Phil Mickelson is Very Good at US Opens

Phil Mickelson has, famously, never won a US Open. Instead, he's finished second five times. But consider, for a moment, what this means: he's really, really good at playing the US Open in few strokes! Five top-2 finishes is more than nearly everyone in the history of the universe can claim. In fact, I've devised a metric that suggests Phil is a better US Open player than several players who won it twice.

It's tough to try and add up cumulative performance in a golf tournament. If you just add together finishes, then a score of 10 could be five second-place finishes, or one 10th-place finish, and there's no good way to handle missed cuts or simply missed tournaments. One could use the career money list, but that gets into tricky inflation problems. Or one could try and create a time-neutral points system similar to a money list, and that's basically the premise of my system. The basic idea is this: if your finish in a tournament can be described with a positive integer n (ignoring ties), you get 1/n points; otherwise, you get 0 points. So Jack Nicklaus, for instance, has a career performance number of 11.048 at the Masters: 1 point each for his 6 wins, half a point each for his 4 runner-up finishes, etc. This is not, of course, a perfect system, but I think it works pretty well. (Incidentally, the next-best finisher at the Masters is Arnold Palmer, in the 6.75 region. Jack was good!)

So Phil Mickelson's US Open Career Performance Number is, by this reckoning, 3.536. And that's without any wins! So far I've computed these numbers for several two-time champions of the tournament, and have found that Billy Casper (3.235), Cary Middlecoff (2.982), Ralph Guldahl (3.334), and, perhaps most surprisingly, Lee Trevino (3.520) do worse than Mickelson. If Phil were to win and finish second (again!) in the next two US Opens, and Tiger Woods miss the cut (which had bloody well better not happen), he'd overtake Tiger, who's at 5.063. It's really amazing, when you think about it, that he hasn't won this thing yet.