Searching for a Specialist: Sony Open

by Josh Culp (futureoffantasy) Last Updated 2017-01-16 18:23:31

Welcome back to another specialist search.

We are staying in Hawaii this week as we ready for the Sony Open in Honolulu.

Before we look ahead, it’s always nice to recap the previous week. At the SBS TOC we saw all five specialists finish top 15, with four inside the top 10. Certainly a good week if you heavily sprinkled the specialists throughout your lineups.

This week at Waialae Country Club we will look at historical performance on short courses, slow greens, par 70 courses, and bermudagrass greens.

Here we go…

Short Courses

The yardage on the scorecard of Waialae Country Club is a measly 7,044 yards.

The good thing about short PGA courses is that we know they aren’t going to be straight forward. If a short course makes the annual rotation then it’s either a foreign course or a “classical design.”

This one falls in the latter bucket. Classical courses were made back in the good old days when shot-shaping was still an art form. That means the fairways are usually lined with trees or hazards and are heavily dog-legged which doesn’t allow you to fully unleash off the tee box, like a lot of modern courses do.

This doesn’t mean we need to cross off all the bombers on our list. It just means that the typical distance advantage is somewhat muted this week and all golfers are on a somewhat equal playing field.

The Top 10 Short Course Specialists are:

Jimmy Walker (2.805 sg:short vs. 1.546 sg:total)
Si Woo Kim (1.964 sg:short vs. 1.092 sg:total) Has Withdrawn
Patrick Rodgers (1.485 sg:short vs. 0.71 sg:total)
Brian Gay (0.374 sg:short vs. -0.351 sg:total)
Anirban Lahiri (1.483 sg:short vs. 0.774 sg:total)
Zac Blair (1.21 sg:short vs. 0.524 sg:total)
Fabian Gomez (1.052 sg:short vs. 0.443 sg:total)
Cameron Smith (1.224 sg:short vs. 0.62 sg:total)
Scott Piercy (1.654 sg:short vs. 1.087 sg:total)
Bill Haas (2.138 sg:short vs. 1.598 sg:total)

You will noticed a few bombers made the list, but for the most part, these golfers are the plodders that rely on iron play and short game.

Jimmy Walker has top 25s in eight of his last nine starts on courses measuring less than 7,100 yards. He typically takes advantage of these tiny layouts.

Who has the biggest sample of success on short courses, since 2014? That would be Russell Knox with 11 top 25s (more on him in a bit) and Charles Howell III with 10 top 25s over that stretch.

On the flip side, Bud Cauley has lost ~14 strokes to the field over his last 30 rounds on short tracks. I see a big year ahead for Cauley, but I don’t think it starts this week.

Golfers Remaining: 52

Slow Greens

The greens here at Waialae are bermuda and they generally run 11 feet on the stimpmeter. Sometimes they stretch them up to 11.5 but for the most part these are on the slow side.

More importantly, the type of golfers that excel on slow greens also have a very high correlation with success at the Sony Open.

The 10 Slow Green Specialists in the field:

Zac Blair (1.265 sg:slow greens vs. 0.524 sg:total)
Tim Wilkinson (0.875 sg:slow greens vs. 0.155 sg:total)
Matt Every (0.23 sg:slow greens vs. -0.351 sg:total)
John Peterson (0.712 sg:slow greens vs. 0.225 sg:total)
Boo Weekley (0.865 sg:slow greens vs. 0.39 sg:total)
Fabian Gomez (0.878 sg:slow greens vs. 0.443 sg:total)
Jimmy Walker (1.969 sg:slow greens vs. 1.546 sg:total)
Tony Finau (1.59 sg:slow greens vs. 1.221 sg:total)
Kevin Kisner (1.426 sg:slow greens vs. 1.099 sg:total)
Jason Bohn (1.106 sg:slow greens vs. 0.794 sg:total)

Immediately the style of golf required this week is starting to take shape. The majority of this list can be bucketed into the category of accurate driver + good irons (ball-striking) or great putter. Tony Finau would probably be the one exception to that, but he’ll get eliminated by the end of this article anyway (SPOILER!).

Zac Blair highlights this list and it’s not just because of his two top 10s here at the Sony Open. In 12 starts played on slow greens, he’s found the top 25 in six of them (50%). Looking at all of his other starts on TOUR, he finds top 25s in 5-of-59 or just 8.4%. Perhaps it’s how the courses he grew up playing in Utah were setup.

On the other side, we have somewhat alarming news for Russell Knox. Over his last 18 starts on slow greens, he’s more than half-a-shot worse per round, when compared to his baseline performance. While this course sets up wonderfully for his tee-to-green game, his poor course history starts to make sense once you dive into these green speed numbers.

Golfers Remaining: 24

Par 70 Courses

Last week we had a par 73 (only one on TOUR!) This week we return to normalcy with a basic par 70 layout.

