Phil's Dominant Week

Okay, the week isn't officially over yet, but the bookmakers at Ladbrokes are giving Phil Mickelson 1/14 odds, i.e. predicting that he'd win the Waste Management Phoenix Open 14 out of 15 times from this position. It's about as close to being over before it's over as a golf tournament can be. That, not surprisingly, is a bit of a testament to how good Phil Mickelson has been playing this week. He's at -24, and holds a six-shot lead over Brandt Snedeker. He's led the tournament wire-to-wire thus far, opening with a 60 that could've easily been a 59, following it up with a 65 that could've been a whole lot better had he not driven the ball into the water on 18, and adding a 64 today to effectively put this thing away. In fact, it's felt like every single day Phil's had one of the best rounds of the entire field. And he has! In fact, it's kind of impressive how well he's been doing compared to the best round anyone else has had.

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.

Volatility At The Top

Seven players, we are told, have a chance to be World Number One after this week's Masters if they win. But on further investigation, I discover that it's not just that: there would be very little possibility for those ahead of any of these seven players to defend their positions with high finishes. The last-ranked player in our group of potential #1's is, ironically, Tiger Woods (though he's accustomed to being the lowest-ranked player who could be #1 next week, usually because he's the only one!). If Tiger wins the Masters, I project that with the 100 ranking points from the win he'd get to 7.953 average points. If Martin Kaymer, current World #1, misses the cut at the Masters, he'll be at just 7.798 average points. To stay ahead of a victorious Tiger, Kaymer would need to get at least 7.6 points from Augusta. In order to do that, he needs to finish in the top-18. Obviously, that's possible, though he's never made the cut at Augusta. But in order for World #2 Lee Westwood to stay ahead of Masters Champion Tiger, he would need approximately 32 points, which requires a finish in the top-3. And World #3 Phil Mickelson would need 60 points to stay ahead of Tiger, and there's only one way to do that: he would have to finish second. (That would be ironic: Tiger wins the Masters, Phil finishes second, and Phil becomes #1.) So, while Kaymer has a fairly plausible scenario to fend off Tiger, essentially no one else does. Also note that Mickelson can get to #1 if he finishes solo second and Kaymer does no better than 18th, while Westwood can take the top spot with a finish inside the top-4 depending on Kaymer's results. Kaymer, for his part, would need the following results to defend against wins by the other six players: vs. Woods, 18th or better; vs. Casey, nothing? Hmm, that's weird, my numbers suggest that Paul Casey doesn't have this opportunity. It's possible that Steve Stricker is actually the 7th, or there is no 7th. Whatever. vs. McDowell, 54th or better; vs. Donald, top-3; vs. Mickelson, solo 2nd, vs. Westwood, no chance at defending. So there's a huge amount of volatility this week. If any of these guys wins, the odds are overwhelming that they'll be #1 six days from today (especially NOT McDowell, who's worse off than Tiger because he's got a larger denominator). Anyway, that's my analysis of how things will play out in the world rankings if one of the top players is in the mix to win the Masters. Should be exciting.