Searching for a Specialist: Waste Management Open

by Josh Culp (futureoffantasy) Last Updated 2017-02-07 14:53:53

Welcome back to another specialist search.

Last week we saw more cut carnage with roughly 3% of lineups getting 6-of-6 through. Two of our six specialists got smacked with the MC. Let’s do a brief recap of our specialists.

Dustin Johnson is an interesting case. Did he perform poorly because of jet lag from Abu Dhabi? Did he perform poorly because of the large crowds following his group of Tiger, and J Day? Did he perform poorly because of the incredibly slow routine of Day? Or did he just have a bad week? It’s impossible to say, but it’s a part of the reason DFS golf is so fun/excruciating.

Jimmy Walker was the second MC. He was a course horse but the warning signs for a letdown were there when he was at the PGA Merchandise Show in Florida until Wednesday afternoon. He clearly wasn’t taking the Farmers very seriously, getting no prep time and it showed on Thursday and Friday.

The four other specialists cleared the cut line with Steele, English, and Michael Thompson all easily pulling their weight. The stud specialists let us down in the end but it wasn’t a disaster, either. It’s time to look ahead for this week’s Waste Management Phoenix Open.

For Phoenix we are going to introduce a new angle (Cold Weather) in addition to Bermuda Greens, Driver-Heavy Courses, and Fast Greens.

Here we go…

Cold Weather

The PGA TOUR has zoned in the annual rota to allow these golfers to primarily play in 75-to-80 degree weather every week. Anything 70 degrees or lower is considered cold for them to golf in.

It’s a bit harder to find that kind of 80-degree weather in January and February, which explains the Aloha Double to kick off the season in Sunny Hawaii. Other than that, a lot of the West Coast Swing takes place in chilly temps, for golf standards.

We saw it last week when Tiger was jokingly complaining about re-adjusting his warmup process for the chilly weather since Mac Daddy Santa is used to practicing shirtless in his backyard back in Florida.

At the Phoenix, since 2010 the daily high at this event has only eclipsed 75 degrees once, round 4 last year when it was a balmy 78 degrees. The morning tee times here often kick off in low-to-mid 50s before heating up to upper 60s by noon.

The Top 10 Cold Weather Specialists are:

Luke Donald (1.975 sg:cold weather vs. 1.041 sg:total)
K.J. Choi (1.501 sg:cold weather vs. 0.603 sg:total)
William McGirt (1.867 sg:cold weather vs. 0.997 sg:total)
Patton Kizzire (1.62 sg:cold weather vs. 0.772 sg:total)
Pat Perez (1.605 sg:cold weather vs. 0.911 sg:total)
Martin Laird (1.53 sg:cold weather vs. 0.854 sg:total)
J.B. Holmes (1.943 sg:cold weather vs. 1.364 sg:total)
Brian Stuard (1.032 sg:cold weather vs. 0.46 sg:total)
Nick Taylor (0.885 sg:cold weather vs. 0.323 sg:total)
Sung Kang (1.201 sg:cold weather vs. 0.667 sg:total)

The list above includes an Englishman, a Scot, a Canadian, a Michigan native. All places you’d expect to play golf in less-than-ideal conditions.

Luke Donald is almost a shot better, per round, in cold weather. That’s a crazy-high split. However, he is equally bad at one of the angles coming up, so I wouldn’t go rush to put Donald into all your lineups just yet.

This is a new angle I’ve started tracking so there isn’t much history behind it, but I’m excited to watch how these cold-weather specialists perform.

Bermuda Greens

When Tom Weiskopf renovated this course after the 2014 edition, he relaid all new TifDwarf Bermuda greens.

It’s worth noting that most Arizona courses get overseeded (generally in September or October from what I’ve read). The seasonal climate from year-to-year can alter how much these greens are putting like Bermuda come February. It’s worth keeping an eye out for any possible word of that.

However, bermuda specialists have the strongest correlation by far at this event, when comparing to other grass types.

The 10 Bermuda Specialists remaining:

Matt Every (0.332 sg:bermuda vs. -0.413 sg:total)
Brett Stegmaier (0.875 sg:bermuda vs. 0.402 sg:total)
Luke Donald (1.506 sg:bermuda vs. 1.041 sg:total)
Fabian Gomez (0.855 sg:bermuda vs. 0.418 sg:total)
John Peterson (0.639 sg:bermuda vs. 0.209 sg:total)
Bryce Molder (1.129 sg:bermuda vs. 0.712 sg:total)
Ben Martin (1.067 sg:bermuda vs. 0.685 sg:total)
Pat Perez (1.284 sg:bermuda vs. 0.911 sg:total)
Lucas Glover (0.919 sg:bermuda vs. 0.558 sg:total)
Blayne Barber (0.865 sg:bermuda vs. 0.516 sg:total)

This list has a lot of elite putters and then a few awful putters that become serviceable putters when they head to bermuda (J Peterson & Glover).

Glover, for instance, has 15 top 25s since 2014, and 11 of those have come on bermudagrass greens.

