But Erik, their position is that the poor putters will be effected more than the good putters by this increased randomness. It’s not a zero sum game like chess or the lottery where increasing luck must have an offsetting reduction in skill.
100% is 100%. What other inputs are there beyond "skill" and "randomness" in saying "those two things determine the outcome"? What else is there? Because I think everything you could tell me fits into "skill."
You're seemingly buying in to the stuff they're selling you. Good putters are good putters. Good putters putt well on all types of surfaces. You're getting caught up in the fact that some players can prefer (because they grew up playing, perhaps) one type of grass over another. But they're still going to be good putters, and on the PGA Tour, they get pretty good at playing all types of surfaces. Brandt Snedeker has a reputation for
playing well at Pebble, and by extension putting well there, but that requires people to both ignore the times he doesn't play well there, and the times he doesn't have a great putting round there, and that he's a pretty good putter everywhere else, too. (Top 40 in SG:P every year, often top 15 or 10, going back to 2014 when I stopped looking, so probably before that too…)
So, yes, some players slightly prefer one surface over another — it can take a little while to learn to adjust for the slight speed change found in grainy Bermuda if you grew up playing on poa as I did — but putting is about reading the green, hitting your line, and controlling your distance, and those skills translate across all putts everywhere. Good putters all tend to hit putts similarly, and bad putters tend to have poorer speed control and poorer start line control (and/or poorer reads, of course).
So just as with Brandt, you can say "oh, Jordan Spieth putted better than Dustin Johnson at Chambers Bay" but look past the fact that you're talking about a guy who finished second, and clearly played (and putted) better than many, many others there. And ignore that even 72 holes is a pretty small sample size when you're talking about "luck" in putting, while these guys would be putting with a ball that weighed maybe 4-5% less with every putt forever, over far more than 72 holes. You can say things like "oh he gets the ball rolling on top of the grass" or "his ball looks like it dives in the hole like a mouse" but that's all just gobbledygook that reinforces what you think you see. It's the same type of thinking that led to "drive for show, putt for dough" type comments. If Strokes Gained type stuff has taught us much, it's that some of these things aren't grounded in reality.
Guys on the PGA Tour are measured with many, many measuring devices. Quintic, SAM, Capto… They all "get the ball rolling on top of the grass" pretty well — you can't really make the ball roll "through" or "under" the grass. It's not physically possible. And this isn't the 1970s when greens were cut longer — PGA Tour players putt on 10-11 stimp greens week in and week out — and when a lot of these types of "phrases" were born. Some players still deliver a bit too much loft, or hit down a bit and get a tiny bit of "backspin" (which can negatively affect distance control/speed a bit), but even those who deliver great launch conditions are getting only the tiniest bit of "forward roll" on the ball. The difference between good and bad putters is generally not their true "launch conditions" — it's read, bead, and speed. The balls of good and bad putters still launch a bit in the air, lands and bounce ever so slightly, and as friction grabs the ball, converts the ball to forward roll where the rotation rate matches the linear rate (i.e. true roll). Good putters read putts a bit better, or control distance a bit better, or hit their intended lines a bit more often.
And a ball that's lighter will negatively affect the good putter more than it will negatively affect the bad putter. At the end of the day, more randomness favors the "worse" putter
because the gap is narrowed. It doesn't make the "bad" putter better. It makes the better putter "more worse" than it makes the bad putter. The better putter is still better… his gap is just narrowed.
And it's just one of the side effects of one of the "ideas" for rolling back the ball — it won't putt the same, and putting will be a lower or lesser "separator" than it is now. (Maybe some people would like that!) And like I said, if you want anecdotes, they also support what I'm saying — read the article here on GCA by JVB and it said twice about the lighter ball that players didn't like how it putted — likely because it was "more random" and "less skill."
Is it the biggest factor? No. Is it likely to be measurable? Yes, I think so. Are there other things, too: yeah, of course: a lighter ball will sit up in the rough more, or even sit up in the fairways more. It'll sit up in bunkers more. It'll be more affected by the wind. It'll go perhaps farther for a slower swinger (narrowing the gap non-linearly, as the Tutelman graphs show). Balls might land at sharper angles because they might launch a bit higher or rise a bit more… all kinds of things will change. If there is to be a rollback, I'd just hope that all things are considered. Imagine how much of a pain it would be to roll the ball back, and then find out that either a) engineers or whomever just "work around" it in a year or two, or b) that there are two or three "bad" and unintended but unforeseen consequences?
This is the kind of thing — putting performance — that could be tested. Get a Perfect Putter and roll thousands of putts on actual putting greens and see how many are made (and where the misses finish) with a lighter ball and a current ball.
You'll see a larger distribution pattern on the lighter ball. So, if the "lighter ball" is chosen as the way to go forward… I just hope they know what they're getting, and they've tested and planned for every outcome, including the narrowing of "separation" between good and bad putters.