Think of it this way...

[TGJB]

If someone had set up a speed figure scale for human milers in 1950, a zero for the mile probably would have been based on 4 minutes. By the time I was a teenager in the 60s, I got to see Jim Ryan break 4 minutes INDOORS at the Garden (one of the two loudest sounds I ever heard was the crowd during the gun lap, the other was when Willis #@%*ing Reed came out of the locker room against my Lakers. But I digress). So if you had the same zero point today, high school runners would be getting negative figures.

What\'s the point of a scale where horses are running on both sides of a zero point? It\'s certainly not what you would want if you were starting the data base today. It\'s simply not convenient-- and the whole question has absolutely nothing to do with accuracy.

You can set a scale anywhere-- higher is better, as Beyer does, or lower is better, with zero having different values, as is true for Ragozin and TG (I may have more on that over the weekend. Too much to do today). The scales are artificial devices-- there is no such thing as an absolute \"zero\", just as a \"point\" is an artificial unit of measurement, whether it is a point on the Beyer scale, or the fifth of a second at 6f that Ragozin and I use. (I use that-- and lower is better-- simply because that is what I was used to, from using Ragozin. Connie Merjos used something else).

If we make the move, again, we\'ll be adding 5 points to every number run by every horse we have stored electronically, which means from 92 on. It will hurt me to make Victory Gallop \"slower\", but there simply is no reason to make handicappers (and figure makers, by the way) deal with lots of negative figures-- as you might have noticed, you don\'t have to deal with a lot of negative numbers in daily life. Patterns are much tougher to read, too-- which is not to say someone with a brain can\'t, they obviously can-- but why have to?

[bobphilo]

There are 2 types of scales. The ones in most common use have a absoulte zero, below which one cannot go. Those it makes sense to say that soneone is minus 5 ft. tall or weighs minus 50 lbs? There are scales like farenhait and celsius where we chose an arbitrary zero. Not that there isn\'t an absolute cold. On the kelvin scale scientists use, zero stands for no heat whatsover. By that scale room temperature would be 293 degrees kelvin. That\'s why we don\'t use in in everday life - too damn bulky and inconvenient. We take the point where water freezes and assign it an arbitrary number like zero centegrade because that\'s cold and we want zero to stand for cold.
As Jerry has said, the scale for figures is also arbitrary so we pick a number that means something as a base. A number representing a rarely seen superior performance. I used to use 100 in my homemade figures (like Acing an exam). TG uses zero. It\'s what the 4 minute mile once was, the summit of Everest. It used to signal the performance of a super horse, now it\'s being run by allowance horses. As horses get faster we have to raise the bar as to who gets the negetive numbers.

Bob

[NoCarolinaTony]

Jerry,

Is this across the board including turf runners or just limited to Dirt Runners?

I would suspect turf runners are already on their own scale already.

NC Tony

[TGJB]

They are not on their own scale, and it would apply to them as well.

It\'s very tough to find the right questions to ask the data base about the turf numbers, as I have said before. Yes, the horses don\'t run as fast figures at each level, but there are other factors involved here-- like they don\'t write cheap claimers on grass, so the claiming levels are wildly inflated (this is yet another situation where the use of pars can really screw you up, by the way). And there is much less market demand for grass pedigrees, so the top grass horses may actually be slower-- the market forces that improved the dirt \"breed\" may not apply. Also, there have always been far fewer move-up guys on grass, for whatever reason.

If you look at the TGI profile for the average sire, you will see that the turf TGI is FASTER. Again, there are qualifiers here-- young (slower) horses don\'t get on grass as often, and again, they don\'t write many grass races for cheap (slow) horses, so many don\'t get counted in the TGI. It\'s complicated.

[Easy Goer]

\" as you might have noticed, you don\'t have to deal with a lot of negative numbers in daily life...\"

This is a racing forum, is it not? I suspect there are more than a few around here who have to deal with negative balances in their checkbooks on a daily basis...

[Joke, guys. Guess I have to spell out when I am joking, or use one of those stupid little Cl(|)handicapper emoticons in order to keep my posts from being deleted nowadays?]

[davidrex]

   Mooned again!