December 5, 2024 • 51 mins
Shane and Marty welcome Chris Broadie, PING Fitting Science Manager, to the podcast to discuss the progression of statistics in sports over the years, the vital role data science plays in the research and development process, future club trends in professional golf, and making pro-level fitting tools available to everyday golfers.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
The guys from Ping. They've kind of showed me how
much the equipment matters.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
I just love that I can hit any shot I
kind of want.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
We're gonna be able to tell some fun stories about
what goes on here to help golfers play better golf.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, everybody, welcome back to the Pink Proven Grounds Podcast.
I'm Shane Bacon, joined us always by Marty Jerts and Marty.
We are diving deep with a man that I know
you work closely with this week.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
Yeah, we got Chris Brody here. Brody, as he goes
by amongst our engineering group and our R and D group,
has a background in mathematics and is the sun of
one very famous statistician in the golf industry. So Brody,
welcome to the pod man.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
Thanks for having me, Marian.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
Shane, Chris, what's like dinner talk like with Pops when
you guys are just discussing golf? Can you have normal
golf conversations or does it always lend down some avenue
of analytics and like what's going on?
Speaker 3 (00:54):
Yeah? I feel like it gets pretty deep. There's been
a lot of recent work he's done on world golf rankings,
college golf rankings. So he's he's trying to figure it
out and hopefully not get too much abuse from from
PJ Tour pros. So it's it's it's fun to hear
what's going on in his in his world of golf rankings.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
Brody before your dad got into the what he's kind
of working on now, which is the world world golf rankings,
the college side of things. Obviously, he he, you know,
wrote the book Every Shot Counts, a kind of you know,
golf's version of Moneyball is is I think the best
analogy therefore, tell us about your kind of childhood and
in some early days of you know, some of the
(01:37):
work and background he was doing in the golf space.
How did how did he get interested or involved in golf?
And how did you you know, you and your brother,
your family members there contribute to that.
Speaker 3 (01:48):
Yeah, I know, it's been it's been very fun to
see the progression of early days of interest to writing
a book getting adopted by PJ Tour. I think interestingly,
for me, there's always been like golf and math floating
around in the background. But for me, it start a
lot with baseball. I remember playing Little League as like
(02:08):
a seven eight year old and probably classically. My dad
would start to record, not just like your typical like
walk singles, but you record like where the ball was
hit to what each player on the team was doing.
So he started asking me, okay, like if you were
to manage this team, like what would you do? How
would you set the lineup for our little league baseball team?
(02:31):
And he's like, one of the first questions like, okay,
how many how many different combinations of lineups are there?
And it's okay, So the first batter you can put
there's nine different people who can choose from second bat
is eight different people, and so you'd be okay. So
the number of combinations you can think through is nine
times eight times seven times six. And I was like this,
this is kind of this kind of getting into like
what the dinner dinner time my seven year old dinner
(02:52):
time conversation.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
You're like, I just want to play baseball, man, you're
talking about.
Speaker 3 (02:56):
I loved it. It was like, okay, I think you might
have set up like a custom simulation for me of
like all right, we can put this player here, see
a expected runs there are? And he was like, quickly,
very quickly, you learn that, like you want to have
your best player up first. It's like at the most
possible at bats. And that was like very early like Moneyball,
like same same conclusion. You want to have your highest
on base sentage hitter going off first. Similarly, like we
(03:20):
looked at like where the hits were in the field,
and like, no little leaguer can keep up with a fastball,
so they all hit it to the right side. So
you put your best defensive guy at second base. Interesting,
so the Nuggets were rolling in pretty quick. Another one
we're going we're going probably too deep into baseball. But
another one was he asked me, like, what what percent
(03:40):
of time do you need to successfully steal second in
order to make it worth it? So guy on first,
no Out's like, when should you give the guy green
light to steal? And I guess my first like initial
thought is, okay, well what's the average success rate? Like
if you can get over seven percent, then go ahead,
And he's like no, no, there's like there's a better
way of think through it, and so we end up
(04:03):
breaking it down. It's okay, with a man on first,
no outs, your expected runs is maybe point eight, but
if you get that guy a second, it jumps up
to one point zero. Now a single might score him,
but then if he gets out, now you have nobody
on and one out and you're down to like point
two runs. And so say, okay, you just gotta look
at the trade off of going point eight to one
(04:23):
point zero or point eight down to point two, and
to make it worthwhile steal you've got to have an
over seventy five percent success rate. And it's like, oh,
that's that's that's the pretty unid insight. And you can
do that for what happens if this guy in first
two outs and they can do the math again, it's like, okay,
if it's zero point two with two outs and guy
on first, make it cessful and a guy guy in
scorem position, you have too point four. But then if
(04:46):
you if you're unsuccessful, the aning's over and down to zero.
But interesting thing there is, if it's point two verse
point four, all you need is a figure sent success
rate to make it worthwhile. And so it's like, okay,
the incentive then is to send a lot of guys
to try to steal second with two outs, think on first.
So a lot of things end up like correlating well
with golf, Like you don't want to just look at
(05:07):
raw stolen base percentage, Like the metric that matters for
baseball is run scored.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (05:12):
I think that translated over pretty quickly towards golf, Like
you don't really want to care about what your farely
hit percentage is, what your green hit percentage is. What
really matters at the end of the day is how
many shots that take you to get into the hole.
And so you can hit a good drive that doesn't
hit the fair way, but if it's three hundred and
thirty yards down there, you might be in a pretty
good spot.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
Marty. It's interesting, you know, as Chris talks about this,
I think about in my life and we're similar raised
to Marty, but in my life, like the real switch
for analytics and golf to me personally, was the switch
from how we play par fives. Yes, and I feel
like it was probably fifteen twenty years ago, Matt. Maybe
now was twenty five years ago, where the idea was
layup to enough you can't get there into lay up
(05:51):
to a number you're comfortable with. And you know, for
me it was always ninety five to one hundred yards.
I've lay up to that number or tried to and
that gave you the best chance of making birdie. And
then there was a flip I feel like in the
early two thousands where numbers and data started to tell
us no, no, no, no, no, send it as far up as
you can ye with both both golf shots, because it's
obviously the easiest place to get up and down make birdie.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
Yeah, when when Brody was talking about the baseball in
his work his dad was doing on the baseball side,
my brain was on, okay, instead of should I steal second?
Should I go for the par five and two? Yeah?
That was exactly Yeah, that was exactly where my head
was at. So yeah, that's it's super cool Brody to
hear those those early days of like your dad thinking
(06:30):
about the probabilities. I mean, one of the other questions
I always thought of Shane when I was in school
for the listeners out there is is Brodie's background is
in mathematics. His degrees in math, and I'm always like,
what does a math major even do? So I think
Brodie's a real life example here, Chris, tell us a
(06:50):
little bit why you went that direction and some of
the work you do, you know, like day to day,
like what does a math major do in the working world.
Speaker 3 (06:59):
Yeah, definitely didn't have much of a clue what I
was gonna do. When I was in college. I was like,
I know, I've always liked math. I've always enjoyed having
these how can I apply data to different problems? And
it was more it was more just like, Okay, I
think if I do a math major, I'm gonna have
some open something's gonna work out, like it might be consulting,
(07:21):
it might be econ, but I'll keep my options open.
And I definitely gravitated towards like applied math problems, probably
stunning from when I was seven years old, and so
it worked out pretty well with I think at the
end of my college career, we're doing a lot of
theoreical math. I was like, this is not quite clicking
(07:41):
for me. I was very lucky to get to paying
and they're like, oh, we got a whole lot of
data and a whole lot of problems we want you
to look at. And it was really fun, just like
dive into a world of golf and math and continue
with a lot of my growing up interests.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
Chris, can you give us an example of something once
you came to Paying because your job at Paying fitting
science manager, what like giving us an example of something
somebody might come to you with a problem to find
a solution, like anything that's popped up throughout your career pain.
Speaker 3 (08:12):
Yeah, I mean there's been a lot of really fun
different ones. One of the more fun ones was Travis Milman,
one of our design engineers, was working on our G
four to thirty Farawood line and he's like, hey, we
have ten grams of discretionary mass. It's just kind of
the gold currency for designers. And he was like, should
(08:36):
we just keep on pushing MI we can probably get
like a five to ten percent boost this Ferrywood or
I can move around the mass, I can try to
drop the CG location. And we kind of had a
hunch that maybe, like if we canet a little bit
higher launched, lower spin out of our out of our farrewoods,
like it could be a pretty nice gain in terms
of strokes gain in terms of performance. But it's a
(09:00):
hard one from a design side, like he's not really
sure how to tell that story, like what exactly do
you gain from higher launch and lower spin? And so
I was able to use some of my simulation background,
use our vocal data where we know help people deliver
fairy woods, and basically run a virtual test that Okay,
if we use your default G four twenty five head
(09:23):
shape with these mass properties versus a four point thirty
with maybe your higher MLI pathway versus four thirty with
your lower CG pathway, or the trade offs that you
can see in terms of performance and kind of all
the things that matter not just can your longest shot
go further, but what happens on your full range of
impacts and mishits. And that's where looking at through a
(09:44):
stroke scand lens kind of helps you blend those things together.
It's not just seeing the ball as far as possible
every time, but it's getting that right blend of distance
and accuracy. And so that was a fun one where
I could tell him like, hey, this is unconventional, but
you can drop the MI by a decent amount. But
on that Elsie Farrowood, if you can lower your CG
location by point one point two inches, you'll see a
(10:06):
pretty big boost and performance.
Speaker 1 (10:09):
Yeah. Shane Brody's been a big part of the ability,
as he talked about of connecting the dots on our
modeling capabilities. So, like you know, ping, we've gone through
this revolution where we used to always do like tons
of robot tests, but those have their limitations because while
sometimes you want to deliver the club perfectly the same
every time, it's not what humans do. So then we
(10:31):
have FOCAL. We spend some time in FOCAL. We talked
to doctor Eric hendrickson on how that works. Chris is
on the end of marrying those things together, running all
these what if scenarios, these virtual simulations, so it saves
us a lot of time and it helps us answer
questions with a lot more clarity more quickly because we
(10:53):
can run these things virtually, and then we can kind
of validate a hypothesis. Then we make the physical prototypes,
test them through our full suite of robot and human testing.
So been able to fast track. So a lot of
fun Chris working on that. Marty.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
I got a question for you, Marty in this, In
this because I'm interested in this because Chris's point about
bringing an idea to him and having to figure it out. Marty,
I know you've been big in terms of you know,
conceptualizing golf clubs and building golf clubs over the last
couple decades at Ping, how many departments are you running
things by when you're coming up with a new driver?
I mean, are there ten departments you're going to and
(11:28):
you're saying, you help us with this, you help us
with this, because I don't think people at home think
about building a golf club and they're thinking Ping's trying
to make a golf club that goes as long as possible, right,
or it goes as straight as possible. But obviously there's
fifty one hundred and two hundred two thousand factors that
go into a driver. So like, how many departments are
you leaning on, Marty as you're coming up with the
new age, the new Ping driver.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
Yeah, yeah, that's a great question, Shane. Like to get
a driver to the market, it's very super cross functional,
all right. So it's it's the designing it three D CAD,
the joints, the mechanical design optimization. Then you're working with
an innovation group and they're working on maybe materials like
our carbon fly wrap and things of that nature and
(12:12):
optimizing those kind of those are they're kind of baking
them in the R and D world, right and getting
them ready to be integrated to the design. Then you're
working with kind of supply chain, manufacturing, sourcing, materials, components,
project engineering, which is kind of all the detailed nitty
gritty to kind of ramp it up and scale the
manufacturing quality control to make sure we're bringing it for
(12:34):
designing a new manufacturing process, we can make it consistently
to meet our brand standards. Our testing group which make
sure it's not going to break, it's durable. We validated
the performance that we want. You know, we got you know,
a USGA liaison in here. We got my team now,
which is the fitting and performance group, which make sure
(12:55):
we're getting the right launch conditions. You know. Then you
got sales and marketing to kind of tell the worry
of it on the on the back end. So yeah,
cross functionally, I mean it's you know, over ten plus departments,
and you know we have eighty plus engineers putting their
fingerprints on it.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
And Chris is a part of your team, so I
mean he's involved in so much of that kind of
from start to finish process of how that golf club's
going to look and perform and how it's going to
perform the best, and how it's going to function the best.
