Farmers Insurance Open: The top ten performances at Torrey Pines
By Bill Felber
In victory, Justin Rose’s game portrait was both classic and classically simple. He not only out-shot everybody else, he out-shot himself.
When you’re already No. 1 in the world and out-perform your standard, that’s tough to beat.
Rose’s major advantage lay in his iron game. Measured by Strokes Gained, he picked up 1.87 strokes per round on the field at Torrey Pines, about 1.35 strokes superior to his .526 stroke per round average.
The rest of his game was less spectacular but uniformly steady. Off the tees, Rose gained about two-thirds of a stroke per round, slightly better than his 2018 average of 0.55. Around the greens, Rose’s margin was six-tenths of a stroke per round, again an improvement on his +0.45 average gain.
It was the same story on the putting surfaces, where Rose in 2018 was about four-tenths of a stroke per round better than the field. At Torrey Pines, he was about two-thirds of a stroke better.
With the exception of his approach game, the improvements are arguably incremental. Yet they add up to 1.8 strokes per round, a nice margin measured against the standard set by the world’s top-ranked player.
Predictably, Rose’s Z Score for the Farmers Insurance Open – the number of standard deviations by which he bettered the field average – was -2.84, making his the second most dominant performance of the 2019 season.