The stars are lining up again this week at Bay Hill Club and Lodge for the Arnold Palmer Invitational.
It feels front-loaded, the current rate of designated events but that’s just the state of the schedule now that we are in the heart of the season.
You’ll have trouble finding many back-to-back weeks moving forward that don’t feature at least one elevated event.
This week’s limited field of 120 golfers will be trimmed to the low 65 and ties after 36 holes.
The Course
Bay Hill Club and Lodge returns to host another edition of the API. They’ve been hosting since the 1979 edition of this event.
This Dick Wilson design was laid out in the early 1960s and reworked by Arnold Palmer in 2009.
Glancing at the scoresheet, we see a par 72 that stretches to 7,466 yards.
That yardage sounds reasonable for today’s standards with it being a par 72 but it does play longer due to the setup of the course. There are many holes that suggest less-than-driver off the tee which puts an emphasis on mid-iron and long-iron approach performance. Adam Scott took that less-than-driver mentality to an extreme last year when he took the driver out of his bag when playing the API.
Sticking with the theme of course setup, last year featured thick rough around the greens which was a major change from the norm at Bay Hill which traditionally has featured more runoff areas, giving players more options to showcase their short game. The switch to thick rough put a bit more emphasis on the putting aspect of the short-game equation since there is more guesswork and hoping to get lucky when you deal with thick rough around the greens.
The green complexes are relatively large with an average square footage of 7,500 but don’t mistake that for easy. The TifEagle Bermuda runs extremely fast, “championship speeds” you might say.
As you might expect from a Florida course, big numbers are common here. The rate of double bogeys at Bay Hill is lower than PGA National or TPC Sawgrass but does stack up similarly with other water-heavy venues such as TPC Southwind and TPC Twin Cities.
Course Quotes
Sifting through some past quotes, let’s try to break down the course to see how it will play.
Rory McIlroy in 2022: “You take care of the par-5s here. You play conservatively the rest of the way, especially how the golf course here has been set up the past few years. You play for your pars, and then you try to pick off birdies on the par-5s and some of the easier holes. If you just keep doing that day after day, you’re going to find yourself around the top of the leaderboard.”
Jason Kokrak in 2021: “I think you can play this place a ton of different ways. You don’t have to hit a lot of drivers here (you can if you would like to) but you hit a lot of long irons off the tees. Some of the other guys are hitting maybe a hybrid or a 5-wood off the tee where I’m hitting maybe a 4-iron so I think that makes the fairways a little bit bigger for me, easier to hit. And I’m a high-ball hitter, so I think being able to hit it higher into the greens and stop it in some spots that some other guys can’t.”
Rafa Cabrera Bello in 2019: “There’s a lot of challenging shots, pretty much on every hole it’s inviting you to take a risk and it really gets you focused on what you want to do. Of course it’s testing you because of all those daunting shots. You commit, I mean, it forces you to commit and I really enjoy that challenge.”
Risk-reward course with a focus on attacking the par 5s. As Kokrak pointed out, you don’t have to hit a lot of drivers but length is still very valuable.
Correlated Courses
Using historical data we can look at overperformance and underperformance at this week’s host course and compare that to all of the courses played out on TOUR. Here are the ones that shared a lot of overlap:
Torrey Pines
TPC Scottsdale
TPC Sawgrass
Detroit GC
Attacking with the driver, dodging trouble with risk-reward shots, and fast greens.
The Weather
Thursday: Sunny with a high of 87 degrees. Winds at 11 MPH gusts up to 25 MPH.
Friday: Sunny with a high of 88degrees. Winds at 22 MPH, gusts up to 40 MPH.
After a calmer-than-usual week at PGA National, Mother Nature returns to have some fun with this week’s strong field. Heavy winds are probable for much of the week.