As he was mentioning kind of with that three wood example.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
Yeah, he's left his fingerprint on especially the modeling side
of things here when we're looking at you know, being
able to do virtual player test, tying it not only
to our focal data, but also are like baldnamic. You know,
Chris and I have worked together and teamed up on
being able to simulate what's going to happen. How does
wind affect it in things of that nature as well
(13:45):
as Shane. Wh's really fun and Chris I want to
get into is learning from en course data. So I
think one of the things we have access to now is,
you know, hundreds of millions of shots from from from
Arcos and our partnership there where we got on course
really precise GPS tracking data. Chris, tell us a little
story of your first experience with that kind of again
(14:09):
stepping back into your childhoodhood here of helping collect some
data from en course play patterns, working with your dad
when he was first getting into that.
Speaker 3 (14:19):
Yeah, we definitely have jumped around a good amount, but yeah,
definitely started. I think maybe now when I was ten,
my dad's focus shifted into the golf arena and how
can we do a better job understanding golf performance. There
are a bunch of different avenues. I think shot link
was starting to come into the fold, so he knew
there's some really good PGA Tour data, but there was
(14:40):
nothing on amateur data outside of some kind of fairly
hit green hit.
Speaker 2 (14:44):
You were talking about you and your dad kind of
transitioning from baseball to golf. What was the why did
he want to get into the golf analytics side? Did
he get into golf at that point in his life?
Did he just see opportunity there?
Speaker 3 (14:55):
Yeah? I think I think he saw opportunity. I think
there's probably some frustration of trying to record golf stats
and seeing like just some really obvious potential flaws in
the stats. It was like there was, as I said,
like faraoe hit percentage, green hit percentage, Like I think
one of them was like putts per round, and it's like, Okay,
(15:16):
the leader of that stat is not necessarily the best putter.
It's the person who like misses the most screens and
chips it.
Speaker 2 (15:22):
Up that's three feet totally totally.
Speaker 3 (15:24):
So he's just like that doesn't seem right. And then
like every single stat you could just like poke some
holes in it's like, I don't know, Tiger's hitting it
miss He's missing like five percent more faraways than average,
So it's like always he's a bad driver of the ball.
I think that was a pretty like I've heard that
narrative still like two thousand and six, he's spraying everywhere.
Steven Aames probably bought into that too and lost nine
(15:46):
to eight. But it's like you see on the surface, like, Okay, yeah,
he's one eightieth and faaraow hit percentage, he has to
be a bad golf driver of the golf ball, but
just doesn't quite add up because you know, he's really
doing very well in terments and.
Speaker 1 (16:02):
It was a weapon of him.
Speaker 3 (16:03):
Yeah he hit it.
Speaker 2 (16:04):
He might maybe sprayed a bit, but he had this
distance that people couldn't keep up with at a time
when that was transitioning into the game.
Speaker 3 (16:10):
Right.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
So I think the focus we in the quote unquote
olden days in terms of statistics in golf, we were
looking at these things is absolutes. Right, you hit fairways,
that's great, You hit greens, that's great, But not every
green regulation is the same, and not every fairway hit
is the same, right, And I think that's something you
guys have done an unbelievable job at breaking down.
Speaker 1 (16:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (16:30):
I think it was just like, how do we get
this into a context that makes sense? I think even
the laying up on par fives, it's like there's some
psychological safety of Oh, I can really easily hit a
seven iron two hundred yards and I'm gonna hit the green,
so it's gonna look good from a status respective like
hitting more greens regulation that it feels safe. And it's
like if you do take out a threewood and plasted
(16:50):
around the green, somewhere you might be underneath the tree
and that it might be hard to get on the
green and you might be throwing off just like you're
clean round. But it was nicer. He could kind of
start to say, Okay, well, how do we get beyond
just these counting stats? And I think, I don't know.
My dad did a phenomenal job of like getting into
that simplest metric, which I think makes sense. Like a
(17:13):
lot of other stats have moved in that direction as well.
Expected goals now is in hockey and soccer, the runs
is in baseball. So it's like it was a trend
that was happening. I would say someone probably would have
come up with it if my dad did not, but
helped answer some of those questions where it's like, Okay,
what is the most meaningful metric for golf? It's shots
(17:34):
and if you start looking in that perspective, then everything
makes sense. Tires a really good driver with the golf ball.
He follows the same blueprint as Rory and Bryson and
guys who a long way but just miss a couple
more fairways, missing one fairway per round, and here you
get twenty five yards past the field. Is actually a
really really good formula for playing good high level golf.
(17:54):
So yeah, definitely cool to see, and it was also
really cool growing up to like see coaches and players
start to adopt it. So I think Luke, Donald Duarte, Mollinari,
Chris Como, Sean Foley, where a lot of a lot
of guys to start to reach out and like see
the insights of of what what looking at things from
a strokes gain perspective could do. So yeah, really really
(18:17):
fun to be involved with the Tangentially as a sixteen
year old didn't know anything.
Speaker 1 (18:21):
Brody, Let's let's fast forward to now and how have
you in our team here? Where we've answered some of
these questions, like brought that to the club fitting world. Right,
So you're going in for a club fitting and you
might have these kind of legacy ideas maybe in your head,
you know, like like I got to hit it straighter,
(18:42):
I gotta I gotta find the middle of the face more.
You know, I need to play a shorter driver because
that's what the tour players are doing. So, uh, you know,
just let's double click on that a little bit of
how somebody can take some of these concepts and principles,
maybe not that they're playing tournament golf in their lives
on the line, but they're going have to get fit
for a new driver. What are what are some ideas
(19:03):
in in in quick math folks can bring to the
table there.
Speaker 3 (19:06):
Yeah, I mean that's a's a fundamental question of maybe
a driver fitting is like what's better is it hitting
as far as possible or hitting as straight as possible?
And you can easily swing to the extremes you can.
If you want hit as far as possible, you probably
grab the longest blank driver you have, crank the loft
down and hopefully hit the one really high launched, low
(19:27):
spin nuke and if you want to hit as straight
as possible, it's like, okay, let's grab a shorter shaft,
let's dial back the swing speed, and I'll try his
night fairies as possible. But as of the most things,
the answer kind of lies in between there, and so
again it's like, how do you how do you break
down that trade off? How do you break down that
distance versus acuity trade off? And as expected, the the
(19:51):
way to look at is from strokes gained and try
to see, yeah, what exactly is that distance versus acuracy
trade off? And it was leaning on work than my
dad did. Of Okay, if you could look at what's
the benefit of gaining twenty yards, quantify that in terms
of strokes versus what's the how much did it hurt
you if you hit it, I don't know, ten feet
(20:13):
more offline? And so which we wanted to make it
as easy for fitters as possible to use this kind
of strokes gained framework to analyze a driver fitting. And
so the simple nuggets it's if you hit twenty yards further,
it's a PGA Tour pro you are started to play
one shot better per round, and so that's huge. That's
(20:34):
exactly what kind of Bryson did and may Fitzpatrick did
when they went through gaining length. And then the interesting
thing is, though it's even more beneficial for amateur golfers.
And so, like my rough math would be a PGA
Tour pro from two hundred yards might average like three
point three shots and you bring them down to one
(20:56):
hundred twenty yards and it's three point zero. So that
eighty yard shift gained him point three shots. But for
a ninety golfer, he might be moving from four point
six at two hundred yards down to four point h
at one twenty, so it's a point six shift, and
so distance is even more valuable, Like what there's more
to gain moving an amateur player just twenty yards close
(21:18):
as a whole every time. And so that's what the
math showed for a ninety golfer, gain twenty yards is
worth two shots instead of that one point oh for
a PJA Tour golfer. And so you kind of use
these trayoffs to develop a pretty simple rule for our
fitting department that if you can gain two yards of distance,
that will be offset by one yard decrease in offline
(21:42):
standard deviation. So you're if you're actually in if your
offline dispersion goes up by a yard, that's offset by
two yards for maybe a scratch golfer, oh I got
that backwards three yards for a scratch golfer, of distance
offsets one yard of accuracy loss. And then for a
ninety golfer where distance is even more at a premium,
(22:04):
it's you only need two yards offset one yard of
accuracy loss. But the nice thing there is that we
have a really clean rule of thumb that like someone
can doesn't have to go to the extremes. They don't
have to just maximize distance or maximize the accuracy. They
can say, hey, you gain twenty yards, you only lost
two yards of offline performance. So that's going to be
a clear win for you. And we can have tools
(22:25):
and copilot that we've mentioned a bunch of this podcast
that says, Okay, you're expect to gain on course is
one point four shots with that new driver. That'll be
a really good tool for you at the end of fitting.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
And Chris, do you have those conversations with the fitters,
I mean, is this something you guys are discussing, you know,
kind of throughout the company to help people relay this
information to consumers because I do think you know, like
this year, Marty, Marty not played golf in January and
he has the two driver system in his bag, and
we've talked a lot about on the pod. But I mean,
it's been one of the biggest changes in my game
(22:58):
I've made in the last probably ten years, is the
is adding a twelve degree driver. Every time I play
golf with somebody to ask about it, they're always very
interested in the link to the shaft and why we
do it. And Marty obviously broke down the numbers, and
you know, he has the math on it. We've talked
about it on the pod. I mean, if you hit
three wood, you know, if you hit three hundred yards,
you hit three wood ninety ninety five percent of the
time off the tee. Why not take a bigger head
(23:18):
and lean on that. That's a simple thing for me
to understand. How do you guys relay this information to
the fitters where they can simplify it as much as
possible to somebody that's looking at a driver, going, I
do want to gain ten fifteen yards, But what that's
going what's that going to do in terms of my accuracy?
Speaker 3 (23:34):
Yeah, I think I think that's the magic of I
guess communicating with math is you have to be able
to understand kind of the deep nuanced science to be
able to come up with new metrics and tools for fitters.
But then the power is then turning into a very
simple story that everyone can understand. And I think even
(23:55):
that example of the of kind of that that driver
the driver baby is like how many different pieces are
are in play on the pink side of Like we
are leveraging our Arcos database of one hundred plus million
shots to understand when people use drivers through wood. We're
leveraging our really cool I mean, that's even like manufacturing
(24:17):
side of things, where we can build a a driver
head the right weight to hit a through wood build
and then we can also do testing. So now the
testing or we ran that test of what happens if
you hit a thriver off the tee versus three off
the ta, and like that's the ultimate proof is like
how much better is it? And that's one of the
more like jaw dropping like clean winds I've ever seen
(24:40):
in a player test, Like the thriver is just dominating
and so and then you can plug it into and
then we had one of the guys in our group,
Max went in. He's like, I want to test out
how does this build compare? And he went into Copilot
and it was like, okay, let let's let's look at
what's my distance gain, what's my accuracy gain. It's like, okay,
it's the or just win the world for a driver.
(25:01):
So kind of all those tools are like married together,
and hopefully Copilot's kind of our avenue for fitters to
get the simplest possible way to communicate to the to
the everyday golfer.
Speaker 1 (25:12):
Yeah, change so Brody, I'll give him some props here.
He's built all pretty much all the algorithms and logic
behind pink Co Pilot right, all the fun cool math
that happens there, and one of the most powerful fun
tools allows you to explore club fitting with the nuance
from a strokes gain lens if you want to write,
if the fitter wants too, if the players kind of
into it. Still a little kind of hard concept, I
(25:35):
think for the everyday golfer to understand I'm going to
gain two tenths of a shot, what does that mean
to me? If? But you know, we're kind of on
this spectrum of change in an evolution with every every
day golfer. They're seeing these stats on TV. They're starting
to understand it more. Now you can go in and
with Pink co pilot and optimize your driver or your
(25:56):
other clubs for which one's going to be the best
from a strokes gain standpoint. So, and we teach our fitters. Okay,
we're gonna look at distance differences. We're gonna look at
your offline standard deviation. That's kind of how big your
left right dispersion is. Right, what does your shot pattern
look like? And there's a way to quantify that on
a launch monitor. Feed it in and you can help
and say, hey, compared to your gamer driver, this one's
(26:18):
gonna be so much better from a strokes gain standpoint.
Let's try a longer driver versus a shorter length shaft
and do that little ab comparison. So really fun to
be able to pass this level of nuance which is
kind of built into the strokes gain concept to the
everyday golfer through copilot, which has been which has been
tons of fun.
Speaker 2 (26:36):
Yeah, and Brody, I mean you know I think about this.
