Jason DeCrow / AP Annika Sorenstam announced last Tuesday she was retiring at the end of the LPGA season. The Swede has 72 career victories going into today's final round of the Sybase Classic.

For the course of four consecutive seasons, no pro golfer was better than Mickey Wright.

Wright won 44 times on the LPGA Tour from 1961 to 1964, raising the championship trophy at least 10 times each year.

For the record(s), no LPGA golfer was better than Annika Sorenstam.

Still in the prime of her playing days, Sorenstam has decided to leave the tour as the third winningest player (72 victories in LPGA history entering today's final round of the Sybase Classic in New Jersey).

Sorenstam was the first player in LPGA history to have a scoring average of under 70 (69.99) in 1998. She was the first to break 60 with a 13-under 59 in the 2001 Standard Register Ping Tournament. In the same year Sorenstam tied Wright's record for largest come-from-behind victory, making up a 10-stroke deficit on the final day to win The Office Depot Tournament.

In 2003, she broke her own LPGA record with 14 consecutive rounds in the 60s. Sorenstam is one of only two golfers to win the same event five times.

With her victory in the 2005 LPGA Championship, she became the first player to win the same major in three consecutive seasons. In the same year, she tied a record with wins in five consecutive tournaments.

Sorenstam's body of work is incredible. In 293 LPGA tournaments, the Swede made the cut 284 times (97 percent) and finished in the top 10 206 times (70.3 percent). She has placed in the top three 144 times (49 percent) with 72 wins, 48 second- and 22 third-place finishes.

The list of her scoring, earnings records and postseason awards are seemingly endless.

Contemporaries like Se Ri Pak, Karri Webb and Laurie Davies had runs of spectacular golf.

Sorenstam remained a standard of consistency for 14 years.

So appreciated were her skills that Sorenstam was the first woman in six decades to be invited to play on the PGA Tour, barely missing the cut.

Chances are Sorenstam's farewell season will be an extension of her brilliant shot-making and top-10 finishes against the LPGA's newest generation of players.

She will leave a body of work players like Lorena Ochoa can only dream of exceeding.

— Derry Eads is a staff writer. His e-mail address is deads@VenturaCountyStar.com