A new season, same old scores

I used to think baseball was the ultimate sport for the stats geek. In the days before SportsCenter, you didn't need video replays to recap the action from the night before. The box score gave you all the information you needed to dissect what happened in the game. Only baseball fans could look at the six-inch-thick "Baseball Encyclopedia" and consider it a treasure instead of a doorstop.

(Fun fact: It works wonderfully as a doorstop.)

I used to go to baseball games with a bag of peanuts in one hand and a score book in the other. Why? Because it was fun.

My friends never thought so. I could never delegate the task of scorekeeping if I wanted to leave my seat for a bathroom break or another beer.

Thankfully I found golf. I can continue my nerdy fascination with breaking games into numbers and statistics. The main difference is that, unlike baseball, I'm not interested in how the pros do.

My scorekeeping interest has turned inward; I keep track of all my scores, my putts, my penalty strokes, my sand shots. Maybe in the jumble of numbers I will figure out how to improve.

Here in the Northeast we've endured a season that barely qualifies as winter. Barely 2/3 of the way through February, I've played golf three times this year.

The first time I was every bit as rusty and horrible as I was when I started the game anew last year. I played nine holes at a lovely course in southern Berks County called Chapel Hill. On the par-36 front nine, I shot 85. On the plus side, I got my money's worth from the course. (I also saw what I think was a fox, but it didn't see me.) I kept my score in the single digits on just four of the nine holes and sank two balls in water hazards.

The fox had no interest in retrieving golf balls from the water hazard.

On track for a 170 score!

A week later, I played Exeter Golf Course with my friend Chris. Maybe it was the social factor, but I improved by almost 20 strokes, shooting a 66 in nine holes. That includes five penalty strokes over the course of the game. Most of the time I hit into giant water hazards, and in one case I hit my tee shot into some poor soul's backyard.

No, I didn't play it from there.

Nine holes of golf might not qualify as an actual test of improvement over last season. And even if it did, those two rounds didn't show much improvement at all. So earlier this week I went to my usual course – the par-56 Village Greens in Sinking Spring – for my first 18-hole round of 2012.

It's an executive course, where all but two holes – 9 and 18 – are par-3s. But the par-3 holes range in distance from 95 to 190, so for beginning golfers like me, the course still provides a nice challenge. The last three times I played there in 2011 I managed to hit in the 90s, not including a 90 I achieved last October.

I like my fairways wide and forgiving.

But this week I still showed the rust of a winter layoff, ending with 105. The first hole didn’t bode well; I shot 7, taking five of those just to get to the green. After bogeying the second hole I struggled the rest of the front nine, getting mostly 7s and 6s, with a 9 on the par-4 ninth hole.

I didn't do much better when I started the back nine, scoring a six on holes 10 and 11, needing three putts to finish each one. But I bogeyed holes 13 and 14; on the former I two-putted and on the latter I hit the green from the tee. I ended with a 47 on the back nine, 11 strokes better than the front nine.

It's still not a great score – 47 is 19 strokes over par for the back nine – but now I know how bad my playing is at the start of 2012.

Nowhere to go but up, right?