Alright, let me walk you through something that was rattling around in my brain the other day. I was thinking about the 2023 Masters tournament, you know, Augusta, green jacket, the whole thing. And a simple question popped into my head: just how many pars were actually made during the entire tournament? Not birdies, not bogeys, just good ol’ pars.
Seemed like a straightforward thing to look up, right? So, I sat down at my desk, fired up the computer, and started digging.
My Search Kinda Went Like This
First stop, I figured, had to be the official Masters website. Navigated through the menus, looked at the results, the player stats, hole-by-hole breakdowns. Lots of great info there, don’t get me wrong. You could see who scored what on which hole, their final scores relative to par, all that jazz. But a simple, tournament-wide total count of pars? Couldn’t find it listed anywhere obvious.
Okay, no problem. Plan B. I went over to some of the big sports news and stats sites. You know the ones. Looked through their Masters coverage, leaderboards, statistical sections. Again, tons of data. Found things like:
- Total birdies made
- Total bogeys
- Number of eagles
- Hardest and easiest holes
- Scores for players who made the cut vs. missed cut
But the specific total number of pars? Still nowhere to be seen as a single headline number. It struck me then that maybe this isn’t a stat people usually track or report directly. It’s kind of granular when you think about it.
Thinking About Why It’s Tricky
I started thinking about what it would take to actually figure this out. You’ve got, what, 88 players starting? Then a bunch miss the cut after two rounds. So, you’d need the scorecard for every single player for every round they completed. Then you’d have to go through hole by hole, count only the pars for each player, and then add all those numbers together. That’s a heck of a lot of counting!
Most stats focus on performance relative to par (like birdies, bogeys, overall score) because that’s what really matters for the leaderboard. A simple count of pars across everyone doesn’t tell you much about who won or how difficult the course played overall, compared to knowing the number of scores under par, for instance.
So, after poking around for a good while, checking different stat pages, even trying some specific search terms, I basically came up empty on finding a quick, readily available number for the total pars made in the 2023 Masters. It seems it’s just not a standard reported figure. You could probably calculate it if you were really determined and had access to all the raw scorecard data, but it’s not something the official sources or major sports sites seem to add up and publish.
It was an interesting little rabbit hole, though! Sometimes the simplest questions don’t have the simplest answers readily available. Just part of the process, I guess. Learned a bit more about what kind of stats are typically tracked and why.