You mentioned baseball earlier. I mean you think about the
eye rolls that came through the moneyball era right with baseball,
and it's like, oh, we don't need to worry about that.
That didn't make any sense, Like what's their er, what's
their batting average?
Speaker 1 (26:50):
Right? I mean, these are stats that.
Speaker 2 (26:52):
Mean something in baseball, and then slowly people started to
understand what it means. I think one thing that golf
is doing better over the last couple of years is
trying to explain this stuff. I think at broadcast at
times I try to dive a little deeper into the
strokes gain stuff just to simply explain what I'm talking about,
because sometimes you hear terms in a sport or in work,
(27:12):
in society and life whatever, but you never really get
explained what it is, and you just kind of take
it for fact. And I think we're getting to a
point now in golf where strokes gained is starting to
make more sense to people at a macro level, which
is huge because for somebody like you, you're leaning so
heavily on it, you want people to understand it because
you know it'll help them in terms of the way
(27:32):
they play, in the way they think about golf.
Speaker 3 (27:34):
It's interesting, like the first thing I did when I
got to ping is we had a competitive data set
of driver tests that we looked at like different competitors,
how they reformed. And my boss at the time, Eric Henderson,
is like, how would you analyze this data? And I
think he was like kind of winking as head of
like I think he might look at this from a
(27:54):
strokes gain perspective, But the way the data had been
analyzed was all right, how far did those balls go?
Like how many fairways did you hit? And he's like,
how would you go about this? And I was like, Okay,
I think there might be a way to apply apply
some of the knowledge I have of strokes gain. And
so yeah, it's been it's been cool too to be
able to I mean even even in our vocabulary I
(28:15):
think is as designers engineers, we've we've moved from uh,
maybe stat areas and how far the ball went to
kind of talking this language of overall performance in it
from a strokes gained lens. So it definitely takes time.
One other thing, what you were talking about baseball, It's
like baseball maybe it was ahead in some respects with moneyball,
(28:35):
but golf has actually been way ahead in terms of
some of their advanced metrics, like we knew about angle
attack and club betspeed tracking. I had more of an
influence kind of on the on the coaching community. They
understood some of these tools way before, like the kind
of baseball analytics they like they're just starting to get
get their head around like angle attack. I feel like
(28:59):
there's some there's some funny things of like TV broadcasters
being like, oh a launch angle swings like a big
concept in baseball, Like they didn't quite have the terminology
down for angle attack. But it's like that's been around
the golf world for h I don't know, ten fifteen
years now.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
That's a really good point Brody's speaking of angle of attack.
I mean think one of the problems we've solved in
our group, and you were instrumental in is helping understand
like why golfers. And for me it was always Lee Westwood.
He hit down on his driver and I was working
on low spin drivers like the answer I fifteen, I twenty,
and they never worked for him. They fell out of
(29:35):
the air, He'd have to change his swing tip back.
Nothing works, So he kept playing the G ten driver,
which was you know, kind of moderate spinning, moderate slash
high spinning driver at the time when he was number
one player in the world, and we could never really
answer that question of why that was. And you know,
since then, I think you were a big part of
doing a bunch of that modeling work to help us
(29:56):
answer the question. Generate this really useful chart for all
for some fitters out there that says, hey, if you
do hit more down you not only can you spin
it more, but you should to be optimal. So give
us a little background on how all that research and
analysis and modeling all came to be.
Speaker 3 (30:14):
Yeah, so I think it definitely kind of goes back
to my kind of first color projects at PAYING. So
after kind of looking at some of that competitor data
where it's kind of looking at applying strokes gain to
some of our driver data, the next project I actually
worked on was looking at ball flight laws. And so
that's not just the kind of undepending there is. When
(30:34):
you have a club path angle attack and a face angle,
a big question is where's that ball going to launch?
So that's really important for coaches if they're trying to
tell a golfer how to hit a functional drawer fade.
I think a very common piece of teaching was you
want to have the face point where the ball ends
up and the path goes where you want the ball
(30:54):
to start. And that doesn't actually quite match what we
see on the side of things, but it kind of
gets your brain kind of thinking about what where should
that path and face be. And so similarly on the
kind of vertical side of things, it's if you have
an angle attack and then a loft in the club,
a big question is where's the ball going to launch?
And so we have with our focal data a lot
(31:16):
of really good information on how the club is delivered,
what that path is, and where the face is pointed.
And so one of my big projects goes, okay, what
is that ratio? So if you have a path that
is ten degrees right and the face is pointed right
at the target, where will the ball launched? And it's
roughly eighty percent, So the ball would launch two degrees
(31:38):
to the right if your face is aimed right at
the target and your path is ten degrees to the right,
and we end up going through the whole whole club set.
So a driver that numbers actually around eighty five percent,
and then down to wedge that number is down to
sev percent. So that's I mean, one one piece that
kind of ties things together is like Joe Mayo's big
on on ten down on a wedge, and so it's like,
(32:00):
if you're ten down and you want to launch the
ball at thirty degrees, you have to have a you
have a four degree difference between your launch angle and
your angle attack. So what spin loft do you need?
You actually need a sixty degree spin loft. That forty
kind of launch minus single attack number goes into that
sixty loft minus single attack number to get your thirty
(32:23):
degree launch angle. So it's kind of really important fundamental
kind of physics things that that drive how your driver
through wedge is perform. And we were like, okay, we
probably apply us to to understanding that angle attack and
driver launch didition in side of things as well. So
kind of a similar kind of thought process I'll go
(32:43):
through is what angle attack drives your launchicition on drivers. So,
like a common target that I've heard thrown out is
you want to hit like seventeen launch and seventeen hundred
spin and from a ball flight model perspective, that ball
goes very very far. That's that's basically that's that's where
(33:06):
we would see like the peak of carry distance and
total distance. But we know from PGA tour data that
people are living a lot more in like that ten
to eleven launch and twenty five hundred spin zones. It's
like something's missing a little bit if we're going to
say that seventeen and seventeen hundred goes as far as possible,
but we don't really see that on tour. And so
the kind of key kind of similar to that Lee
(33:27):
West's story is that the key underpaining thing is that
golfers PGA tour golfer's average angle attack is around zero.
So if they want to launch a ball at seventeen degrees,
they if they use this eighty five percent number, they
need to have a loft delivered an impact at twenty degrees,
So that twenty degree loft difference turns into a seventeen
degree launch difference. And the issue with having a twenty
(33:51):
degree kind of spin loft number on a driver is
it's going to spin a tremendous amount, So you're crazy, Yeah,
you experience is gonna be five thousand. Yeah, So like yeah,
it's definitely not the way you don't want a driver
that's launching at seventeen to five thousand spin, and then
on the other side of things like, hey, well what
if we try to get down to seventeen hundred soon
you know it's the knuckleball. It goes pretty far, and
(34:11):
it's okay, probably divide those that loft number by three.
Let's take that twenty degrees of loft down to seven,
and now you're launching it at six degrees, so again
that that ball flight loss knowledge really matters, and it's like, Okay,
we're in a pickle here. You don't really want to
launch it six degrees and seventeen hundred spin. You don't
want launch it seventeen degrees and five thousand spin. There's
some happy medium in between, and it's like, Okay, this
(34:31):
is probably something that that some modeling can can help
us out with here, and through the power of having
a ball flight model, having an impact model developed by
Eric Henrickson, you can kind of nicely toggle through all
the different loft options and just plug in, Okay, which
combination of loft and angle attack and club at speed
(34:51):
produces the most carry distance, most total distance. And that's
kind of the kind of thing what starts down this
path of trying to develop an oft to launch a
spin chart, and so I might be able to pull
it up, but there's angle attack on the bottom ball
speed going up like the y axis, and we can
for each those combinations go into an impact model and
(35:12):
figure out the loft that maximizes someone's distance, and there's
some cool trends that show up. I think Marty was
kind of hinting at it. But if you go look
at the angle of attack, that is a really clear
indicator of what your spin rate should be. So if
you're four down, your optimal your optimal spin rate is
three thousand. That's the spineraryates. Then they hit the ball
(35:34):
as long as possible for you, and that's because if
you had less spin than that, your launch angle of
nine degrees goes down to six degrees and that ball
is just going nowhere. And if you had if you
try to get your launch up from eight or nine
degrees up to twelve, your three thousand spin turns into
four thousand. That ball is also going nowhere. So it's counterintuitive,
but three thousand spin is the right number for someone
(35:56):
who's four down. And then the other side of you
can actually move up into plus four territory. Then you
can get to some nicer sounding spin rate it's of
twenty two hundred or something, and that will help you.
That will be the new optal, so you can move
along that angle attack kind of X access and see
what your target spinarate should be. I think it's pretty
eye opening for golfers.
Speaker 1 (36:17):
I think, Shane, what's fun here about what Brody just
talked about is that it's a lot of numbers, a
lot of angles. I'm always having to jot things down
and do some trigonometry in my head, and that can
go over a lot of the listeners' heads, no doubt.
But what's fun is that we turned it into a practical,
actionable fitting chart in a fitting tool that's helped golfers
unluck distance right, super fun. It explains Lee Westwood four
(36:40):
down three thousand spin, number one player in the world.
It explains Cameron champ one ninety five ball speed. He
hits down two degrees, and he launches it at like
seven and a half eight, you know, and spins it
twenty six twenty seven hundred, and that's perfect actually for him.
Or it explains you know, like Bubba Watson. We used
(37:01):
to is this high straight one. He'd hit up on it,
He'd hit up like five or six, and he would
launch it a fifteen to seventeen with you know, seventeen
nineteen hundred spin when he went to go hit his
high bomb where he straightened out the curve. So this
chart explained finally we've cracked the code on explaining you
know why angled attack is super duper important. And again, Brody,
(37:24):
I think going back to baseball, it's just like a
brand new thing in baseball. But here we are in golf,
we've already cracked the code on this.
Speaker 2 (37:30):
You know, Brody, I wanted to ask you we are
we are always kind of finding new tools and our bags.
In terms of golf, it typically starts on the pro level.
I mean, I think, you know, we were a few
years ago it felt like everybody on the planet and
professional golf had a crossover. Now it's moved a little
bit more to the lofted wood world. I mean, I've
got a seven one in the bag. I think Marty's
(37:50):
got a seven more in the bag. I got a
nine wood built for me a few months ago. I
haven't put it in the bag yet, but I've messed
around with it, and I like it. I never in
my life I would take a driving iron out of
the bag. That was kind of one of my like,
my go to shot for so long. What's the next thing,
in your opinion that we'll see over the next year
or so in the professional golf world and maybe it'll
(38:11):
move to uh, to the amateur golf world that will
be popular amongst golfers. That's maybe not the most popular
thing right now.
Speaker 3 (38:18):
Yeah, I mean, I'm I'm definitely hoping that it's Thriver
for the for the PGA Tour golf world. I'm trying.
I'm trying to stir up, starve some fitting for myself
to get it in play because I've had some three
months that haven't cooperated in tournaments. So that's definitely on
the top of my mind right now.
Speaker 2 (38:35):
Two drivers in the bag from from a lot of
the time. I mean, I like, I mean, Marty did
did Tony? Did Tony do this at Augusta this past year?
Was that something he used during the tournament?
Speaker 1 (38:44):
Yeah? No, he did it at Augusta. And and what's
unique about his his experience there and and you know
better than than me having been around that golf course,
a lot, and being on the telecast is uh that
there's some specific holes you also need to draw it,
which is rare, Which is rare for a PGA Tour event,
you know, where you get to a course where it's
mandatory at a player of his length not only hit
it straighter, you're definitely going to hit off the tee
(39:07):
never needs it as a second shot. If you make
a mistake on yeah, thirteen to fifteen, you are laying
up there right, because that's how you maximize your strokes
gained on those particular holes. But yeah, Tony did it.
But I think what's fun about that concept is that
not only are we looking at the PGA Tour player
that hits it very far, but Brody tell Shane a
little bit about some of the insights we've had for
(39:28):
the everyday golfer from the Arcos data on where they
are on the golf course and how that informs maybe
some of our set configuration, set design, which is not
just looking at the super far hitter, but what do
we see on the opposite end, you know, the players
that hit a little bit shorter.
Speaker 3 (39:45):
Yeah, I was gonna say, like a better answer to
where we might be moving in the future is looking
at where do people hit most of their golf shots from.
