mdl

For the same reason the OP wasn't sure his relief then better shot option was legal. Say you've got a ball buried in the mud right near the trunk of a bushy, thorny tree. If you simply took the ball out of the mud, cleaned it off, and then placed it 1 inch to the side of the plug hole, it would be unplayable. If you drop it one club length outside the bush, now it's playable. The exception is to prevent this. You can't unplug and take a free drop from a spot that would be unplayable even if the ball weren't plugged.

I was gonna reference Rancho Park. Used to be my home course too. I was in the men's club for a while. I basically never played starting after 8am on weekends, and even then quicker than 5 hours was rare, and 6 hours wasn't out of the question. Quicker than 5:30 starting closer to midday on the weekend basically never happened. I love #10 at Rancho, and it's a hard hole. But even if you played it well and parred (or birdied!) and were excited, you'd be instantly deflated on a weekend round coming up to 3 groups getting snacks and drinks at the snack hut waiting for the par 3 to clear. And even then, people would only rarely let you hit on like they were supposed to.

Like @Pretzel said, I'd always rather be closer. And I have way more confidence in my 60˚ from anywhere in the 30-75 yard range than I do with a full swing with that club. But counting only shots from the distance for a full swing with my shortest club, it's 118-125 yards (depending on the day), pin right center of green, smooth swing with my GW.

I think Erik's being a little pedantic here But I agree with his answer. The lowest I've ever gotten was a 7.7, and I play off ~10 now. I've never been good enough to really experience the ramifications of good architecture. I'm good enough to appreciate it and try to make decisions based off of it, but I feel like a full appreciation requires that you actually expect to make the shot and get the reward a good percentage of the time when taking a risk determined by the architecture. Or that when you understand that a low ball on a certain side of the fairway is the best play, you actually have that in your bag at a high percentage. Just being able to see the cool consequences of the architecture, something I think I'm at least not bad at, isn't the same as actually having your experience of the course primarily dominated by the architecture, rather than primarily dominated by the width of your dispersion cone.

Yeah, it's weird this knowledge hasn't fully taken over. It's been shown many times, at least in baseball where I used to look into the research, that warming up with lighter than game weight increases swing speed, and heavier than game weight reduces swing speed. This isn't a definitive study, but is the first one I found googling just now and agrees with other literature I've seen over the years.

I've never actually said "Be the right club today!", but I totally unironically yell "Be right!" when I hit one that's tracking right on the pin. That's probably the most embarrassing one for me. I might have to slap someone who said Mr. Hogan non-ironically. Thankfully I've never heard that in person...

Agree that in general the OP pic indicates maybe your club should be more upright. But a word of caution. When I got fit, going from standard to 2˚ upright helped me hit with the toe of the club less angled towards the ground, but not all the way. And going more and more upright didn't help! It was my swing. I'd come in toe down from how I set up with basically any reasonable lie angle.

Ah. Right. That makes sense. So I never need to leave the flagstick in

Maybe I missed this earlier in this very long thread. But am I right in deducing from #3 that according to your testing while having the flagstick in doesn't hurt if you're stopping the ball within a couple feet of the cup, it also doesn't help? Intuitively that makes sense if you're only going to run it by ~6". But I'm surprised if having the stick in doesn't help at least a touch on balls that are going to run 3' by.

After seeing the numbers, and having some experience playing with the stick in all the time when I'm trying to speed golf, I want it in all the time. I'm not going to be a big stickler about it though. If I'm not first to putt and a playing partner takes it out, I won't insist on putting it back in. Maybe I'd be singing a different tune if I ever had anything more than $10 on the line. I agree it could become a problem for pace of play. Not sure how likely I feel that is.

Looks great!

Shot a nice 80 on Sunday. Didn't have time to get there early, just stepped onto the first tee. 3-putt double to start, then three more bogeys, one a 3-putt, to go +5 through 4. Then +3 through last 14, hitting the ball great. It was really cold so even lost a few shots choosing the wrong club for the conditions, coming up short twice and long twice hitting the shot I wanted, though I got two of those up and down. Shot of the day though was this. Two putted for birdie.

Haha. You're welcome. Notice I haven't posted a video of my own swings in a while. I know they're ugly and have obvious flaws to work on when time permits. Don't need online evidence of how ugly it is

What's up with the cross the line at the top and super steep at A5?