THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

I think I’m with you on this one.  Given the game situation, punctiliousness in play is in order.  It might well have been nerves that caused him to drop his ball onto the marker.  And it’s not like this is an odd local rule or something.  And it’s also not like there’s some other, lesser penalty that he could incur. 

In a way, it’s a lot like Boise State’s excellent kicker missing two chip shots and costing the school millions of dollars.  That was nerves.  To win a championship, you have to bring everything together at once, even if your team is otherwise superior to the other.  Neither Poulter nor Boise State could do it on the field of play when it counted.  A shame, but no one is going to change either set of rules because of it.  The football example wouldn’t lead anyone to change the rules.  I’d argue the same here in golf.  The reason you don’t hear about this penalty a lot is that no one commits it.

Breadbaker (#1) is right.  The nature of golf is such that a one-stroke penalty is the minimum that you can assess.

Poulter dropped his ball on the maker causing it to flip over and land in a different spot.  Forty feet from the cup or not, I think there’s got to be a penalty for that.  There are a lot of definitive rules in golf - you can’t ground your club in a bunker AT ALL, you can’t touch the ball as you address it AT ALL.  The nice thing about these rules is that it takes human judgement out of it.  If the rule said that you could accidentally move your marker just a little bit but not so much as to probably improve your chance of making the putt, then you’d have to have referees all over the place making value judgments.

Some of those definitive rules are silly because whether you break those rules are not, you are still left in the exact same position as you were in.

Grounding your ball in a bunker, away from the ball, and so, having no effect on the ball is a zero-tolerance policy created to make life easier for a non-referee situation (to decide whether the grounding in the bunker caused the ball to move, or to give yourself a better shot at the ball).  It’s a throw the baby with the bathwater rule: you don’t want to apply a judgement call, so just treat every bunker ground as if it did improve the lie.

With the flipping of the marker, that is not the same thing.  It actually did change the position of the ball, however small and insignificant.  So, there’s really no reason to get upset at this rule, because, referee or no referee, zero-tolerance policy or no, the call would have been made the same.

Sam: I moved your comment to the appropriate thread.  Off-topic is not really tolerated by me.  -2 strokes for you.

How about pushing the ball back a foot or a club length?

Sky: ah, now there’s a sensible solution!  Excellent point.

Of course, the golfinistas are going to say that a player might intentionally do that if say his ball is on nonflat ground, and so, pushing the ball back 3 feet might make it advantageous for him.

That said, I’d compare it to billiards: we’ve all done it, accidentally tapped the ball when addressing the ball.  It’s extremely sloppy to do it, and the player and his opponent will both accept as if you played the ball, regardless of intent.  (Like a checked swing almost… or flubbing on a penalty shot, where the puck gets away from you.) All that is sloppy play where the ball actually moved.

I admire Sky’s initiative here.  And I think even the best solution would still be to treat the moving-marker scenario as if you actually played the ball.

"Grounding your ball in a bunker, away from the ball, and so, having no effect on the ball ...”

Not to defend the rule, but the purpose isn’t to prevent moving the ball to give yourself a better lie, but rather to prevent “testing” the condition of the sand.  The results of a shot out of a bunker are significantly affected by the depth of the sand, its moisture content, and how densely it is packed.  The rules suppose that your are required to guess those conditions as part of the penalty for having hit into the bunker.

dlf: yeah, I heard that one already.  They have a practice round the day before, so, they’re going to know each bunker already.  And they are walking in the sand, so they’re going to feel it with their shoes too.  I’m not buying that argument at all. Nice try though.

I think your billiard example argues in favor of the marker rule.  The result in billiards is you have taken your turn.  The result in golf is that you’ve taken your stroke.  That’s what a one stroke penalty effectively does.

Yes, that’s why I introduced the billiard example!  I was making the case for the golf rule as being sound.

#7/#8m, that is EXACTLY the reason for the rule, and for a professional golfer that IS an advantage (albeit, not a huge one).  If the conditions of the course are different than during your practice round, such as rain, no rain, you would LOVE to test the sand in a bunker with your club (again, if you are a professional or even a very good amateur).