So I think in our kind of gapping app logic,
it's easy just default too, Okay, Well, even gaps across
the bag. We want to have all of your irons
be I don't know, twelve to fifteen yard gaps. We
have our rule of thumb. Of your seven iron ballspet
(40:07):
divide by ten is your target gap number. But I
think what we can move towards when we have so
much data is figure out, okay, for a particular golf course,
what shots you're going to face. I think PGA tour
pros know this. Okay, if I have a two hundred
and fifty yard part three, it's like I'm going to
need that high loft affair. Would that have a chance
to hold that green? Trying to hit three ron into
that green is probably almost impossible. And so we can
(40:31):
probably start to provide that solution down to the everyday
golfer of understanding. Okay, you on your home course, you're
hitting a lot of t shots and that will be
your driver. And then maybe you have a ton of
your shots from eighty to one hundred and twenty yards,
and so you might want to have a four wedge
solution or five ledge solution that's really dialed in that range.
(40:52):
I think, I don't know give away Marty's like secret
for twenty twenty five, but he was mentioning he might
go to a five edge setup and try to get
super di although and he has some of these shorter
Arizona courses the summer.
Speaker 1 (41:03):
If you say five five wedges, yeah, And so my
my analysis on that, Shane is for Arizona Golf.
Speaker 3 (41:10):
Here we go on.
Speaker 2 (41:11):
Let's says, we gotta get it. This is Marty's twenty
twenty five New Year's resolution. We're gonna get out there
a few months early.
Speaker 1 (41:18):
We're going five wedges and it's love Arizona golf, right,
it's for the uh, you know, the talking stick golf
courses of the world where I am seventy to one
hundred and thirty five yards on every single approach shot
on the park totally, totally, and I need tighter gaps.
And then if I go a different course, I'll I'll
go back to four wedges and mix it up at
(41:40):
the top end of the back. No problem.
Speaker 2 (41:42):
What are we talking If we're talking five wedge set up,
I mean because you're not. I mean, I know famously
Phil did this back in the day. I mean, you're
not the first person to go five wedges, but I'd
say it went three to four and that was the
big jump. And now obviously going four to five, do
you have an idea of what it would look like?
Do you have an idea of what that loft would
look like in your bag?
Speaker 1 (41:59):
We haven't finished out, but in my head I want
to have instead of like thirteen or fourteen yard gaps
between wedges, I want to get them to nine or ten. Okay, right,
So that's really what I want to do, as well
as I need to improve my skill of being able
to hit my wedges closer. But yeah, that's a little
sneak preview. I think what Brody's getting at is, let's
get super nuanced into how to build somebody's bag for
(42:21):
their individual golf course patterns, playing conditions and things of
that nature, right, right, Brody?
Speaker 3 (42:27):
Yeah, And there definitely were some kind of higher level
of global insights that we got from Arcos data of
where do people hit their golf shots from And it's
not just a very even distribution from fifty to two
hundred yards that it does tend to clump around one
hundred and twenty five to one hundred and seventy five yards.
An interesting takeaway we had from Arcos Stata was that
(42:47):
it was almost irrespective of how far hit your driver,
which is maybe people not teeing U from the right tees.
But we looked at like, if you hit it one
hundred and seventy five to two hundred yards of your driver,
how far is your second shot distribution? And then for
a guy who hits at two fifty to two seventy five,
how far is your second shot distribution? And they like
lined up perfectly where all their second shots are around
(43:08):
that one hundred and twenty five two hundred and seventy
five yard range, and we're like, okay, let's get some
more clubs in the bag at that range. That was
kind of our push with the g four to thirty
line to add in kind of that fifty forty five
forty one kind of wedge solution there to get some
more clubs where people are hitting a lot of their
(43:28):
golf shots. And so that's that's the global perspective, But
then there's also maybe the iteration out of the line,
so we can take in someone's own personal arcostata and say, hey,
given how you play golf at your home course, this
is actually the set that we'd recommend for you and Marty.
Speaker 2 (43:43):
I'm assuming, you know, when you guys dive into this
arco stata, I'm assuming that an extremely high percentage of
golfers play almost one hundred percent of their golf at
the same golf yeps. I mean, you know, that's yeah,
that's something I'm sure you guys can figure out. And
I you know, like I think about my own golf, right,
and I traveled decent amount for work, and you know,
I get a chance to travel here and there. I'm
still playing the majority of my golf at my club
(44:05):
that I play at, right, So you want the bag
to make the most sense, like the Thriver at my club.
I've talked about this a lot with my friends. The
Thriver my club, for three holes is a mandatory golf shot,
and it would be a tough shot for me with
three wood, to be frank. So it's important for me
because again, if I'm playing my golf there, why not
have a bag that makes the most sense for the
course I'm playing the most.
Speaker 1 (44:26):
Yeah, totally, I think that's that's the future. It's super exciting.
I think it's again kind of meets that heuristic Shane
I like to have and we actually talked about on
the a little bit earlier in our conversation, which is
the tools that the tour player has access to. We
want to try to build that and make it available
to the everyday golfer. And it usually happens about a
decade later, Like it was probably about ten years ago
(44:49):
Chris was was mapping out bunkers on on on Google
Earth right, and now now it's all automated and applified
and you know, and things of that nature. So getting
being able to build somebody's bag to how they play golf,
how much do they travel, their specific things. I go
back to our conversation we had with Sawhith where he
was playing two clubs that went the same distance, one
(45:11):
went higher and went lower. That's a way to gap
your bag. You can gapping is not only yardage. You
can have trajectory gapping right, vertical gapping. It's another way
to kind of think about it.
Speaker 2 (45:21):
Yeah, Brody, can you watch golf and not think about data?
Is it possible for you to just sit down on
a Saturday afternoon and not. It's like I struggle with
this in terms of the like the production broadcasting side right,
because I've been involved in it for a number of years.
As I watch golf and on honestly all the sports,
I find myself noticing things right that would make sense
(45:42):
in my industry. Do you do the same thing when
you're just sitting around to casually watch, you know, the
back nine on Sunday of a golf tournament.
Speaker 3 (45:48):
Yeah, I was thinking that, Like you'd love to get
invested in a major and you're like, oh man, that's
super fun to watch. Maybe US Open briceless fields of pressure,
like you just get immersed in that. And then I
was like, well, in my hands, like man, there should
be a really cool like strokes gained pressure stat that
you come up with. So it doesn't take it doesn't
take much for like the wheels to start spinning, so yeah,
(46:09):
I probably don't get to to remove for it. You
see someone miss of ten foot and you're like, A,
that's point four shots. That's tough.
Speaker 1 (46:17):
I love that. I love that.
Speaker 2 (46:18):
You're like not, you're like jotting it down point four.
There you go, he's out.
Speaker 1 (46:21):
He's out.
Speaker 2 (46:22):
Should have should have stole second.
Speaker 1 (46:23):
You know what I'm saying.
Speaker 3 (46:24):
Yeah, just yeah, you gotta gotta get it better, better
than that.
Speaker 1 (46:27):
Shane, I got a fun one. Brody helped me with you.
You actually remember this, you you helped cover this event.
It was the Top Golf Tour Championship. So me and
me and my buddy qualified. Who are you playing with?
Who'd you play with? Martin? My friend Chris O'Connor, one
of my best that's striker. Uh you know, played at
Arizona State. Walked on when and real quick.
Speaker 2 (46:47):
For people that don't have any idea what this was,
this was a a two man golf tournament at Top Golf.
And if you qualified, I think if you were one
of the top two teams that all the top golfs
around the country, you went to Vegas, YEP to to
play in this in the Top Golf Tour Championship that
we actually shot and cut together and put it up
on YouTube. And I'm sure they're still out on YouTube
to this day.
Speaker 1 (47:07):
Yes. Yeah, it was actually the top one team. So
we was only one team from your local top Golf.
So me and my buddy qualified two years in a row,
and so had I had Brody. So we looked at
the top. The layout of the top golf in Las
Vegas was different than the one in Scottsdale where the
targets are how big they were the end of the range,
And so I knew the scoring and I was like, hey, Brody,
(47:30):
I didn't know the right strategy. Should I go like
try to make it all in all the short targets
a lot of the time, or should we take more
risk and go to the end ones and maybe run
the risk and my dispersion wouldn't be as good. So
I was like, hey, Brody, look at my data. Tell
me what to do. So Chris tell Shane about how
that how that little analysis.
Speaker 3 (47:48):
Went yeah, and like immediately triggered my kind of golf
metrics thirteen year old days because I was on Google
Earth trying to figure out how wide every target was.
I literally was like or functioning Google Earth, You're like, Okay,
that argaet is ten yards? Why that one's fifteen, that
one's twenty. And then it was like, oh, well, we
have player test data from Marty hitting pitching wedges seven irons,
(48:09):
four irons. That's kind of what the different distances were.
And so I was like, Okay, I can take Mary's
player test data, map it on to those different targets,
and I can figure out, like what his expected points
are if he only hits pitching wedges or only hits
seven irons, only hits four irons. And I gave him recommendation.
I was like, hey, Marty, I think the second target
is the way to go. That looks like your highest
(48:32):
fected points. And I also gave him like what's your
range of outcomes, like if you want to get aggressive
or you need to get a ton of points to
this set, like which one has the highest variance, So
trying to get pretty nuanced. But then then I don't know,
Marty can probably tell us. But the funny part to
me about the story is I was like, pretty proud
I did analysis for what Mary's stras should be. Maybe
questionable to do it on work time. That's a different
(48:54):
story also, And then Marty goes to Top Golf and
completely throws out the entire analysis.
Speaker 1 (49:03):
We started with a couple of things. Shane, it was
super windy, super windy, I remember that, yeah, And and
actually the terrain there on the Vegas Top Golf is
not flat, so everyone kept kind of the winds off
the left, hitting these slicy foreurns over to the right,
they'd hit this bank and it'd roll back in and
get in the target for super high points. So I
(49:23):
was like, Okay, we didn't capture that in the analysis.
Nothing wrong with the analysis, but you.
Speaker 2 (49:28):
Know, you know what, next year we should have flown
Brody out like the space I got it all done.
Speaker 1 (49:34):
So that's so fun in the semi finals.
Speaker 3 (49:38):
I think you always have to be like, what could
be wrong with your analysis when you're doing it, And
I was like, I'll just treating everything like it's I
don't know, like wherever it carries is where it goes.
And I kind knew in the back of my head
like balls can definitely bounce in and I was like,
I don't know if I can capture that very well.
But I ended up being like the reason why he
ended up changing the strategy because he could aim for
the far target. If it missed it, it bounce into
(49:59):
the back wall. And it's like, all right, yeah, pretty good.
Yeah that's better than I could have dreamed up.
Speaker 1 (50:03):
We needed the whole three D contour out.
Speaker 3 (50:05):
The yeah, yeah, weight model bouncing. We I messed up.
Speaker 1 (50:09):
Yeah, No, it was fun, mart Marty.
Speaker 2 (50:12):
There's two guys listening to this right now that qualified
like out of Myrtle Beach who are probably drinking like
Miller lights the whole time going we shouldn't have flown
in Vegas. This guy's got this guy handalyzing the targets
and got guys, you know, the smartest guys in the
room figured it out. Maybe I was in the wrong
I was in the wrong fight.
Speaker 1 (50:28):
My whole data science team behind me there. You know,
still didn't get it done. You still got to hit
the shops.
Speaker 2 (50:33):
It was like it was like fifty k.
Speaker 1 (50:35):
I think it hurts man.
Speaker 3 (50:38):
I was over her a five percent. Coaches, I was,
I was pushing.
Speaker 2 (50:42):
You know what, you got to negotiate on the front
and this is the same thing. And like your dad,
you had to get somebody in there to negotiate on
the front end. It's actually two dollars an hour, Dad,
That's what we're gonna do. Marty, got anything else for
Brody before we before we let him get back to work.
Speaker 1 (50:53):
No, yeah, I think for the those listening out there
with youngsters just going into college or high school and
they're like, hey, how can I use math? And use
it to apply it in sports. I mean, I think
what's fun about Brody is like the real life example
has made an enormous impact on the industry, combining you know, math, modeling,
(51:15):
physics skills and really helping out a lot of golfers
play better golf and improve clubfitters out there as well.
So I just think it's very fun and exciting to
have Brody here on her team and you know, kind
of embody that combination of skills and how you can
apply them in the golf industry. So, Brody, thanks for
thanks for being on the pod.
Speaker 3 (51:35):
Brother Yeah, thank you so much, Marty, thanks so much.
