time? Time of race is in question

[Silver Charm]

I redboarded the 9th race at Belmont last Sunday and noticed on of the contestants, Baletti had received the above titled designation next to his last effort figure which was a 2 1/2. A 1 1/2 point New Top.

The Keeneland timing of the race was 1:49:39.

Later in the day Parading won the Ben Ali in a time of about 1:48 flat. I said about. Much faster than Baletti but he also won convincingly by 6 lengths and also received a significant New Top of a Neg 1.

Both horses won the next time out. Parading in the Dixie at Pimlico and Baletti the previously mentioned race on Sunday which had a pretty good field for an allowance race.

My question is when a runner receives a mark such as this is TG reviewing the race and hand timing it themselves? How does the handicapper know if the Time in question was deemed to be questionably Too Fast or Too Slow?

And in the case of the figures assigned to both runners that day was there cause for pause of review to assigning New Tops to two different runners in two different races considering how divergent the eventual final times were.

By the way the fact both returned to beat fields probably tougher than they had previously beaten before does seem to indicate the eventual final figures were correct and both horses were rounding into career form.

[TGJB]

\"Time?\" means we have strong reason to believe the \"official\" time is wrong, and acted accordingly in assigning figures. Virtually always this is because of BOTH the time our guy gets and the way the race comes out in figure terms if you try it both ways.

[Silver Charm]

TGJB Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Virtually always this is
> because of BOTH the time our guy gets and the way
> the race comes out in figure terms if you try it
> both ways.

You lost me a little here on the last part. You examine the time your guy gets and then do the figure? Do you also examine the figure if you used the track clock time and use this as an additional verification that the track clock had to be wrong because the figure makes so little sense?

In the case of Baletti the figure became a decent New Top for him which made this a little trickier with the timer issue. However it was surface switch so maybe he liked the surface. By the way he did have established Turf form and ran a New Top on Synthetic dispelling the idea that the Synthetic figures are slower.....lol. Same goes for Parading.    

Or maybe Baletti is also just getting good. Would be curious to know what he got in his last.

[TGJB]

When there is a significant time discrepency we look at the horses to see which time makes more sense. We\'re not talking about a fifth or two here-- it\'s usually obvious who had it right. Also keep in mind Balletti is just one horse-- we use all of them, not just the winner.

The approach Beyer is taking with synthetic figures is interesting, and off the top of my head, wrong. If it were simply a question of some horses being robbed of good figures, when they jumped up on dirt far more of them would repeat those figures, rather than fall apart. It will make some first synth winners \"look\" like they make more sense, though.

I suspect that there is going to be a big difference in how this plays out with horses coming from California as opposed to other places with synthetics, and I think it will have more to do with testing in those areas than surface issues.