Driver-Heavy Courses

The layout at TPC Scottsdale is desert-style golf. It’s firm and fast, and not extremely penalizing directly off the fairways.

Danny Lee had this to say last year, “The greens being so firm, you’re kind of forced to hit driver at tee shot. You want to hit a shorter club on second shot.”

The Top 10 Driver-Heavy Specialists:

Brian Gay (0.544 sg:driver-heavy vs. -0.283 sg:total)
Rod Pampling (0.824 sg:driver-heavy vs. 0.182 sg:total)
Smylie Kaufman (1.377 sg:driver-heavy vs. 0.741 sg:total)
Brett Stegmaier (1.019 sg:driver-heavy vs. 0.402 sg:total)
Rickie Fowler (2.487 sg:driver-heavy vs. 1.888 sg:total)
Alex Cejka (1.279 sg:driver-heavy vs. 0.682 sg:total)
Boo Weekley (0.954 sg:driver-heavy vs. 0.359 sg:total)
Shane Lowry (2.129 sg:driver-heavy vs. 1.537 sg:total)
Billy Horschel (1.837 sg:driver-heavy vs. 1.274 sg:total)
Ollie Schniederjans (1.139 sg:driver-heavy vs. 0.581 sg:total)

The key here is comfort. The list above is a mix of bombers and plodders.

Some of the bombers may feel comfortable on this type of layout because they get to use their favorite weapon more often. Bomb and Gouge type of golf.

The plodders on the other hand are happy because they put their drives in the fairway more often than the rest of the field, which sets them up for plenty of short-to-mid irons into the firm greens.

Fast Greens

Green speeds are not given as much reporting attention as I would like. In an ideal world, the PGA TOUR would send out some round notes that include things like stimpmeter for the round.

Luckily, we get some basic data after the fact that tells us how fast the greens were running. When they are faster than 12 feet on the stimpmeter than we can classify them as fast.

The greens here generally run between 12 and 12.6 on the stimp which puts them in the category of faster greens.

The 10 Fast Green Specialists:

Geoff Ogilvy (1.352 sg:fast greens vs. 0.336 sg:total)
Boo Weekley (1.172 sg:fast greens vs. 0.359 sg:total)
Roberto Castro (1.269 sg:fast greens vs. 0.535 sg:total)
Ryo Ishikawa (1.078 sg:fast greens vs. 0.386 sg:total)
Hunter Mahan (1.244 sg:fast greens vs. 0.64 sg:total)
Jonas Blixt (1.063 sg:fast greens vs. 0.51 sg:total)
Matt Every (0.14 sg:fast greens vs. -0.413 sg:total)
Jamie Lovemark (1.338 sg:fast greens vs. 0.816 sg:total)
Greg Chalmers (0.312 sg:fast greens vs. -0.204 sg:total)
Charlie Beljan (-0.223 sg:fast greens vs. -0.732 sg:total)

The Aussies tend to struggle with the cold weather, but make up ground in the fast green category.

Once again, this is all about comfort, because not all golfers grew up or even practice now in the same conditions. In general, good ball-strikers get a boost when firm and fast greens are on tap while the plodders that usually rely on putting often get a downgrade.

Baseline Performance

We now have a list of 13 potential specialists but we can narrow that down by looking at current form.

If a golfer hasn’t teed it up over the last 10 weeks or if they are losing strokes to the field over that time frame, then we can eliminate them from our specialist search. That includes:

Matt Kuchar
Boo Weekley
Ricky Barnes
K.J. Choi

Matt Kuchar will be making his first start of 2017. He usually starts in Hawaii but didn’t win an event last year so he skipped those tournaments this year. Obviously, his price tag on DK makes him easy to pick despite the lack of recent play.

Lastly we can also remove Ken Duke from our search since he’s losing strokes to the field since the calendar struck 2017.

The Specialists

Roberto Castro
Lucas Glover
William McGirt
Daniel Berger
Brooks Koepka
Harris English
Robert Streb
Bubba Watson

Our specialist this week is Roberto Castro!

Castro is making his debut in the specialist circle, but he picked a good week to do so. He is coming off a week where he led the Farmers field in Greens in Regulation as well as Distance from Edge of Fairway. If his driver stays hot this week then he should have plenty of short irons into these greens at TPC Scottsdale.

There are no red flags popping up with any of the specialists unless you talk about Glover’s putter or Bubba’s disdain for the course.

Overall, I think it should be a good week for the specialists if you mix and match them throughout your lineups.

The Anti-Specialists

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

Brian Harman
Spencer Levin
Patrick Reed

Patrick Reed is the big name here. He’s making his third start at TPC Scottsdale with a T19 and T40 on his resume. If you look at his specialist numbers they are all just barely in the negative. I wouldn’t say this is a must-fade, but the course does not appear to be an ideal fit. He also recently withdrew from an upcoming event in Australia due to respiratory infection. That may be precautionary to avoid getting sick again, or he may be still fighting it off. Either way, the stars do not look to be aligned for Captain America this week.

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 (PGA & Euro). Given the holiday break, form is just now rounding back into shape.