Freak Show

[Molesap]

Formal Gold ran three races in a row all above 124 in the second half of 1997. He lost the Whitney by a nose to Will\'s Way in one of those races.

[Fairmount1]

Silver,

TGJB kept it simple.  But basically the way Beyer calculates his figures now as compared to before about a decade ago (guessing on timeline here) is comparing apples to oranges.

Before Beyer bought into Jerry\'s methodology that involves basing the figures a bit more on the individual horses\' previous races as opposed to only making a variant and not wavering too often even when it clearly didn\'t fit resulted in very, very inaccurate Beyer figures very, very often.  I think Beyer did believe in split variants even then but he didn\'t adjust his numbers to fit the previous races of horses in the race.  As such, the numbers of those horses from a generation ago were probably made negligently by today\'s standards and Beyer would likely say the same.  He didn\'t have the speed figure methodology as perfected as today even though there is a certain human element that it is never a \"perfect\" process per se.  While I may have made some verbage errors here and mis-statements that could be cleaned up by Jerry, this is the basic idea he was trying to make.  

My apologies for butchering the explanation as it is even more technical than that but thought I\'d give it a shot since no one else did.

[TGJB]

The basic idea is that if you use pars (as Beyer and Ragozin did for a very long time and may still), you can\'t compare horses from different generations. If you start out by saying a winning 10 claimer will average 7 (or 80 or whatever), and use pars to bring horses to that average, at the end of the year (or decade) they will average 7. And your other claiming levels will do the same.

That means two things. The first is, you won\'t be able to tell if as a group race horses are getting better (or worse, theoretically), which makes your figures useless for generational comparisons. The second is, horses will receive huge figures if they are far superior to the others in THEIR generation.

Andy and I started to get into this at the 2004 DRF Expo, but didn\'t get to finish it. He was saying that Secretariat etc. were obviously better than the horses today, but he was basing that on dominance of their peers, without knowing it.

[FrankD.]

A Zillion racing surface changes over the years all across the country too! Baffert on Byk this AM talking about how much deeper than normal SA surface was for this cup?