That means only two par 5s to take advantage of. With the par 5s both at 551 yards or shorter, everyone in the field can take advantage of them.

Let’s see who prefers these par 70 courses.

The Top 10 Par 70 Specialists:

Brian Gay (0.32 sg:par70 vs. -0.351 sg:total)
Tim Wilkinson (0.63 sg:par70 vs. 0.155 sg:total)
Shawn Stefani (1.241 sg:par70 vs. 0.797 sg:total)
Chris Kirk (1.598 sg:par70 vs. 1.263 sg:total)
Boo Weekley (0.683 sg:par70 vs. 0.39 sg:total)
Kevin Kisner (1.376 sg:par70 vs. 1.099 sg:total)
Ken Duke (0.212 sg:par70 vs. -0.058 sg:total)
Zac Blair (0.779 sg:par70 vs. 0.524 sg:total)
Brian Harman (1.089 sg:par70 vs. 0.879 sg:total)
Kyle Stanley (0.425 sg:par70 vs. 0.246 sg:total)

If you haven’t noticed the trend by now, let me point it out. Distance is not a requirement this week.

Someone like Brian Gay is nowhere near elite at this stage in his career, but at least he’s on the right side of the field when it comes to these par 70 tracks.

Think Patrick Rodgers is in for a big 2017? So do I, but par 70s have not been kind to him. In 14 attempts at par 70s, he’s found just one top 25. That ratio will surely improve over the course of his career, but in the mean time, I will save my big-exposure weeks for par 72s when he can really take advantage of his massive distance.

Golfers Remaining: 14

Bermuda Greens

Last week we saw bermuda greens but if you listen to the golfer quotes, you can’t help but notice how unique the greens are at Kapalua. They are slow and incredibly twisty-turny. If you watched any of the coverage last week, you probably noticed golfers lining up nearly with their back to the hole on some of the big swoopers.

That won’t be the case this week at Waialae. That brings grass type into the equation, because the small subtleties of properly reading the grain will be more important this week.

The 5 Bermuda Specialists:

Matt Every (0.493 sg:bermuda vs. -0.351 sg:total)
Fabian Gomez (0.959 sg:bermuda vs. 0.443 sg:total)
John Peterson (0.647 sg:bermuda vs. 0.225 sg:total)
Boo Weekley (0.698 sg:bermuda vs. 0.39 sg:total)
Chris Kirk (1.487 sg:bermuda vs. 1.263 sg:total)

Matt Every enters with 11 straight missed cuts but if there were a betting line out there for him to make the cut, I would be in favor of YES, he will make the cut. That being said, he’s missed 11 straight cuts! Don’t get carried away here.

This is where Tony Finau gets a lot of attention. Early on in his career he’s seen a massive decrease in performance on bermuda versus any other putting surfaces. The safe thing is to avoid Finau this week, because the odds are not in your favor.

Golfers Remaining: 9

Baseline Performance

Looking at long-term performance we can say goodbye to Ken Duke and Matt Every here, since they are both losing strokes to the field since 2014.

More recently we can look at performance over the last 10 weeks and eliminate Kevin Kisner and Boo Weekley. The Kiz finally figured out the riddle of Waialae last year, posting a fifth-place finish, but without that great form entering the week, I won’t take my chances on a repeat. Same goes for Weekley, who I would consider a GPP-only option along with Kisner.

The Specialists

Zac Blair
Fabian Gomez
John Peterson
Shawn Stefani
Chris Kirk

Our specialist this week is Zac Blair!

Talk about some value specialists! Last week we had five specialists and it wasn’t possible to make a lineup with all five. This time around, you’d have a whopping $13.K remaining if you jammed all five into a squad.

Our specialists pass the test in terms of course history this week. Overall, they are a combined 16-for-17 at Waialae including six top 10s, one of those a win (Fabian Gomez last year). Surprisingly, the missed cut came from Chris Kirk, but he was playing his way back from injury at the time.

I would say all five are good to go this week. They should help you diversify your lineups and avoid some of the chalk landmines that have been setup due to soft pricing.

The Anti-Specialists

Looking for the opposite of our specialists, these golfers have negative numbers in all four angles!

Bud Cauley
Jonas Blixt
Johnson Wagner
Justin Thomas

The big name here is Justin Thomas. He’s coming off a monster week at Kapalua and that should really increase his ownership. Based on the course setup this week, it looks like a good week to fade him entirely, or at least lower your exposure dramatically.

Best of luck everyone!

Below is a table with the full specialist data. Any fields with a 0 in them mean the sample size is not large enough. There is a minimum of 25 rounds to qualify for each angle.

The SG:Total column is a baseline performance measure (since 2014),

Form looks at the performance over the last 10 weeks. Given the holiday break, form is not to be fully trusted right now due to small samples.