Sand Saves
It is amazing how often players get up and down out of sand traps. The tour has data for this category going back to 1980. Theoretically hitting the ball into a sand trap constitutes an error in ball striking, so I thought it would be instructive to review the patterns of how often players hit the ball into sand traps expecting to see a decline over the years in how often players trap the ball.
However, as you can see above players have trapped the ball consistently with almost no variation in the mean or the median over the years, averaging slightly more than 1.5 traps per round. Next we will look specifically at how often the players get up and down from traps. Any improvement in trap play will translate directly to the bottom line of saving strokes.
As you can see sand play steadily improved with players getting up and down somewhere between 8% and 10% more often at the end of the period than at the beginning. At a median of 1.63 traps per round and 9% improvement, 1.63 (traps per round) X 4 (rounds per tournament) x 9%= 0.6 fewer strokes per tournament and 15% of our one stroke per round reduction in scoring average.