THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Haven’t read the paper, but my first reaction is ... when you’re playing with Tiger on Sunday and he’s leading, you must be having almost as good a tournament.  When you’re playing with Tiger on Sunday and he’s not leading, you’re not having as good a tournament.

So maybe what’s being measured is just whether you’re on your game this week?

I hate to speculate not having read the paper, and they probably corrected for this and other things ...

I would hope that the researchers would have corrected for that, Phil.  Then again, with the history we see of academicians doing research on sports…

We find that some luck is required to win PGA Tour events, even for the most highly skilled players.

Imagine that!

Here is the full abstract from Tango’s link above.  There is no mention of Tiger in the abstract.  Tango, are you sure this is the paper that Marchman is referring to?

In this study, we implement a random-effects model that estimates cubic spline-based time-dependent skill functions for 253 active PGA Tour golfers over the 1998–2001 period. Our model controls for the first-order autocorrelation of residual 18-hole scores and adjusts for round–course and player–course random effects. Using the model, we are able to estimate time-varying measures of skill and luck for each player in the sample. Estimates of spline-based player-specific skill functions provide strong evidence that the skill levels of PGA Tour players change through time. Using the model, we are able to rank golfers at the end of 2001 on the basis of their estimated mean skill levels and identify the players who experienced the most improvement and deterioration in their skill levels over the 1998–2001 period. We find that some luck is required to win PGA Tour events, even for the most highly skilled players. Player–course interactions contribute very little to variability in golfer performance, but the particular course rotations to which players are assigned can have a significant effect on the outcomes of the few tournaments played on more than one course. We also find evidence that a small number of PGA Tour participants experience statistically significant streaky play.