Speaker 2 (51:37):
Sean, Absolutely that is Chris Brody. This is the Ping
Proving Grounds Podcast.
The guys from Ping. They've kind of showed me how
much the equipment matters.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
I just love that I can hit any shot I
kind of want.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
We're gonna be able to tell some fun stories about
what goes on here to help golfers play better golf.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, everybody, welcome back to the Pink Proven Grounds Podcast.
I'm Shane Bacon, joined us always by Marty Jerts and Marty.
We are diving deep with a man that I know
you work closely with this week.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
Yeah, we got Chris Brody here. Brody, as he goes
by amongst our engineering group and our R and D group,
has a background in mathematics and is the sun of
one very famous statistician in the golf industry. So Brody,
welcome to the pod man.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
Thanks for having me, Marian.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
Shane, Chris, what's like dinner talk like with Pops when
you guys are just discussing golf? Can you have normal
golf conversations or does it always lend down some avenue
of analytics and like what's going on?
Speaker 3 (00:54):
Yeah? I feel like it gets pretty deep. There's been
a lot of recent work he's done on world golf rankings,
college golf rankings. So he's he's trying to figure it
out and hopefully not get too much abuse from from
PJ Tour pros. So it's it's it's fun to hear
what's going on in his in his world of golf rankings.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
Brody before your dad got into the what he's kind
of working on now, which is the world world golf rankings,
the college side of things. Obviously, he he, you know,
wrote the book Every Shot Counts, a kind of you know,
golf's version of Moneyball is is I think the best
analogy therefore, tell us about your kind of childhood and
in some early days of you know, some of the
(01:37):
work and background he was doing in the golf space.
How did how did he get interested or involved in golf?
And how did you you know, you and your brother,
your family members there contribute to that.
Speaker 3 (01:48):
Yeah, I know, it's been it's been very fun to
see the progression of early days of interest to writing
a book getting adopted by PJ Tour. I think interestingly,
for me, there's always been like golf and math floating
around in the background. But for me, it start a
lot with baseball. I remember playing Little League as like
(02:08):
a seven eight year old and probably classically. My dad
would start to record, not just like your typical like
walk singles, but you record like where the ball was
hit to what each player on the team was doing.
So he started asking me, okay, like if you were
to manage this team, like what would you do? How
would you set the lineup for our little league baseball team?
(02:31):
And he's like, one of the first questions like, okay,
how many how many different combinations of lineups are there?
And it's okay, So the first batter you can put
there's nine different people who can choose from second bat
is eight different people, and so you'd be okay. So
the number of combinations you can think through is nine
times eight times seven times six. And I was like this,
this is kind of this kind of getting into like
what the dinner dinner time my seven year old dinner
(02:52):
time conversation.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
You're like, I just want to play baseball, man, you're
talking about.
Speaker 3 (02:56):
I loved it. It was like, okay, I think you might
have set up like a custom simulation for me of
like all right, we can put this player here, see
a expected runs there are? And he was like, quickly,
very quickly, you learn that, like you want to have
your best player up first. It's like at the most
possible at bats. And that was like very early like Moneyball,
like same same conclusion. You want to have your highest
on base sentage hitter going off first. Similarly, like we
(03:20):
looked at like where the hits were in the field,
and like, no little leaguer can keep up with a fastball,
so they all hit it to the right side. So
you put your best defensive guy at second base. Interesting,
so the Nuggets were rolling in pretty quick. Another one
we're going we're going probably too deep into baseball. But
another one was he asked me, like, what what percent
(03:40):
of time do you need to successfully steal second in
order to make it worth it? So guy on first,
no Out's like, when should you give the guy green
light to steal? And I guess my first like initial
thought is, okay, well what's the average success rate? Like
if you can get over seven percent, then go ahead,
And he's like no, no, there's like there's a better
way of think through it, and so we end up
(04:03):
breaking it down. It's okay, with a man on first,
no outs, your expected runs is maybe point eight, but
if you get that guy a second, it jumps up
to one point zero. Now a single might score him,
but then if he gets out, now you have nobody
on and one out and you're down to like point
two runs. And so say, okay, you just gotta look
at the trade off of going point eight to one
(04:23):
point zero or point eight down to point two, and
to make it worthwhile steal you've got to have an
over seventy five percent success rate. And it's like, oh,
that's that's that's the pretty unid insight. And you can
do that for what happens if this guy in first
two outs and they can do the math again, it's like, okay,
if it's zero point two with two outs and guy
on first, make it cessful and a guy guy in
scorem position, you have too point four. But then if
(04:46):
you if you're unsuccessful, the aning's over and down to zero.
But interesting thing there is, if it's point two verse
point four, all you need is a figure sent success
rate to make it worthwhile. And so it's like, okay,
the incentive then is to send a lot of guys
to try to steal second with two outs, think on first.
So a lot of things end up like correlating well
with golf, Like you don't want to just look at
(05:07):
raw stolen base percentage, Like the metric that matters for
baseball is run scored.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (05:12):
I think that translated over pretty quickly towards golf, Like
you don't really want to care about what your farely
hit percentage is, what your green hit percentage is. What
really matters at the end of the day is how
many shots that take you to get into the hole.
And so you can hit a good drive that doesn't
hit the fair way, but if it's three hundred and
thirty yards down there, you might be in a pretty
good spot.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
Marty. It's interesting, you know, as Chris talks about this,
I think about in my life and we're similar raised
to Marty, but in my life, like the real switch
for analytics and golf to me personally, was the switch
from how we play par fives. Yes, and I feel
like it was probably fifteen twenty years ago, Matt. Maybe
now was twenty five years ago, where the idea was
layup to enough you can't get there into lay up
(05:51):
to a number you're comfortable with. And you know, for
me it was always ninety five to one hundred yards.
I've lay up to that number or tried to and
that gave you the best chance of making birdie. And
then there was a flip I feel like in the
early two thousands where numbers and data started to tell
us no, no, no, no, no, send it as far up as
you can ye with both both golf shots, because it's
obviously the easiest place to get up and down make birdie.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
Yeah, when when Brody was talking about the baseball in
his work his dad was doing on the baseball side,
my brain was on, okay, instead of should I steal second?
Should I go for the par five and two? Yeah?
That was exactly Yeah, that was exactly where my head
was at. So yeah, that's it's super cool Brody to
hear those those early days of like your dad thinking
(06:30):
about the probabilities. I mean, one of the other questions
I always thought of Shane when I was in school
for the listeners out there is is Brodie's background is
in mathematics. His degrees in math, and I'm always like,
what does a math major even do? So I think
Brodie's a real life example here, Chris, tell us a
(06:50):
little bit why you went that direction and some of
the work you do, you know, like day to day,
like what does a math major do in the working world.
Speaker 3 (06:59):
Yeah, definitely didn't have much of a clue what I
was gonna do. When I was in college. I was like,
I know, I've always liked math. I've always enjoyed having
these how can I apply data to different problems? And
it was more it was more just like, Okay, I
think if I do a math major, I'm gonna have
some open something's gonna work out, like it might be consulting,
(07:21):
it might be econ, but I'll keep my options open.
And I definitely gravitated towards like applied math problems, probably
stunning from when I was seven years old, and so
it worked out pretty well with I think at the
end of my college career, we're doing a lot of
theoreical math. I was like, this is not quite clicking
(07:41):
for me. I was very lucky to get to paying
and they're like, oh, we got a whole lot of
data and a whole lot of problems we want you
to look at. And it was really fun, just like
dive into a world of golf and math and continue
with a lot of my growing up interests.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
Chris, can you give us an example of something once
you came to Paying because your job at Paying fitting
science manager, what like giving us an example of something
somebody might come to you with a problem to find
a solution, like anything that's popped up throughout your career pain.
Speaker 3 (08:12):
Yeah, I mean there's been a lot of really fun
different ones. One of the more fun ones was Travis Milman,
one of our design engineers, was working on our G
four to thirty Farawood line and he's like, hey, we
have ten grams of discretionary mass. It's just kind of
the gold currency for designers. And he was like, should
(08:36):
we just keep on pushing MI we can probably get
like a five to ten percent boost this Ferrywood or
I can move around the mass, I can try to
drop the CG location. And we kind of had a
hunch that maybe, like if we canet a little bit
higher launched, lower spin out of our out of our farrewoods,
like it could be a pretty nice gain in terms
of strokes gain in terms of performance. But it's a
(09:00):
hard one from a design side, like he's not really
sure how to tell that story, like what exactly do
you gain from higher launch and lower spin? And so
I was able to use some of my simulation background,
use our vocal data where we know help people deliver
fairy woods, and basically run a virtual test that Okay,
if we use your default G four twenty five head
(09:23):
shape with these mass properties versus a four point thirty
with maybe your higher MLI pathway versus four thirty with
your lower CG pathway, or the trade offs that you
can see in terms of performance and kind of all
the things that matter not just can your longest shot
go further, but what happens on your full range of
impacts and mishits. And that's where looking at through a
(09:44):
stroke scand lens kind of helps you blend those things together.
It's not just seeing the ball as far as possible
every time, but it's getting that right blend of distance
and accuracy. And so that was a fun one where
I could tell him like, hey, this is unconventional, but
you can drop the MI by a decent amount. But
on that Elsie Farrowood, if you can lower your CG
location by point one point two inches, you'll see a
(10:06):
pretty big boost and performance.
Speaker 1 (10:09):
Yeah. Shane Brody's been a big part of the ability,
as he talked about of connecting the dots on our
modeling capabilities. So, like you know, ping, we've gone through
this revolution where we used to always do like tons
of robot tests, but those have their limitations because while
sometimes you want to deliver the club perfectly the same
every time, it's not what humans do. So then we
(10:31):
have FOCAL. We spend some time in FOCAL. We talked
to doctor Eric hendrickson on how that works. Chris is
on the end of marrying those things together, running all
these what if scenarios, these virtual simulations, so it saves
us a lot of time and it helps us answer
questions with a lot more clarity more quickly because we
(10:53):
can run these things virtually, and then we can kind
of validate a hypothesis. Then we make the physical prototypes,
test them through our full suite of robot and human testing.
So been able to fast track. So a lot of
fun Chris working on that. Marty.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
I got a question for you, Marty in this, In
this because I'm interested in this because Chris's point about
bringing an idea to him and having to figure it out. Marty,
I know you've been big in terms of you know,
conceptualizing golf clubs and building golf clubs over the last
couple decades at Ping, how many departments are you running
things by when you're coming up with a new driver?
I mean, are there ten departments you're going to and
(11:28):
you're saying, you help us with this, you help us
with this, because I don't think people at home think
about building a golf club and they're thinking Ping's trying
to make a golf club that goes as long as possible, right,
or it goes as straight as possible. But obviously there's
fifty one hundred and two hundred two thousand factors that
go into a driver. So like, how many departments are
you leaning on, Marty as you're coming up with the
new age, the new Ping driver.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
Yeah, yeah, that's a great question, Shane. Like to get
a driver to the market, it's very super cross functional,
all right. So it's it's the designing it three D CAD,
the joints, the mechanical design optimization. Then you're working with
an innovation group and they're working on maybe materials like
our carbon fly wrap and things of that nature and
(12:12):
optimizing those kind of those are they're kind of baking
them in the R and D world, right and getting
them ready to be integrated to the design. Then you're
working with kind of supply chain, manufacturing, sourcing, materials, components,
project engineering, which is kind of all the detailed nitty
gritty to kind of ramp it up and scale the
manufacturing quality control to make sure we're bringing it for
(12:34):
designing a new manufacturing process, we can make it consistently
to meet our brand standards. Our testing group which make
sure it's not going to break, it's durable. We validated
the performance that we want. You know, we got you know,
a USGA liaison in here. We got my team now,
which is the fitting and performance group, which make sure
(12:55):
we're getting the right launch conditions. You know. Then you
got sales and marketing to kind of tell the worry
of it on the on the back end. So yeah,
cross functionally, I mean it's you know, over ten plus departments,
and you know we have eighty plus engineers putting their
fingerprints on it.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
And Chris is a part of your team, so I
mean he's involved in so much of that kind of
from start to finish process of how that golf club's
going to look and perform and how it's going to
perform the best, and how it's going to function the best.
