That time of year.

[TGJB]

I\'ve taken it easy on the Ragozin operation for a while, mostly because (as you can see by the quality and number of posts on both boards) I seem to have made my point over the years. But every once in a while something comes up that I just can\'t let pass...

According to a post by Friedman today, Pyro ran a TOP (presumably meaning new top, not even a pair-up) in the RISEN STAR. You know, the race with snail-like pace, where he had all that trouble and only ran about a quarter mile. Then, if I read Len\'s post correctly, they had him going BACK substantially in the Louisiana Derby.

Talk among yourselves...

[miff]

You would also be astonished at the differnce in the TG vs Rags figs for War Pass, Big Brown, Dennis Of Cork and several other derby contenders.It may be time to put a fork in the 3 and 1/2 point difference between the TG scale and the Rags Scale.


Mike

[TGJB]

Is there a pattern to the differences? I haven\'t seen their stuff since the BC.

The Pyro thing is really screwy.From another post it sounds like they did it as a \"pace\" race and still gave him a new top, which is the same nonsense they did with last year\'s Blue Grass. Hard to believe.

[BitPlayer]

TGJB -

With all due respect, isn\'t that really about a difference in philosophy on how to handle slow-paced races?  If one is trying to identify \"big efforts\", your approach is the right one.  If one is trying to identify dominant performances, the Ragozin view makes some sense.  To quote Ron Anderson from Steve Haskin\'s column on bloodhorse.com:  \"Horses don’t accelerate on the dirt like he did in the Risen Star (gr. III). That was breathtaking. When people tell me he didn’t beat anything I just walk away.\"

In the end, I think people take all figures from slow-paced races with a grain of salt.

P.S.  Do you really think a negative \"1\" will be fast enough to win the Derby with Pyro\'s running style?

[miff]

Pattern, no, disagreement, yes, maybe variant or ground but in the case of Pyro he\'s been kinda inside in his last two and ground should not be the issue.From time to time I have seen figs that make little sense from all 3 top fig makers.While I don\'t make figs, I have studied them for a very long time.

On many occasions my conversions of the 3 fig makers usually show TG and Beyer(adjusted) closer than say Beyer and Rags.Rag figs seems to be a little slower by comparision. Overall the agreement of the 3 is in the 90 % area but given what the projection methodology is, those 10% \"bad\" figs being projected off must create a mini disaster over time in ones data base.Strange that most of the differences I find are in big races, wonder why? Small example, War Pass got a 9(from memory) on Rags and a 1 3/4( again from memory) on TG in his first start at GP.How can a race that straight forward be that difficult. Rags is off by a pole from TG and Beyer, how??

The disparities between the top 3 are so severe on occasion that I am certain that someone is getting it wrong.We\'ve been down that road before and TG guys swear by their figs as does Rags/Beyer by theirs.


Anyway there is no doubt, imo, that anyone using/understanding these products have a substantial edge on those who do not.

Mike

[Chuckles_the_Clown2]

Ron Anderson? Who cares what he said.

What did Haskin say? (Later: Haskin is gushing TOO!! If Keeneland plays like last year, Pyro could win there and go to the Derby as the prohibitive favorite.)

Horses don\'t accellerate on dirt like that? Where do horses accellerate like that? On Turf?...On Poly?...On Asphalt?...In Water?

Get that Jockey a new agent!

I\'d be impressed if Pyro were coming home in 22:4 on those dawdling paces. But closing in 23:4 against nothing at short distance?

BitPlayer Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> TGJB -
>
> With all due respect, isn\'t that really about a
> difference in philosophy on how to handle
> slow-paced races?  If one is trying to identify
> \"big efforts\", your approach is the right one.  If
> one is trying to identify dominant performances,
> the Ragozin view makes some sense.  To quote Ron
> Anderson from Steve Haskin\'s column on
> bloodhorse.com:  \"Horses don’t accelerate on the
> dirt like he did in the Risen Star (gr. III). That
> was breathtaking. When people tell me he didn’t
> beat anything I just walk away.\"
>
> In the end, I think people take all figures from
> slow-paced races with a grain of salt.
>
> P.S.  Do you really think a negative \"1\" will be
> fast enough to win the Derby with Pyro\'s running
> style?

[BitPlayer]

Chuckles -

Where did you get 23:4?

From Randy Moss\'s NTRA blog:

\"Pyro actually ran his final quarter in about 22.3 seconds.\"

http://www.ntra.com/blog.aspx?blogid=2&year=2008&month=2&day=11

[fkach]

Doesn\'t he have some kind of formula for slow paced races that generates the figure off the closing time instead of the final time?

