Steve Eck, who wrote a book about a PGA ranking system he divised, at Oaks North Golf Course in Rancho Bernardo.

Steve Eck was one of those kids growing up who loved baseball box scores. Everybody had a least one friend like Eck. He couldn’t wait to grab the sports page of the paper and pour through the numbers. Because that’s what it was all about: numbers. Baseball was the conduit.

Box scores gave a fertile, analytical young mind the opportunity to compare and contrast, to hypothesize and project. Little wonder that Eck in his adult life would become an aerospace engineer.

The San Marcos resident also loves sports, golf in particular, and that led Eck to combine his passion for numbers and the game. He recently published a book, “Golf’s All-Time Greatest” (Tate Publishing, $13.99), that presents a statistical analysis of the performance of pro golfers from the 1930s forward.

Inspired by other rating systems and disappointed with flaws he saw in others, Eck also has developed his own current rankings (the Eck Rating System) for both the PGA Tour and the world.

The 42-year-old, married father of a 5-year-old son figures he’s spent hundreds of hours on the project.

“It keeps my mind going,” Eck said. “It’s also relaxing at the same time. It motivates me to glean more information than I’ve got.”

Fascinated by the sports rankings developed in the mid-1980s by Jeff Sagarin, an MIT math whiz, Eck devised his own college football and basketball rankings. He enjoyed that, but didn’t like that he couldn’t quantitatively compare teams from different eras.

That’s where golf came in. Eck enjoyed golf from childhood and became a single-digit handicap player. He knew that Jack Nicklaus was widely considered the greatest golfer of all time, but he wanted to develop the system to back that up, and to explore how golfers from various generations lined up.

One of the most pressing questions, of course: Where does Tiger Woods currently rank among the all-time greats?

That answer and a few others surprised Eck.

In Eck’s rankings, Woods is No. 5 all-time behind Nicklaus, Sam Snead, Arnold Palmer and Tom Watson. At No. 6 is San Diego native Billy Casper; Phil Mickelson is No. 13.

The reason that Woods is not higher is that he has played in far fewer tournaments than any of the men ahead of him, and Eck measures an entire career.

Eck, a Woods fan, has tried to separate his emotions from the numbers.

“I’m really interested to see where Woods ends up,” Eck said. “Even if Tiger wins four more majors (to tie Nicklaus on the all-time list), to say that he’s had equal the career of Nicklaus would be rather subjective. I would like to see some empirical truth. Maybe because it’s the field I’m in, but I want to have things proven by numbers.”

Eck’s rating system factors in finishing position and strength of field in tournaments. He puts a heavy emphasis on the four major championships, Players Championship and World Golf Championships.

Tournaments are broken down to category levels, depending on the strength of field. So the winner of a major (Category A) gets 500 points; a WGC champion (Category B) earns 250; a Farmers Insurance Open winner (Category C) gets 150 points; the champion of the John Deere (Category D) gets 75. The top 25 golfers in every tournament get points.

The heavy lifting for Eck came in tracking down the top-25 results for every tournament since 1930. It would have been virtually impossible without the Internet and sites such as Google that allowed him to look at old newspapers.

Eck said the research gave him a greater appreciation for many of the players of the past, including golfers such as Casper, with whom he was not very familiar. Casper ranked third behind only Palmer and Nicklaus for the decade of the 1960s.

Most impressive to Eck is Nicklaus, who in his rating system accumulated 49,669 points. That is 13,300 points better than No. 2 Snead and 16,000 better than Woods through the 2011 season. In order for Woods to catch Nicklaus, Eck said, he would have reproduce the entire career of No. 22 Ernie Els, who has four major wins and 19 PGA Tour victories.

“It just shows you how great Nicklaus was,” Eck said.

Eck has done a comparison of career points for Nicklaus and Woods at various ages. From ages 32-34, Woods held a slight lead, but he has fallen behind in recent years after the troubles of his scandal and swing changes.

As for individual seasons, Eck ranks Woods’ 2000 campaign – nine wins, including three majors -- as the greatest ever. Interestingly, Palmer (1960-61) owns the next two spots, while Nicklaus’ only top-10 season is 1964.

Eck’s book is available in print or digital form at and
