THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

I think this is fair. Slow play is the worst; if you’re penalized add it to the hole you’re playing, since that’s the one on whose score you are getting “help” from the slow play. He can still tell his buddies about it. If he has any buddies, that is; slow players don’t deserve friends.

As someone who knows the rules of golf pretty well, I will say that essentially every rule is based in logic, as arcane and minute the scope of the rule may be. I like this little running segment and get a chuckle out of it, but the truth is most rules make sense in the context of the other rules. In this instance, the stroke has to be applied to some hole in particular for official scorekeeping purposes, and infraction just happened to be immediately prior to an ace 1. I have little to no sympathy since slow play is the bane of golf, and now he doesn’t have to buy everyone drinks!

But why not just give him the option to apply it to the last hole, the one where he actually was slow on?

Again, what’s the difference to the Gods of Golf?

Because it’s not as much of a penalty if you get to choose how and when to apply it.  I can just imagine someone sentenced to 10 years in jail asking to have the sentence applied at the end of their life, rather than the point in their life in which they committed the crime?

Wow, no one cares which hole it applies to. They could have chosen any hole at random.  You want to change the rules (or think that the rules makers should have taken this situation into consideration) to allow a player to add it to any hole he wants so that once a century someone can write a 1 down on their score card?  Are you kidding me?

Again, if you don’t play much golf, I don’t think you will often come up with a cogent argument for or against a particular rule…

It’s the same penalty.  Why would they have to say which hole to apply it to?

If you view the purpose of a penalty as only serving to worsen the final score of a player, then sure, it’s the same penalty.  But I view the purpose of a penalty as being a disincentive against some behavior.  And I think it’s pretty clear that a penalty applied to the appropriate hole is a stronger disincentive than a penalty applied to the hole of the penalized player’s choosing.  Otherwise they’d be ambivalent and wouldn’t care what hole you apply it to.

Why would a player care what hole it was applied to?  I am an avid golfer and I play many tournaments.  I would not care what hole the penalty was applied to.  In any case, as far as I know, every penalty is applied to a certain hole.  The idea of giving the player the option of what hole to apply it to, whether the player cares or not, is ridiculous.

"Why would a player care what hole it was applied to?”

Please don’t answer that with, “Just in case he happens to get a hole in one on the next hole after a slow play penalty.” The chances of that happening are astronomically small.

As 7/MGL says, no one ever cares, except in the 1 in 10000 chance it’s right as you are making an ace.

Tango, if you’re interested in salvaging any respect you may have for the rules of golf in this situation, it helps to strip the context out. A guy get’s a penalty called on him while playing a hole of golf (the penalty was called while he was on the par 3. Slow play is clocked. You are warned, then if you are still behind schedule on the second check-in, you are penalized. Straightforward.) What’s more logical:

-Since the stroke must be applied to an individual hole, for official scorekeeping purposes, the penalty gets tacked onto the hole you are playing.

-The player gets to pick which hole the penalty is applied to.

Since players check the leaderboard constantly, he has to at least apply it to the current hole or a previous one. And since everyone has already recorded his previous holes’ scores… process of elimination.

n=1 !

You still haven’t replied why it’s necessary to specify which hole.  I can understand in match(?) play (is that what it’s called?), where you play hole by hole.

Are you saying he got called for slow play AFTER he hit the hole he aced?

And, no score is official until the card is signed and submitted.  The scores you see on the scoreboard is unofficial, right?

It’s necessary to apply the stroke to a specific hole for two main reasons: Official stat keeping (for the player and for the course), and almost all tie breaking scenarios involve hole by hole comparisons at some point in the sequence of events. Granted most major tournaments do not have tie breakers, but some smaller ones do, and when you think about the rules of golf, it applies to far more people than just the folks playing on teh PGA tour.

I don’t know exactly how it happened, but here’s the gist. On the 2nd or 3rd hole an official warned them about their slow play. From that point on, if the official checks in on them again and they are behind whatever pace is deemed to be acceptable, they are penalized. This is a great rule, no question. It just so happens that they clocked them the second time while he was on the hole he had aced, but before the group had completed the hole.

Correct, the scoreboard is unofficial. But players check them constantly, and they’re are accurate 99.99% of the time. The stroke needs to be applied when the infraction occurs to keep the integrity of the competition in a stroke play tournament. It’d be nonsensical to do anything else with it (ie apply it to a previous hole, or add a “+1” next to the players name). Sometimes it’s vitally important what a players sees what another competitor just made on a hole. And that player added two strokes to his score on that par 3, as unfortunate as it is to have an ace wiped out… and anyway, it’s not like it made it any less awesome or valuable to his round! It’s still an ace. It’s just an ace with a penalty.