As he was mentioning kind of with that three wood example.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
Yeah, he's left his fingerprint on especially the modeling side
of things here when we're looking at you know, being
able to do virtual player test, tying it not only
to our focal data, but also are like baldnamic. You know,
Chris and I have worked together and teamed up on
being able to simulate what's going to happen. How does
wind affect it in things of that nature as well
(13:45):
as Shane. Wh's really fun and Chris I want to
get into is learning from en course data. So I
think one of the things we have access to now is,
you know, hundreds of millions of shots from from from
Arcos and our partnership there where we got on course
really precise GPS tracking data. Chris, tell us a little
story of your first experience with that kind of again
(14:09):
stepping back into your childhoodhood here of helping collect some
data from en course play patterns, working with your dad
when he was first getting into that.
Speaker 3 (14:19):
Yeah, we definitely have jumped around a good amount, but yeah,
definitely started. I think maybe now when I was ten,
my dad's focus shifted into the golf arena and how
can we do a better job understanding golf performance. There
are a bunch of different avenues. I think shot link
was starting to come into the fold, so he knew
there's some really good PGA Tour data, but there was
(14:40):
nothing on amateur data outside of some kind of fairly
hit green hit.
Speaker 2 (14:44):
You were talking about you and your dad kind of
transitioning from baseball to golf. What was the why did
he want to get into the golf analytics side? Did
he get into golf at that point in his life?
Did he just see opportunity there?
Speaker 3 (14:55):
Yeah? I think I think he saw opportunity. I think
there's probably some frustration of trying to record golf stats
and seeing like just some really obvious potential flaws in
the stats. It was like there was, as I said,
like faraoe hit percentage, green hit percentage, Like I think
one of them was like putts per round, and it's like, Okay,
(15:16):
the leader of that stat is not necessarily the best putter.
It's the person who like misses the most screens and
chips it.
Speaker 2 (15:22):
Up that's three feet totally totally.
Speaker 3 (15:24):
So he's just like that doesn't seem right. And then
like every single stat you could just like poke some
holes in it's like, I don't know, Tiger's hitting it
miss He's missing like five percent more faraways than average,
So it's like always he's a bad driver of the ball.
I think that was a pretty like I've heard that
narrative still like two thousand and six, he's spraying everywhere.
Steven Aames probably bought into that too and lost nine
(15:46):
to eight. But it's like you see on the surface, like, Okay, yeah,
he's one eightieth and faaraow hit percentage, he has to
be a bad golf driver of the golf ball, but
just doesn't quite add up because you know, he's really
doing very well in terments and.
Speaker 1 (16:02):
It was a weapon of him.
Speaker 3 (16:03):
Yeah he hit it.
Speaker 2 (16:04):
He might maybe sprayed a bit, but he had this
distance that people couldn't keep up with at a time
when that was transitioning into the game.
Speaker 3 (16:10):
Right.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
So I think the focus we in the quote unquote
olden days in terms of statistics in golf, we were
looking at these things is absolutes. Right, you hit fairways,
that's great, You hit greens, that's great, But not every
green regulation is the same, and not every fairway hit
is the same, right, And I think that's something you
guys have done an unbelievable job at breaking down.
Speaker 1 (16:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (16:30):
I think it was just like, how do we get
this into a context that makes sense? I think even
the laying up on par fives, it's like there's some
psychological safety of Oh, I can really easily hit a
seven iron two hundred yards and I'm gonna hit the green,
so it's gonna look good from a status respective like
hitting more greens regulation that it feels safe. And it's
like if you do take out a threewood and plasted
(16:50):
around the green, somewhere you might be underneath the tree
and that it might be hard to get on the
green and you might be throwing off just like you're
clean round. But it was nicer. He could kind of
start to say, Okay, well, how do we get beyond
just these counting stats? And I think, I don't know.
My dad did a phenomenal job of like getting into
that simplest metric, which I think makes sense. Like a
(17:13):
lot of other stats have moved in that direction as well.
Expected goals now is in hockey and soccer, the runs
is in baseball. So it's like it was a trend
that was happening. I would say someone probably would have
come up with it if my dad did not, but
helped answer some of those questions where it's like, Okay,
what is the most meaningful metric for golf? It's shots
(17:34):
and if you start looking in that perspective, then everything
makes sense. Tires a really good driver with the golf ball.
He follows the same blueprint as Rory and Bryson and
guys who a long way but just miss a couple
more fairways, missing one fairway per round, and here you
get twenty five yards past the field. Is actually a
really really good formula for playing good high level golf.
(17:54):
So yeah, definitely cool to see, and it was also
really cool growing up to like see coaches and players
start to adopt it. So I think Luke, Donald Duarte, Mollinari,
Chris Como, Sean Foley, where a lot of a lot
of guys to start to reach out and like see
the insights of of what what looking at things from
a strokes gain perspective could do. So yeah, really really
(18:17):
fun to be involved with the Tangentially as a sixteen
year old didn't know anything.
Speaker 1 (18:21):
Brody, Let's let's fast forward to now and how have
you in our team here? Where we've answered some of
these questions, like brought that to the club fitting world. Right,
So you're going in for a club fitting and you
might have these kind of legacy ideas maybe in your head,
you know, like like I got to hit it straighter,
(18:42):
I gotta I gotta find the middle of the face more.
You know, I need to play a shorter driver because
that's what the tour players are doing. So, uh, you know,
just let's double click on that a little bit of
how somebody can take some of these concepts and principles,
maybe not that they're playing tournament golf in their lives
on the line, but they're going have to get fit
for a new driver. What are what are some ideas
(19:03):
in in in quick math folks can bring to the
table there.
Speaker 3 (19:06):
Yeah, I mean that's a's a fundamental question of maybe
a driver fitting is like what's better is it hitting
as far as possible or hitting as straight as possible?
And you can easily swing to the extremes you can.
If you want hit as far as possible, you probably
grab the longest blank driver you have, crank the loft
down and hopefully hit the one really high launched, low
(19:27):
spin nuke and if you want to hit as straight
as possible, it's like, okay, let's grab a shorter shaft,
let's dial back the swing speed, and I'll try his
night fairies as possible. But as of the most things,
the answer kind of lies in between there, and so
again it's like, how do you how do you break
down that trade off? How do you break down that
distance versus acuity trade off? And as expected, the the
(19:51):
way to look at is from strokes gained and try
to see, yeah, what exactly is that distance versus acuracy
trade off? And it was leaning on work than my
dad did. Of Okay, if you could look at what's
the benefit of gaining twenty yards, quantify that in terms
of strokes versus what's the how much did it hurt
you if you hit it, I don't know, ten feet
(20:13):
more offline? And so which we wanted to make it
as easy for fitters as possible to use this kind
of strokes gained framework to analyze a driver fitting. And
so the simple nuggets it's if you hit twenty yards further,
it's a PGA Tour pro you are started to play
one shot better per round, and so that's huge. That's
(20:34):
exactly what kind of Bryson did and may Fitzpatrick did
when they went through gaining length. And then the interesting
thing is, though it's even more beneficial for amateur golfers.
And so, like my rough math would be a PGA
Tour pro from two hundred yards might average like three
point three shots and you bring them down to one
(20:56):
hundred twenty yards and it's three point zero. So that
eighty yard shift gained him point three shots. But for
a ninety golfer, he might be moving from four point
six at two hundred yards down to four point h
at one twenty, so it's a point six shift, and
so distance is even more valuable, Like what there's more
to gain moving an amateur player just twenty yards close
(21:18):
as a whole every time. And so that's what the
math showed for a ninety golfer, gain twenty yards is
worth two shots instead of that one point oh for
a PJA Tour golfer. And so you kind of use
these trayoffs to develop a pretty simple rule for our
fitting department that if you can gain two yards of distance,
that will be offset by one yard decrease in offline
(21:42):
standard deviation. So you're if you're actually in if your
offline dispersion goes up by a yard, that's offset by
two yards for maybe a scratch golfer, oh I got
that backwards three yards for a scratch golfer, of distance
offsets one yard of accuracy loss. And then for a
ninety golfer where distance is even more at a premium,
(22:04):
it's you only need two yards offset one yard of
accuracy loss. But the nice thing there is that we
have a really clean rule of thumb that like someone
can doesn't have to go to the extremes. They don't
have to just maximize distance or maximize the accuracy. They
can say, hey, you gain twenty yards, you only lost
two yards of offline performance. So that's going to be
a clear win for you. And we can have tools
(22:25):
and copilot that we've mentioned a bunch of this podcast
that says, Okay, you're expect to gain on course is
one point four shots with that new driver. That'll be
a really good tool for you at the end of fitting.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
And Chris, do you have those conversations with the fitters,
I mean, is this something you guys are discussing, you know,
kind of throughout the company to help people relay this
information to consumers because I do think you know, like
this year, Marty, Marty not played golf in January and
he has the two driver system in his bag, and
we've talked a lot about on the pod. But I mean,
it's been one of the biggest changes in my game
(22:58):
I've made in the last probably ten years, is the
is adding a twelve degree driver. Every time I play
golf with somebody to ask about it, they're always very
interested in the link to the shaft and why we
do it. And Marty obviously broke down the numbers, and
you know, he has the math on it. We've talked
about it on the pod. I mean, if you hit
three wood, you know, if you hit three hundred yards,
you hit three wood ninety ninety five percent of the
time off the tee. Why not take a bigger head
(23:18):
and lean on that. That's a simple thing for me
to understand. How do you guys relay this information to
the fitters where they can simplify it as much as
possible to somebody that's looking at a driver, going, I
do want to gain ten fifteen yards, But what that's
going what's that going to do in terms of my accuracy?
Speaker 3 (23:34):
Yeah, I think I think that's the magic of I
guess communicating with math is you have to be able
to understand kind of the deep nuanced science to be
able to come up with new metrics and tools for fitters.
But then the power is then turning into a very
simple story that everyone can understand. And I think even
(23:55):
that example of the of kind of that that driver
the driver baby is like how many different pieces are
are in play on the pink side of Like we
are leveraging our Arcos database of one hundred plus million
shots to understand when people use drivers through wood. We're
leveraging our really cool I mean, that's even like manufacturing
(24:17):
side of things, where we can build a a driver
head the right weight to hit a through wood build
and then we can also do testing. So now the
testing or we ran that test of what happens if
you hit a thriver off the tee versus three off
the ta, and like that's the ultimate proof is like
how much better is it? And that's one of the
more like jaw dropping like clean winds I've ever seen
(24:40):
in a player test, Like the thriver is just dominating
and so and then you can plug it into and
then we had one of the guys in our group,
Max went in. He's like, I want to test out
how does this build compare? And he went into Copilot
and it was like, okay, let let's let's look at
what's my distance gain, what's my accuracy gain. It's like, okay,
it's the or just win the world for a driver.
(25:01):
So kind of all those tools are like married together,
and hopefully Copilot's kind of our avenue for fitters to
get the simplest possible way to communicate to the to
the everyday golfer.
Speaker 1 (25:12):
Yeah, change so Brody, I'll give him some props here.
He's built all pretty much all the algorithms and logic
behind pink Co Pilot right, all the fun cool math
that happens there, and one of the most powerful fun
tools allows you to explore club fitting with the nuance
from a strokes gain lens if you want to write,
if the fitter wants too, if the players kind of
into it. Still a little kind of hard concept, I
(25:35):
think for the everyday golfer to understand I'm going to
gain two tenths of a shot, what does that mean
to me? If? But you know, we're kind of on
this spectrum of change in an evolution with every every
day golfer. They're seeing these stats on TV. They're starting
to understand it more. Now you can go in and
with Pink co pilot and optimize your driver or your
(25:56):
other clubs for which one's going to be the best
from a strokes gain standpoint. So, and we teach our fitters. Okay,
we're gonna look at distance differences. We're gonna look at
your offline standard deviation. That's kind of how big your
left right dispersion is. Right, what does your shot pattern
look like? And there's a way to quantify that on
a launch monitor. Feed it in and you can help
and say, hey, compared to your gamer driver, this one's
(26:18):
gonna be so much better from a strokes gain standpoint.
Let's try a longer driver versus a shorter length shaft
and do that little ab comparison. So really fun to
be able to pass this level of nuance which is
kind of built into the strokes gain concept to the
everyday golfer through copilot, which has been which has been
tons of fun.
Speaker 2 (26:36):
Yeah, and Brody, I mean you know I think about this.
You mentioned baseball earlier. I mean you think about the
eye rolls that came through the moneyball era right with baseball,
and it's like, oh, we don't need to worry about that.
That didn't make any sense, Like what's their er, what's
their batting average?