Again, you kind of have to be an avid golfer and follow the PGA in order to have a cogent opinion on some of these rules. It is not like in baseball where watching a lot of games is enough (although even in baseball, if you never played it, you also might not be able to have a cogent opinion on some of the rules).

Virtually all of the rules in golf are for a good reason. Like any rule, and in all sports, there are going to be infractions that don’t actually give you an advantage, but you have to enforce them in order to, as Tango said, take away the human judgment at the borders (where it is NOT clear if the action gives you an advantage). 

And, like it or not (and I have no problem with it), rules are very much a part of the game in golf, and they are typically enforced to the letter and not to the spirit.  PGA players have no problem with that, and most avid golfers understand that.

Craig Stadler puts a towel under his knees so his pants don’t get dirty or wet.  He gets penalized for “building a stance.” Not only that, but he gets disqualified for not incurring the penalty on himself and signing an incorrect (better than it was) scorecard!

Robert Di Vicenzo in the 68 Masters gets a 3 on on Augusta’s 17th hole, but accidentally writes down a 4.  Everyone knows he got a 3, but he has to take the 4!

In the 2001 Open, someone accidentally put their driver in Ian Woosnan’s golf bag. Woosnan incurred a 2-stroke penalty (for too many clubs in bag)!

There are lots more!

I mentioned this the other month: what if the MLB rule was that the manager has to “sign the scorecard” as to how many runs they scored?  And if he doesn’t do it before he enters the clubhouse, it’s a forfeit?  And everyone knows the rule, and everyone accepts the rule, and everyone is used to the rule.

And when Lou Piniella wins the world series for the Cubs, he is whisked away by his players, and as he pleads for his players to not drag him to the clubhouse, it’s too late.  The Cubs lose the world series.

Are we all ok with that?

Well, we’d have to, because we’d have been indoctrinated with that rule since we were 8 years old. 

Now, try explaining that rule to lukewarm fans.

It’s just the nature of the game, baby!  The nature of the game.

Golf is a gentleman’s game whose history is about integrity and decorum.  As I said, strict enforcement and self-enforcement of the rules are an inherent part of the game (there are of course practical reasons for that, not the least of which are that there are no “official” referees, and they can’t watch everyone play, in the old days there was no TV or even large crowds, etc.).

People that are really into golf understand and accept that, even young ones (they teach young golfers about decorum and rules first and foremost - at least they should).  If you are a casual fan and you don’t understand, accept or like it, that’s too bad. It is like if I watch a soccer or rugby game, of which I know little about, I am sure that some of the rules, customs, and traditions would seem bizarre and unfair to me. Too bad.  I also recognize that I have no credible opinion on them, because, as you have said (I think), what makes a rule or custom appropriate in a sport is what the participants, and to some extent the majority of the fans, will accept. In golf, if the golfers want to change a rule, they can take it up with the rules committee…

In response to my World Series scenario, MGL said:

It’s just the nature of the game, baby!  The nature of the game.

Right, exactly.  It’s a learned behaviour, a capricious, arbitrary decision to have the team’s manager sign the scorecard before declaring victory, be it a regular season game or the World Series, even though you have hundreds of millions of people verifying the accounting anyway.  It’s an obligatory IRS audit, where failing an audit means losing everything you earned that day.

There’s nothing inherently logical about it with respect to the competition itself.  It’s an accounting requirement, not a competition requirement.

And yes, that’s the “nature” of that game.  Everyone that participates follows that rule, just like we all follow crazy laws on the books, no matter how inconsequential they in effect actually are, because they make some sort of sense to some one at some point in time.

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I also remember a tourament where Tiger Woods had a ball lie in front of a big rock, and apparently the rule is that if its a moveable object, then you are allowed to move it.  Of course, it was only moveable if you had 4 spectators move it for Tiger Woods.  And yet that makes more sense than a guy leaning down on his towel.

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Jack Nicklaus testifying against a disabled person from using an electric cart because, well, the nature of the game is that you have to be able to walk on your own.

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A team being upset at NOT being called for their own late game fouls.

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Icing the kicker.

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Replacing the goalie multiple times in the same game as a way to get a timeout.

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Throwing over to first base with no disincentive whatsoever (other than the booing crowd).

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Yes, these are all nature of the game arguments.  That doesn’t mean they can’t be silly.