No one is disputing that the penalty is valid, so we don’t have to discuss whether it’s a great rule or a super great rule.

Again, it’s irrelevant whether he tees off at 2 on the next hole, or he adds 1 to the current hole.  Completely irrelevant (unless they are playing scores by hole). 

If you are saying that it counts as an ace, even after the penalty, then fine.  I can imagine Joe Sakic being warned for slow play, then getting a hole in one, celebrating like a fool, and the marshall then applying a one stroke penalty, negating his 500,000$ shot.

***

And, how can he be cited for slow play AFTER he aced a hole?  Did he celebrate for 5 minutes or something?  That’s like George Brett being picked off first base after getting his 3000th hit (because he was so overwhelmed by the moment)… and then having that hit erased to send him back down to 2999.

"Again, it’s irrelevant whether he tees off at 2 on the next hole, or he adds 1 to the current hole.  Completely irrelevant (unless they are playing scores by hole).”

It is relevant though. If he counts the 1 and starts the next hole at 2, then no one else on the course knows his true score until he is done with the next hole.

“And, how can he be cited for slow play AFTER he aced a hole?  Did he celebrate for 5 minutes or something?  That’s like George Brett being picked off first base after getting his 3000th hit (because he was so overwhelmed by the moment)… and then having that hit erased to send him back down to 2999.”

It was about overall pace of the group (ie they played the last 2 holes 15 minutes too slowly), and it was ruled that he was the cause of it - which it usually is pretty obviously one guy’s fault in these instances. It wasn’t that a particular shot he hit too was taken too slowly (though that can be a penalty as well.) When they were “caught” being slow by the official (clocked for the second time), it happened to be while they were playing that par 3.

Your complaints seem a little misplaced to me (plus some snark?). What exists is the most simple way I can imagine implementing this rule.

- Penalty gets called.
- Apply penalty stroke to score.
- Which score? The hole you are on. (I believe the rule is that you haven’t finished a hole until you (and maybe the group) have walked off the green to the next tee.) And reinforcing this with logic… you know there is a penalty stroke that needs to be applied, so you apply it in the most immediate fashion.

Anything outside of that seems contrived. No?

You seem to be making the “know the true score in real-time” as some incredibly important thing, and a key to the Rules of Golf.  If that were truly the case, then instead of having the score known 99.99% of the time as accurate, it would be 100%.

Anyway, I think you made your case to those predisposed to accept whatever the Golf Gods would say.  To us weekend golfers: no.

Reasons to apply the stroke to the current hole, as the rules state:

- Official Scorekeeping
- Realtime scoring, spirit of competition
- Logical
- Simple

Reasons to apply the stroke in some other contrived way ie - tacking it onto the the end of the round (distrupts realtime scoring, difficult to track statistics), or a previously played hole (illogical):

- So some guy gets to count his hole-in-one

If the most important thing in the world to you is writing down a “1” on your scorecard when you make an ace, then yes, I can see your point.

Reasons you can’t assign your penalty strokes:

-Other players knowing your score.
-Handicaps: the current system here is your best 10 rounds, and depending on your existing handicap, there is a maximum over par per hole you can count (enacted because players were taking suspiciously high scores to end rounds and then winning Net Score championships). Allowing you to pick a hole to apply it to would allow you to manipulate you handicap.
-Match Play
-Stableford Scoring System
-Tiebreakers

Reasons to let you pick:
-So you can claim a particular score on a particular hole.

The finer points of the rules of golf are really only there for competition, in my opinion. If I get a bad lie in the fairway, I take a better one. Turns out that hazard was out of bounds, I sure as hell don’t run back to the tee and hit again. Same for a lost ball, or stakes of the wrong colour. Drop one and play on. Want a mulligan, go ahead. I’ve played with guys who use a tee from everywhere except the green. Lots of people never actually finish a hole. Worrying about the finer points of the golf rules is essentially pointless unless you are a competitive golfer…

I don’t play golf, but I’m pretty sure if a golfer was allowed to add +1 to any round after the match that many times it would be overlooked and not counted.

To me, this sounds more like arguing about whether or not the umpire screw up last year should have still resulted in an official no-hitter. Obviously it was no longer a no-hitter, but it was equally obvious the umpire made the incorrect call. The only logical way to view that game was not as a no-hitter. It seems to me the only logical way to apply the penalty in golf is to apply it to a specific hole. There would undoubtedly be accounting errors if it was applied any other way.

#17—Amen.