Speaker 1 (26:50):
Right? I mean, these are stats that.
Speaker 2 (26:52):
Mean something in baseball, and then slowly people started to
understand what it means. I think one thing that golf
is doing better over the last couple of years is
trying to explain this stuff. I think at broadcast at
times I try to dive a little deeper into the
strokes gain stuff just to simply explain what I'm talking about,
because sometimes you hear terms in a sport or in work,
(27:12):
in society and life whatever, but you never really get
explained what it is, and you just kind of take
it for fact. And I think we're getting to a
point now in golf where strokes gained is starting to
make more sense to people at a macro level, which
is huge because for somebody like you, you're leaning so
heavily on it, you want people to understand it because
you know it'll help them in terms of the way
(27:32):
they play, in the way they think about golf.
Speaker 3 (27:34):
It's interesting, like the first thing I did when I
got to ping is we had a competitive data set
of driver tests that we looked at like different competitors,
how they reformed. And my boss at the time, Eric Henderson,
is like, how would you analyze this data? And I
think he was like kind of winking as head of
like I think he might look at this from a
(27:54):
strokes gain perspective, But the way the data had been
analyzed was all right, how far did those balls go?
Like how many fairways did you hit? And he's like,
how would you go about this? And I was like, Okay,
I think there might be a way to apply apply
some of the knowledge I have of strokes gain. And
so yeah, it's been it's been cool too to be
able to I mean even even in our vocabulary I
(28:15):
think is as designers engineers, we've we've moved from uh,
maybe stat areas and how far the ball went to
kind of talking this language of overall performance in it
from a strokes gained lens. So it definitely takes time.
One other thing, what you were talking about baseball, It's
like baseball maybe it was ahead in some respects with moneyball,
(28:35):
but golf has actually been way ahead in terms of
some of their advanced metrics, like we knew about angle
attack and club betspeed tracking. I had more of an
influence kind of on the on the coaching community. They
understood some of these tools way before, like the kind
of baseball analytics they like they're just starting to get
get their head around like angle attack. I feel like
(28:59):
there's some there's some funny things of like TV broadcasters
being like, oh a launch angle swings like a big
concept in baseball, Like they didn't quite have the terminology
down for angle attack. But it's like that's been around
the golf world for h I don't know, ten fifteen
years now.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
That's a really good point Brody's speaking of angle of attack.
I mean think one of the problems we've solved in
our group, and you were instrumental in is helping understand
like why golfers. And for me it was always Lee Westwood.
He hit down on his driver and I was working
on low spin drivers like the answer I fifteen, I twenty,
and they never worked for him. They fell out of
(29:35):
the air, He'd have to change his swing tip back.
Nothing works, So he kept playing the G ten driver,
which was you know, kind of moderate spinning, moderate slash
high spinning driver at the time when he was number
one player in the world, and we could never really
answer that question of why that was. And you know,
since then, I think you were a big part of
doing a bunch of that modeling work to help us
(29:56):
answer the question. Generate this really useful chart for all
for some fitters out there that says, hey, if you
do hit more down you not only can you spin
it more, but you should to be optimal. So give
us a little background on how all that research and
analysis and modeling all came to be.
Speaker 3 (30:14):
Yeah, so I think it definitely kind of goes back
to my kind of first color projects at PAYING. So
after kind of looking at some of that competitor data
where it's kind of looking at applying strokes gain to
some of our driver data, the next project I actually
worked on was looking at ball flight laws. And so
that's not just the kind of undepending there is. When
(30:34):
you have a club path angle attack and a face angle,
a big question is where's that ball going to launch?
So that's really important for coaches if they're trying to
tell a golfer how to hit a functional drawer fade.
I think a very common piece of teaching was you
want to have the face point where the ball ends
up and the path goes where you want the ball
(30:54):
to start. And that doesn't actually quite match what we
see on the side of things, but it kind of
gets your brain kind of thinking about what where should
that path and face be. And so similarly on the
kind of vertical side of things, it's if you have
an angle attack and then a loft in the club,
a big question is where's the ball going to launch?
And so we have with our focal data a lot
(31:16):
of really good information on how the club is delivered,
what that path is, and where the face is pointed.
And so one of my big projects goes, okay, what
is that ratio? So if you have a path that
is ten degrees right and the face is pointed right
at the target, where will the ball launched? And it's
roughly eighty percent, So the ball would launch two degrees
(31:38):
to the right if your face is aimed right at
the target and your path is ten degrees to the right,
and we end up going through the whole whole club set.
So a driver that numbers actually around eighty five percent,
and then down to wedge that number is down to
sev percent. So that's I mean, one one piece that
kind of ties things together is like Joe Mayo's big
on on ten down on a wedge, and so it's like,
(32:00):
if you're ten down and you want to launch the
ball at thirty degrees, you have to have a you
have a four degree difference between your launch angle and
your angle attack. So what spin loft do you need?
You actually need a sixty degree spin loft. That forty
kind of launch minus single attack number goes into that
sixty loft minus single attack number to get your thirty
(32:23):
degree launch angle. So it's kind of really important fundamental
kind of physics things that that drive how your driver
through wedge is perform. And we were like, okay, we
probably apply us to to understanding that angle attack and
driver launch didition in side of things as well. So
kind of a similar kind of thought process I'll go
(32:43):
through is what angle attack drives your launchicition on drivers. So,
like a common target that I've heard thrown out is
you want to hit like seventeen launch and seventeen hundred
spin and from a ball flight model perspective, that ball
goes very very far. That's that's basically that's that's where
(33:06):
we would see like the peak of carry distance and
total distance. But we know from PGA tour data that
people are living a lot more in like that ten
to eleven launch and twenty five hundred spin zones. It's
like something's missing a little bit if we're going to
say that seventeen and seventeen hundred goes as far as possible,
but we don't really see that on tour. And so
the kind of key kind of similar to that Lee
(33:27):
West's story is that the key underpaining thing is that
golfers PGA tour golfer's average angle attack is around zero.
So if they want to launch a ball at seventeen degrees,
they if they use this eighty five percent number, they
need to have a loft delivered an impact at twenty degrees,
So that twenty degree loft difference turns into a seventeen
degree launch difference. And the issue with having a twenty
(33:51):
degree kind of spin loft number on a driver is
it's going to spin a tremendous amount, So you're crazy, Yeah,
you experience is gonna be five thousand. Yeah, So like yeah,
it's definitely not the way you don't want a driver
that's launching at seventeen to five thousand spin, and then
on the other side of things like, hey, well what
if we try to get down to seventeen hundred soon
you know it's the knuckleball. It goes pretty far, and
(34:11):
it's okay, probably divide those that loft number by three.
Let's take that twenty degrees of loft down to seven,
and now you're launching it at six degrees, so again
that that ball flight loss knowledge really matters, and it's like, Okay,
we're in a pickle here. You don't really want to
launch it six degrees and seventeen hundred spin. You don't
want launch it seventeen degrees and five thousand spin. There's
some happy medium in between, and it's like, Okay, this
(34:31):
is probably something that that some modeling can can help
us out with here, and through the power of having
a ball flight model, having an impact model developed by
Eric Henrickson, you can kind of nicely toggle through all
the different loft options and just plug in, Okay, which
combination of loft and angle attack and club at speed
(34:51):
produces the most carry distance, most total distance. And that's
kind of the kind of thing what starts down this
path of trying to develop an oft to launch a
spin chart, and so I might be able to pull
it up, but there's angle attack on the bottom ball
speed going up like the y axis, and we can
for each those combinations go into an impact model and
(35:12):
figure out the loft that maximizes someone's distance, and there's
some cool trends that show up. I think Marty was
kind of hinting at it. But if you go look
at the angle of attack, that is a really clear
indicator of what your spin rate should be. So if
you're four down, your optimal your optimal spin rate is
three thousand. That's the spineraryates. Then they hit the ball
(35:34):
as long as possible for you, and that's because if
you had less spin than that, your launch angle of
nine degrees goes down to six degrees and that ball
is just going nowhere. And if you had if you
try to get your launch up from eight or nine
degrees up to twelve, your three thousand spin turns into
four thousand. That ball is also going nowhere. So it's counterintuitive,
but three thousand spin is the right number for someone
(35:56):
who's four down. And then the other side of you
can actually move up into plus four territory. Then you
can get to some nicer sounding spin rate it's of
twenty two hundred or something, and that will help you.
That will be the new optal, so you can move
along that angle attack kind of X access and see
what your target spinarate should be. I think it's pretty
eye opening for golfers.
Speaker 1 (36:17):
I think, Shane, what's fun here about what Brody just
talked about is that it's a lot of numbers, a
lot of angles. I'm always having to jot things down
and do some trigonometry in my head, and that can
go over a lot of the listeners' heads, no doubt.
But what's fun is that we turned it into a practical,
actionable fitting chart in a fitting tool that's helped golfers
unluck distance right, super fun. It explains Lee Westwood four
(36:40):
down three thousand spin, number one player in the world.
It explains Cameron champ one ninety five ball speed. He
hits down two degrees, and he launches it at like
seven and a half eight, you know, and spins it
twenty six twenty seven hundred, and that's perfect actually for him.
Or it explains you know, like Bubba Watson. We used
(37:01):
to is this high straight one. He'd hit up on it,
He'd hit up like five or six, and he would
launch it a fifteen to seventeen with you know, seventeen
nineteen hundred spin when he went to go hit his
high bomb where he straightened out the curve. So this
chart explained finally we've cracked the code on explaining you
know why angled attack is super duper important. And again, Brody,
(37:24):
I think going back to baseball, it's just like a
brand new thing in baseball. But here we are in golf,
we've already cracked the code on this.
Speaker 2 (37:30):
You know, Brody, I wanted to ask you we are
we are always kind of finding new tools and our bags.
In terms of golf, it typically starts on the pro level.
I mean, I think, you know, we were a few
years ago it felt like everybody on the planet and
professional golf had a crossover. Now it's moved a little
bit more to the lofted wood world. I mean, I've
got a seven one in the bag. I think Marty's
(37:50):
got a seven more in the bag. I got a
nine wood built for me a few months ago. I
haven't put it in the bag yet, but I've messed
around with it, and I like it. I never in
my life I would take a driving iron out of
the bag. That was kind of one of my like,
my go to shot for so long. What's the next thing,
in your opinion that we'll see over the next year
or so in the professional golf world and maybe it'll
(38:11):
move to uh, to the amateur golf world that will
be popular amongst golfers. That's maybe not the most popular
thing right now.
Speaker 3 (38:18):
Yeah, I mean, I'm I'm definitely hoping that it's Thriver
for the for the PGA Tour golf world. I'm trying.
I'm trying to stir up, starve some fitting for myself
to get it in play because I've had some three
months that haven't cooperated in tournaments. So that's definitely on
the top of my mind right now.
Speaker 2 (38:35):
Two drivers in the bag from from a lot of
the time. I mean, I like, I mean, Marty did
did Tony? Did Tony do this at Augusta this past year?
Was that something he used during the tournament?
Speaker 1 (38:44):
Yeah? No, he did it at Augusta. And and what's
unique about his his experience there and and you know
better than than me having been around that golf course,
a lot, and being on the telecast is uh that
there's some specific holes you also need to draw it,
which is rare, Which is rare for a PGA Tour event,
you know, where you get to a course where it's
mandatory at a player of his length not only hit
it straighter, you're definitely going to hit off the tee
(39:07):
never needs it as a second shot. If you make
a mistake on yeah, thirteen to fifteen, you are laying
up there right, because that's how you maximize your strokes
gained on those particular holes. But yeah, Tony did it.
But I think what's fun about that concept is that
not only are we looking at the PGA Tour player
that hits it very far, but Brody tell Shane a
little bit about some of the insights we've had for
(39:28):
the everyday golfer from the Arcos data on where they
are on the golf course and how that informs maybe
some of our set configuration, set design, which is not
just looking at the super far hitter, but what do
we see on the opposite end, you know, the players
that hit a little bit shorter.
Speaker 3 (39:45):
Yeah, I was gonna say, like a better answer to
where we might be moving in the future is looking
at where do people hit most of their golf shots from.
