"We’ve seen numbers-crunchers change baseball, basketball and football. Golf could be next."

Sean Martin covers the the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan Sports Analytics Conference's first Golf Analytics panel where they discussed applications of advanced statistical analysis in golf in hopes that could have our own VORP's and Billy Beane's. The PGA Tour will be unveiling a new putting stat with the dreaded V word in it.

The old putting statistics were unreliable measures of skill because they put excessive value on prior shots. A player who missed a lot of greens often took fewer putts per round because his chip shots to the green left shorter putts than if he’d hit the green with his approach shot. Putts per green in regulation was too dependent on the length of a player’s birdie putt.

ShotLink also can change the way we view golf. Kin Lo, the PGA Tour’s director of research and development, theorizes there could be a day when we see a player’s probability of hitting a green or making a putt displayed on-screen before he attempts a shot, similar to what we see in poker.

“(ShotLink statistics) facilitate a much deeper understanding of what’s going on and how players are performing,” Lo said.

The more-detailed data allows deeper analysis of the game, from which everyone from professionals and amateurs can benefit. Two University of Pennsylvania professors used the ShotLink statistics to prove how “loss aversion,” the tendency of people to strongly prefer avoiding losses over acquiring gains, was detrimental to players’ putting.