Statistics in sports are either something you love or ignore.

For generations — long before fantasy leagues — people spent each morning combing through the slightest details of baseball box scores in the paper. They did it for the pleasure.

Others looked at the overwhelming jumble of digits and turned the page. Too much work for a brain seemingly allergic to numbers.

Golf never was much for stats. Until the last decade, golf stats were about as rudimentary as they could get and hardly indicative of much. Putting average? So you chip in from a foot off the green to a foot from the cup, and you get credit for a one-putt? That says more about your chipping than your putting.

Really, it was about one thing. The score.

The PGA Tour's ShotLink changed everything. Hundreds of volunteers at tour stops each week use high-tech lasers, combined with CDW software, to measure every shot. In turn, the tour produces more statistics than just about any sport, though baseball is still king of the minutiae.

And they keeping coming.

At the Memorial last weekend, the tour introduced three areas of its strokes-gained statistics: off-the-tee, approach-the-green and around-the-green. These are further breakdowns of the original strokes-gained categories: tee-to-green and putting.

“The vision was always to really evolve to the point where we had a benchmark for each phase of the game,” said Steve Evans, a 26-year tour employee and vice president of information systems.

“Traditional golf stats made their best effort to work on phases of the game, but really, most of those statistics ended up falling short. This gives us a very objective way to measure all the shots.”

Because golf is an individual sport, the idea with strokes gained was to compare players' abilities in each facet. Where does a certain golfer gain shots and lose them in any given round? What can be learned of long-term trends, and how might players use them to improve?

Of more interest to the consumer and television viewer: Does it make the PGA Tour more interesting?

“It gives a fan a better understanding of what's really going on,” Evans said. “There are three guys tied for the lead in the final round. How did they get there?”

Evans cites an example this season from Doral, which saw a great stretch duel that included winner Adam Scott, Bubba Watson, Danny Willett, Rory McIlroy and Phil Mickelson.

“All but one of them was there because of their tee-to-green play,” Evans said. “One was there because of his putting. That was Willett. And lo and behold, he goes on to win the Masters.”

After Jordan Spieth's second win of the year at Colonial, tour gurus compared his stats thus far with his five-win season of 2015. He was worse in only one category this year: approach-to-green, where he was losing more than a half-shot per round (.59) to the field. And Spieth would agree he hasn't been as sharp with his irons.

The tour was able to use the ShotLink data to calculate the new statistics going back six years. The leaders: off-the-tee, Bubba Watson, who impressively gained more than a stroke (1.03) per round; approach-to-the-green, Jim Furyk (0.88); and around-the-green, Luke Donald (0.44).

Scott leads the tour this season in strokes gained tee-to-green, and Jason Day is the top gainer in putting. Day has three wins and Scott two. That would seem to validate the relevancy of the stats.

One stat that jumped out at Evans came when comparing performance from the fairway and the rough. For players to achieve hitting 75 percent of the greens, they have to approach from 150 yards or closer while in the fairway. From the rough, they hit 75 percent from 47 yards or closer.

“That's a pretty big difference that nobody had quantified before,” Evans said.

The stats system is not without its detractors.

Posted a critic, Tom Pesta, under a story on the tour's website: “These numbers don't seem to translate into scoring average, or money won, or victories – so WHO CARES!!”

Countered Evans: “I get the concept that at the end of the day it's whoever gets the ball in the hole in the least number of strokes. But the only way to know you're improving at something is if you measure it.”

Spoken like a true stats lover.

tod.leonard@tribpub.com