So I think in our kind of gapping app logic,
it's easy just default too, Okay, Well, even gaps across
the bag. We want to have all of your irons
be I don't know, twelve to fifteen yard gaps. We
have our rule of thumb. Of your seven iron ballspet
(40:07):
divide by ten is your target gap number. But I
think what we can move towards when we have so
much data is figure out, okay, for a particular golf course,
what shots you're going to face. I think PGA tour
pros know this. Okay, if I have a two hundred
and fifty yard part three, it's like I'm going to
need that high loft affair. Would that have a chance
to hold that green? Trying to hit three ron into
that green is probably almost impossible. And so we can
(40:31):
probably start to provide that solution down to the everyday
golfer of understanding. Okay, you on your home course, you're
hitting a lot of t shots and that will be
your driver. And then maybe you have a ton of
your shots from eighty to one hundred and twenty yards,
and so you might want to have a four wedge
solution or five ledge solution that's really dialed in that range.
(40:52):
I think, I don't know give away Marty's like secret
for twenty twenty five, but he was mentioning he might
go to a five edge setup and try to get
super di although and he has some of these shorter
Arizona courses the summer.
Speaker 1 (41:03):
If you say five five wedges, yeah, And so my
my analysis on that, Shane is for Arizona Golf.
Speaker 3 (41:10):
Here we go on.
Speaker 2 (41:11):
Let's says, we gotta get it. This is Marty's twenty
twenty five New Year's resolution. We're gonna get out there
a few months early.
Speaker 1 (41:18):
We're going five wedges and it's love Arizona golf, right,
it's for the uh, you know, the talking stick golf
courses of the world where I am seventy to one
hundred and thirty five yards on every single approach shot
on the park totally, totally, and I need tighter gaps.
And then if I go a different course, I'll I'll
go back to four wedges and mix it up at
(41:40):
the top end of the back. No problem.
Speaker 2 (41:42):
What are we talking If we're talking five wedge set up,
I mean because you're not. I mean, I know famously
Phil did this back in the day. I mean, you're
not the first person to go five wedges, but I'd
say it went three to four and that was the
big jump. And now obviously going four to five, do
you have an idea of what it would look like?
Do you have an idea of what that loft would
look like in your bag?
Speaker 1 (41:59):
We haven't finished out, but in my head I want
to have instead of like thirteen or fourteen yard gaps
between wedges, I want to get them to nine or ten. Okay, right,
So that's really what I want to do, as well
as I need to improve my skill of being able
to hit my wedges closer. But yeah, that's a little
sneak preview. I think what Brody's getting at is, let's
get super nuanced into how to build somebody's bag for
(42:21):
their individual golf course patterns, playing conditions and things of
that nature, right, right, Brody?
Speaker 3 (42:27):
Yeah, And there definitely were some kind of higher level
of global insights that we got from Arcos data of
where do people hit their golf shots from And it's
not just a very even distribution from fifty to two
hundred yards that it does tend to clump around one
hundred and twenty five to one hundred and seventy five yards.
An interesting takeaway we had from Arcos Stata was that
(42:47):
it was almost irrespective of how far hit your driver,
which is maybe people not teeing U from the right tees.
But we looked at like, if you hit it one
hundred and seventy five to two hundred yards of your driver,
how far is your second shot distribution? And then for
a guy who hits at two fifty to two seventy five,
how far is your second shot distribution? And they like
lined up perfectly where all their second shots are around
(43:08):
that one hundred and twenty five two hundred and seventy
five yard range, and we're like, okay, let's get some
more clubs in the bag at that range. That was
kind of our push with the g four to thirty
line to add in kind of that fifty forty five
forty one kind of wedge solution there to get some
more clubs where people are hitting a lot of their
(43:28):
golf shots. And so that's that's the global perspective, But
then there's also maybe the iteration out of the line,
so we can take in someone's own personal arcostata and say, hey,
given how you play golf at your home course, this
is actually the set that we'd recommend for you and Marty.
Speaker 2 (43:43):
I'm assuming, you know, when you guys dive into this
arco stata, I'm assuming that an extremely high percentage of
golfers play almost one hundred percent of their golf at
the same golf yeps. I mean, you know, that's yeah,
that's something I'm sure you guys can figure out. And
I you know, like I think about my own golf, right,
and I traveled decent amount for work, and you know,
I get a chance to travel here and there. I'm
still playing the majority of my golf at my club
(44:05):
that I play at, right, So you want the bag
to make the most sense, like the Thriver at my club.
I've talked about this a lot with my friends. The
Thriver my club, for three holes is a mandatory golf shot,
and it would be a tough shot for me with
three wood, to be frank. So it's important for me
because again, if I'm playing my golf there, why not
have a bag that makes the most sense for the
course I'm playing the most.
Speaker 1 (44:26):
Yeah, totally, I think that's that's the future. It's super exciting.
I think it's again kind of meets that heuristic Shane
I like to have and we actually talked about on
the a little bit earlier in our conversation, which is
the tools that the tour player has access to. We
want to try to build that and make it available
to the everyday golfer. And it usually happens about a
decade later, Like it was probably about ten years ago
(44:49):
Chris was was mapping out bunkers on on on Google
Earth right, and now now it's all automated and applified
and you know, and things of that nature. So getting
being able to build somebody's bag to how they play golf,
how much do they travel, their specific things. I go
back to our conversation we had with Sawhith where he
was playing two clubs that went the same distance, one
(45:11):
went higher and went lower. That's a way to gap
your bag. You can gapping is not only yardage. You
can have trajectory gapping right, vertical gapping. It's another way
to kind of think about it.
Speaker 2 (45:21):
Yeah, Brody, can you watch golf and not think about data?
Is it possible for you to just sit down on
a Saturday afternoon and not. It's like I struggle with
this in terms of the like the production broadcasting side right,
because I've been involved in it for a number of years.
As I watch golf and on honestly all the sports,
I find myself noticing things right that would make sense
(45:42):
in my industry. Do you do the same thing when
you're just sitting around to casually watch, you know, the
back nine on Sunday of a golf tournament.
Speaker 3 (45:48):
Yeah, I was thinking that, Like you'd love to get
invested in a major and you're like, oh man, that's
super fun to watch. Maybe US Open briceless fields of pressure,
like you just get immersed in that. And then I
was like, well, in my hands, like man, there should
be a really cool like strokes gained pressure stat that
you come up with. So it doesn't take it doesn't
take much for like the wheels to start spinning, so yeah,
(46:09):
I probably don't get to to remove for it. You
see someone miss of ten foot and you're like, A,
that's point four shots. That's tough.
Speaker 1 (46:17):
I love that. I love that.
Speaker 2 (46:18):
You're like not, you're like jotting it down point four.
There you go, he's out.
Speaker 1 (46:21):
He's out.
Speaker 2 (46:22):
Should have should have stole second.
Speaker 1 (46:23):
You know what I'm saying.
Speaker 3 (46:24):
Yeah, just yeah, you gotta gotta get it better, better
than that.
Speaker 1 (46:27):
Shane, I got a fun one. Brody helped me with you.
You actually remember this, you you helped cover this event.
It was the Top Golf Tour Championship. So me and
me and my buddy qualified. Who are you playing with?
Who'd you play with? Martin? My friend Chris O'Connor, one
of my best that's striker. Uh you know, played at
Arizona State. Walked on when and real quick.
Speaker 2 (46:47):
For people that don't have any idea what this was,
this was a a two man golf tournament at Top Golf.
And if you qualified, I think if you were one
of the top two teams that all the top golfs
around the country, you went to Vegas, YEP to to
play in this in the Top Golf Tour Championship that
we actually shot and cut together and put it up
on YouTube. And I'm sure they're still out on YouTube
to this day.
Speaker 1 (47:07):
Yes. Yeah, it was actually the top one team. So
we was only one team from your local top Golf.
So me and my buddy qualified two years in a row,
and so had I had Brody. So we looked at
the top. The layout of the top golf in Las
Vegas was different than the one in Scottsdale where the
targets are how big they were the end of the range,
And so I knew the scoring and I was like, hey, Brody,
(47:30):
I didn't know the right strategy. Should I go like
try to make it all in all the short targets
a lot of the time, or should we take more
risk and go to the end ones and maybe run
the risk and my dispersion wouldn't be as good. So
I was like, hey, Brody, look at my data. Tell
me what to do. So Chris tell Shane about how
that how that little analysis.
Speaker 3 (47:48):
Went yeah, and like immediately triggered my kind of golf
metrics thirteen year old days because I was on Google
Earth trying to figure out how wide every target was.
I literally was like or functioning Google Earth, You're like, Okay,
that argaet is ten yards? Why that one's fifteen, that
one's twenty. And then it was like, oh, well, we
have player test data from Marty hitting pitching wedges seven irons,
(48:09):
four irons. That's kind of what the different distances were.
And so I was like, Okay, I can take Mary's
player test data, map it on to those different targets,
and I can figure out, like what his expected points
are if he only hits pitching wedges or only hits
seven irons, only hits four irons. And I gave him recommendation.
I was like, hey, Marty, I think the second target
is the way to go. That looks like your highest
(48:32):
fected points. And I also gave him like what's your
range of outcomes, like if you want to get aggressive
or you need to get a ton of points to
this set, like which one has the highest variance, So
trying to get pretty nuanced. But then then I don't know,
Marty can probably tell us. But the funny part to
me about the story is I was like, pretty proud
I did analysis for what Mary's stras should be. Maybe
questionable to do it on work time. That's a different
(48:54):
story also, And then Marty goes to Top Golf and
completely throws out the entire analysis.
Speaker 1 (49:03):
We started with a couple of things. Shane, it was
super windy, super windy, I remember that, yeah, And and
actually the terrain there on the Vegas Top Golf is
not flat, so everyone kept kind of the winds off
the left, hitting these slicy foreurns over to the right,
they'd hit this bank and it'd roll back in and
get in the target for super high points. So I
(49:23):
was like, Okay, we didn't capture that in the analysis.
Nothing wrong with the analysis, but you.
Speaker 2 (49:28):
Know, you know what, next year we should have flown
Brody out like the space I got it all done.
Speaker 1 (49:34):
So that's so fun in the semi finals.
Speaker 3 (49:38):
I think you always have to be like, what could
be wrong with your analysis when you're doing it, And
I was like, I'll just treating everything like it's I
don't know, like wherever it carries is where it goes.
And I kind knew in the back of my head
like balls can definitely bounce in and I was like,
I don't know if I can capture that very well.
But I ended up being like the reason why he
ended up changing the strategy because he could aim for
the far target. If it missed it, it bounce into
(49:59):
the back wall. And it's like, all right, yeah, pretty good.
Yeah that's better than I could have dreamed up.
Speaker 1 (50:03):
We needed the whole three D contour out.
Speaker 3 (50:05):
The yeah, yeah, weight model bouncing. We I messed up.
Speaker 1 (50:09):
Yeah, No, it was fun, mart Marty.
Speaker 2 (50:12):
There's two guys listening to this right now that qualified
like out of Myrtle Beach who are probably drinking like
Miller lights the whole time going we shouldn't have flown
in Vegas. This guy's got this guy handalyzing the targets
and got guys, you know, the smartest guys in the
room figured it out. Maybe I was in the wrong
I was in the wrong fight.
Speaker 1 (50:28):
My whole data science team behind me there. You know,
still didn't get it done. You still got to hit
the shops.
Speaker 2 (50:33):
It was like it was like fifty k.
Speaker 1 (50:35):
I think it hurts man.
Speaker 3 (50:38):
I was over her a five percent. Coaches, I was,
I was pushing.
Speaker 2 (50:42):
You know what, you got to negotiate on the front
and this is the same thing. And like your dad,
you had to get somebody in there to negotiate on
the front end. It's actually two dollars an hour, Dad,
That's what we're gonna do. Marty, got anything else for
Brody before we before we let him get back to work.
Speaker 1 (50:53):
No, yeah, I think for the those listening out there
with youngsters just going into college or high school and
they're like, hey, how can I use math? And use
it to apply it in sports. I mean, I think
what's fun about Brody is like the real life example
has made an enormous impact on the industry, combining you know, math, modeling,
(51:15):
physics skills and really helping out a lot of golfers
play better golf and improve clubfitters out there as well.
So I just think it's very fun and exciting to
have Brody here on her team and you know, kind
of embody that combination of skills and how you can
apply them in the golf industry. So, Brody, thanks for
thanks for being on the pod.
Speaker 3 (51:35):
Brother Yeah, thank you so much, Marty, thanks so much.
Speaker 2 (51:37):
Sean, Absolutely that is Chris Brody. This is the Ping
Proving Grounds Podcast.
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