not par.  That was the 2nd hole which had slightly more bogeys than pars and a 4.59 average overall. 


Good players and pros average below 2 putts per GIR.  So the assumption of 2 putts in the concept of par is a rounded figure.  On the other hand, par assumes the the expert player will reach the green in regulation, which only actually happens about 70% of the time (and they don't always get up and down and can suffer penalty strokes, etc).  Luckily, the overestimate and the underestimate tend to cancel each other. 

[JESII]

It's funny...I've always argued that the presence of par does in fact matter as a means of imparting expectations on the player. Plenty of our navel gazers here pretend to be above that sort of trickery but most can admit how brittle they are...


Now Sean Arble is suggesting par is the best score the best players could expect to make on a hole.


(I know...he's also probably able to ignore the actual number itself...)


Did Sunningdale suddenly become a Par 66 after Bobby Jones shot that score?


Oakmont a Par 63?


The convention of par is as simple as, two strokes to get on the green = par 4. Three strokes = par 5...It is not about total score, or even hole by hole score because they allocate 2 putts for every single green.


Could/should par be reduced when a 500 yard hole is easily reachable? If it means they won't go into neighboring property to make it 560, hell yes...because there just are not many people for which a 560 yard hole could ever be more interesting than a 500 yard hole if all else stays the same.


Think about the poise Colin Morikawa played with Sunday afternoon. He had committed to not hitting driver on 16 before the week began. If it were a 295 yard par 3 do you think it's possible he would have that game plan? No shot. That just doesn't happen. Because it was a par 4, he felt he could play it with extreme caution...but once he was in the heat of the tournament and decided someone had to win the event (as opposed to someone losing it), he changed his game plan to one he saw as too risky just a couple days prior...probably even that morning.

[Peter Flory]

Just think if they called 16 a par 1.  Players would have been whipping out their putters. 

[Mark Pearce]

I bet that the median and the average- rounded to the nearest integer are going to be exactly the same at Harding.

I go further.  I bet that on pretty much every hole on every Major Championship venue in the last 20 years the mean, modal and median score for the field has been par.  There may be a very, very few par 5s where the mean and modal; average has dropped below 4.5 and just possibly a par 4 where they have crept above 4.5 but those will be extreme outliers. 

[Peter Flory]

If we take Augusta for example-

Every par 5 has a historical average under par and every par 3 has an average over par.  When you combined them, the par 3s and 5s in the history of the Masters averages out to 4.00625 per hole.  i.e. the par 3s are as hard relative to par as the par 5s are easy relative to par. 

In last year's tournament, the field averaged 72.8735 in rd 1, 71.9769 in rd 2, 70.7695 in rd 3, and 71.4616 in rd 4 for an overall average of 71.8649.  Par 72 seems appropriate for the course, even though some player may be able to hit #13 with a Driver + SW. 

[David_Tepper]

"The elite guys we watch on TV etc are good, incredibly good, and their skills and gross scores are amazing, but they ain’t as good as their scores in relation to realistic ‘par’ suggest."     
I've got a feeling that the elite guys might very well be better in relation to par than their scores suggest.

[JLahrman]

Just think if they called 16 a par 1.  Players would have been whipping out their putters.

LOL +1, really no need to read the rest of this thread.

[Jeff Schley]

In reality, this is done with the handicap system, no?  If the pros had handicaps, they would undoubtedly be plus players, maybe up to plus 5.

I totally agree Jeff. We have the course ratings and we can calculate their handicaps. Just plug them in together to see what their course handicap is for a course. Now we know that (at least it was until this worldwide handicap system) you were supposed to shoot your handicap around 20% of the time as it is your potential. Of course playing The Ocean Course at Kiawah Island is much tougher than the TPC at Summerlin and would be reflected.

You have this very mature system of course rating which you have to have in order to generate how good the PGA Pros are in relation to the scratch player. So those that say the course rating derived from the scratch player is meaningless, well to utilize the system that can already tell us how good PGA Tour pros scores are in relation to par is needed.

If you want to add another level above scratch and call it professional rating that is entirely different story, but we need the course rating to get the PGA Tour pros handicap index which can then be applied to a particular course to get their course handicap.

Here is a guy who computed PGA Tour pros handicap index from 2016-2020 and I appreciate this as it shows consistency of who is the best most often. https://golf.com/instruction/pro-golfer-handicap-index-score/
BTW who the heck is Denny McCarthy???

[Sean_A]

I don't know how else explain it. My argument has nothing to do with handicap golf and only the very best players in the world.  IMO, par should be based on what happens in tournaments when the best players turn up.  Who cares about how a scratch player plays when it comes time to set the expert score...and the expert score should be based on the best players when they are playing well...in other words...playing to their expectations. 

If we want par to be an accurate reflection of how the pros are going to play the holes, then why not just use the actual historic scoring averages?  e.g. Hole #1: par 4.1378. 

If we want to round to the nearest integer, then they got it exactly right at Harding Park since the field scoring average on every single hole rounded to what the pars were on each hole.  That means that for each hole, par would have been the best predictor for what a contestant was going to make on the remaining holes.  For leaderboard status and viewer expectations, that seems like the perfect outcome.

Scoring average is not nearly the same thing as the best players playing to their expectations. Now, maybe if you want to take the scoring average of the top 50 that is more likely the real par of a course. That par would be far more reflective of what experts should score over 18 holes rather than going by the terribly outdated method of individual hole par based on yardage. How can par be the same as 50 years ago when guys hit their drives 75 yards further today?

Again, handicapping has nothing to do with the subject.

Ciao

[Ira Fishman]

50 is a ridiculously low number to define expert in a sport that has millions of players. But let's go one better: the average winning score regardless of the player. In other words, the best player each week regardless of whether the winner was top 10, 25, 50, 100, or 250 for the whole year. The average for the winner of every event: 16 Under. Once again, I think Par is not relevant for architecture and that certainly the Pro game should not dictate architecture, but the facts are the facts about Par.


Ira

[JESII]

Yes, but how about 50th place if we’re using that number as expert?


How about 25th place if we assume half the top players are playing the US Tour?


Point is well made...prepare our courses for the people that play them!

[Peter Pallotta]

Even navel gazers have to look up once in a while, to watch golf on tv. And then they discover that 'par' is real. If a pro golfer is not unhappy walking off with a par, par is right where it should be.

[Sean_A]

Well, it's obvious this crew is sold on a par number they dream to achieve. Drop it 3 to 5 shots and even in your dreams that can't be achieved. Ah well, let's add 500 more yards to courses to make 72 a realistic par. It makes me think these hickory blokes are spot on by opting all together.

Ciao

[Peter Flory]

Yes, but how about 50th place if we’re using that number as expert?


How about 25th place if we assume half the top players are playing the US Tour?


Point is well made...prepare our courses for the people that play them!

If we think that the top 50 in a sport are the experts, then that means that about 95% of MLB players are not experts.