This installment of The One Board originally appeared in Bowlers Journal International, September, 2020
For millennia, people have been searching for the perfect bowling scoring pace. Despite the greatest efforts from the pharaohs to the Hapsburgs to the PBA King of Bowling, the perfect pace still eludes us. Averaging 250 is too high, but averaging 180 is too low. 200 is par? Not anymore, it isn’t. 210 to cash might be about right, unless too many—or too few—lefties make it.
When determining the scoring pace, we can’t go by the leader’s average. No matter whether the lanes are impossibly simple or simply impossible, the leader is often averaging 5-10 pins more than the next best player. Similarly, we can’t go by the red leader’s average, which is frequently 50-60 pins below the cut to match play, but we can’t go by the cut to match play because it’s possible to miss that cut and still get paid. Thus, the scoring pace that matters is the cash line.
Bowlers understand someone is going to lead by a lot and that’s fine. They understand someone is going to trail by a lot and that’s fine. But if they can count on a perfect scoring pace required to get paid, then it’s all up to each player to bowl that number and get paid. The only slight downside to this line of thinking is bowling tournaments are competition and thus always graded on a curve. Sometimes 205 gets a player into match play in 12th and other times 205 misses the cut by hundreds of total pins.
If the scores are too high, the tournament becomes a carry contest, favoring power players and unfair to the shotmakers. How will the pros gain any respect from the general public when there’s no way to explain how hard it is to be that good?
When the scores are too low, qualifying somehow takes even longer than it usually does. It’s all about grinding and unfair to the power guys. How can the pros gain respect from the general public by rolling 180s when any schlub at home has bowled a 180 game at least once? Obviously, a 180 average on a flat pattern is much harder than a single 180 game by a random schlub, but the schlub doesn’t know that.
Sometimes, the leaderboard is full of lefties. It’s unfair they have no traffic over there and can do whatever they want with no repercussions. A single ball for the whole round? This is unfair to the righties.
Unless the lefties are shut out, that is. How can they ever build any miss room on such a brutal condition when there are so few of them and the righties are all carving a groove on their side and also cutting into the lefty laydown area? This is unfair to the lefties.
So, the perfect scoring pace is one that will allow power players, shotmakers, two-handers, one-handers, righthanders, lefthanders and Jason Belmonte to have an equal chance at all times. But what is that number? And does it matter? We can shut out lefties with a 250 pace or a 190 pace. We can handcuff shotmakers at the same time even though, by name and definition, they should be able to make shots. Lefthanded powerful shotmakers? Doomed. No-thumb one-handed shotmaking righties? Disqualified upon entry.
The only way to make it truly fair is to jam a flat pattern out there with oil that never moves. Doing so would also eliminate the need to adjust, taking away one of the most important and compelling parts of the game, though. This leaves us where we started: searching for the magic cash number.
Unfortunately, technology hasn’t yet caught up to the intricacies of bowling fairness, so even with the world’s top statisticians working on it, the perfect number that should be next to the last-cash player’s name at every event continues to evade us.
However, we can definitively say this: at any given event, the perfect scoring pace is the opposite of whatever the actual scoring pace is.