Why 2 stroke penalty for hitting flagstick?

[Vinsk]

You don't understand the word 'theory.' What you say after using the word 'theory' is in fact, theory. You're referring to 'hypothesis.' Many non-scientific people make this error. Saying 'just theory' is actually an oxymoron. Also, any logical and rational person reading this discussion would side with Iacas. 'Jerk?' Hardly. It is you who loses credibility with such a statement.

Edited March 18, 2017 by Vinsk

[mvmac]

4 hours ago, iacas said:

P.S. @mvmac from a conversation today: "I was fooling around with the short putts without the flagstick in the other day, yes the hardest part is hitting it firm enough, feels so weird." He can attest to how hard it is to change your mindset in an instant. I will again suggest you don't do it before your tournament.

Right. So today I put the stick behind the hole about how far I was trying to hit it past the hole, I think that helped me hit it firm enough.

Here's that post.

 

[Hatchman]

In or out.  In every time for me, even in wind and slope.  Doesn't imped anything as Peltz said, unless you ram it.

 

Edited March 18, 2017 by Hatchman

[boogielicious]

We could run more designed experiments (a.k.a. DoE) with ramps to control ball speed and direction as others have done. We could aim the ball at the flagstick and off the flagstick but still in the area of the hole. We could run different distances from the cup and add break into the data set with uphill, downhill and side hill putts. We could run different speeds that would have the ball run 2, 4, 6 etc., feet past the hole if it was unimpeded. We could run hundreds of replicates randomized the legs. We could chart where the ball ended up with scatter charts. We could do statistical analysis on percent of putts holed and average distance missed putts were from the hole. We could publish our findings and show they agree with previous findings.

But it won't matter to those who firmly believe it not to be true because they saw Phil have Bones take the flagstick out at Torrey Pines on 18 back in 2012. Phil must be right, correct? He wasn't just doing if for show, right?

It reminds me of people who ignore the "science" that smoking and secondary smoke can cause cancer. They like to smoke, so the "science" is flawed.

[iacas]

3 hours ago, boogielicious said:

But it won't matter to those who firmly believe it not to be true because they saw Phil have Bones take the flagstick out at Torrey Pines on 18 back in 2012. Phil must be right, correct? He wasn't just doing if for show, right?

Thing is, too @boogielicious, Phil was fine to take the flagstick out there, because he might have been afraid of the flagstick hitting the ball while the ball was in the air. I think his plan was to fly it just past the flag and let the little spin and the big slope there bring it back. So he was maybe afraid of the initial fly-by, which would surely careen his ball back into the water hazard.

To argue against myself he probably didn't care if he finished second or fifth, so that may not have been the reason, but if it was I can at least see a little bit of the logic there because he had the "while the ball is in the air near the flagstick" bit to worry about.

Even that may not have fully offset the advantage gained by having it in with a ball bouncing or rolling near the cup, but it would have made it closer to net neutral for sure.

---

And @dedalus101, dude, chill out. If you honestly want to compare "I don't care" with "self-important jerk" as if they're equivalent, you're taking this shit way too seriously. It's just golf. I have the knowledge I have, and you have… your experiences. I'll stick with my information and the testing I've done. I'll stick with what the discussions I've had with physicists have told me, and my own calculations. You've yet to convince me of anything, and the only thing you've brought to the table at this point is a will to argue (and only this one thing - you've yet to post about anything else here at TST) and your experiences, which my knowledge tells me you're probably not even remembering accurately (because far more often than not a ball kept out by a flagstick would not have gone in with the flagstick out, either, and would have finished farther away, in fact).

P.S. The USGA and R&A haven't conducted the studies on their own. I'm asking them to, and I'm fairly confident that once they do, they'll see what I have seen. Yes, in this case, having read Pelz, having done a study myself, having run through the physics, I'm quite confident I know a bit more about this than the USGA/R&A. They haven't done any studies themselves. They're assuming there's no benefit. My experience and knowledge says they're wrong. And what's my end goal in trying to get this rule kept out of the 2019 rules? I'm looking after the game I love. Nothing more. It's not like I'll make a dime off this. In fact I spent money and time to build that site. All in service to the game I love.

[iacas]

Just quoting myself from another topic because I think it relates to this topic here, too.

Just now, iacas said:

Yeah, as you basically say below… I've found people are pretty bad at recognizing capture speed or how fast a ball is really rolling.

For example…

Both of those balls would have rolled 20-25' past the cup (we know because we played too much break a few times and the balls rolled that far past the cup), but if you asked most people they'd say 4 to 8 feet. Well, the people I asked said 4 to 8 feet, anyway.

My ball, for example, hit the BACK of the 8" cup. Matt's would have hit the back bottom corner had he not nailed the stick.

It's tough to gauge the speed of the ball going away from you. Even in the video, my putt (sideways) looks like it's going quite a bit faster than Matt's putt, but Matt's putt took about 44 frames to get to the front lip and mine took about 41 or 42, so it's not a big difference. A ball moving away from you is bound to look slower than one moving across your field of vision. This is where I think people's "experiences" (like @dedalus101's) are misleading - they see a ball pop out with the flagstick in, but fail to recognize that the ball was trucking along at 8' or 10' past capture speed or something, and so their memory is "the flagstick kept my ball out."