I think he also has a \"quit\" figure for very fast paced races.

[TGJB]

Bit-- the purpose of performance figures is neither to identify big efforts nor to identify dominant performances. It\'s to come up with the most accurate rating possible for the performances of ALL the horses in the races.

Miff-- I\'m not going to get into a general discussion of why we do \"s. pace\" races the way we do (Michael D. and P Eckhart have commented on this before and may want to jump in). But what\'s crazy is what Ragozin did with last year\'s Blue Grass-- marking a race \"s. pace\" (which by definition means you are not using the final time because it\'s too slow), and then giving out new tops to more than half the horses in the field. How the hell do you come up with that?. (This wackiness resulted in them giving SS the same figure for his BG-- four horse blanket finish after a snail-like pace-- and his Derby win).

But now we have moved into the twilight zone. From the \"SHEETS\" board, Friedman posting, today, in answer to a question about Pyro\'s \"top\" in the Risen Star (emphasis is mine):

\"In his first race this year, though, the pace was unusually slow so we gave all the horses some extra credit AND SINCE PYRO CLOSED QUITE A BIT INTO THE LAST FRACTION, HE RECEIVED EVEN MORE CREDIT\".

Holy s--t.

What Len is saying is that they have thrown away the fixed relationships of horses within the race. In other words, Pyro won the race by 2 lengths, but they are giving him credit for winning by 4 lengths (or whatever they chose to end up with).

This statement is from the guy who once famously posted that Ragozin\'s figures were made by a method \"that produces accurate, objective numbers\".

Now, this idea is crazy enough under any circumstances-- throw out your beaten lengths charts, just adjust the figure of each horse in the race independent of the others to what you think they would have run with a faster pace. But on top of this, they did it here TO GIVE HIM A BETTER FIGURE THAN HE HAD EVER SHOWN HE WAS CAPABLE OF RUNNING. They took an \"s. pace\" race, adjusted it to make it faster, then further gave one horse extra credit (a better figure) simply because he finished strong (not surprising, given he had not expended much energy early). Huh?

[BitPlayer]

TGJB –

Actually, based on what I\'ve been reading in the ROTW, I think you and others use performance figures as a proxy for both dominance (as in \"X is the fastest horse in the race\") and effort level (as in \"X has a history of bouncing off big efforts, and we expect him to do that here\").  In most cases, they measure both well.  The problem with slow-paced races is that, in those cases, performance figures become an unreliable measure of both ability and effort.

Take Z Fortune.  In the Risen Star he earned the best TG figure of his life (by 0.75 points) and better figures than both Pyro (who ran by him like he was standing still) and Indian Blessing (who, just 35 minutes earlier, had run the same distance more than a second faster).  What does that performance figure tell us about him?

The obvious problem (which both fkach and miff have pointed out) is that the slow pace compresses the field, making your normal points-to-beaten-lengths ratio inappropriate.  A less obvious problem is that, while the beaten lengths are compressed, ground loss on the turns is not, so that the horses who were wide (e.g., Z Fortune) tend to earn better figures relative to the field than they normally would.

I\'m not going to defend Ragozin\'s methodology.  I don\'t see their data and I don\'t read their board, so I have no idea how they do things other than what I have read here.  My point is simply that all performance figures in slow paced races are of suspect value and that, as long as their users understand that the rules have changed, Ragozin\'s use of abnormal methods in abnormal circumstances to give Pyro credit for a breathtaking performance is not necessarily unwarranted.

That said, I\'m not betting Pyro in the Derby at 3/1.  As always, I appreciate your willingness to discuss these issues.

[P.Eckhart]

The idea of abandoning the fixed distance relationship for the winner wouldn\'t be unusual, paid jockey club handicappers will do it. In countries where handicaps not claimers are the staple diet, professionally, it\'s necessary for them to handicap what the winner could\'ve won by, not what he did win by. Otherwise, there would be wholesale exploitation of the handicap ratings by winning connections through minimizing the margin of victory to suppress a fair rise in impost.

[TGJB]

Bit-- you covered a lot of ground, I haven\'t got time to deal with all of it in depth.

1-- The reason we mark the races as \"S. pace\" is to alert the user that judgement was used to not use the final time (and if you want, to decide the figure is \"of suspect value\").

2-- Unless the pace is crazy slow (last year\'s BG, not this year\'s Risen Star or any other than a very few other extreme cases) the length relationships are not sigificantly altered-- if there is an alteration, it is slight. If that were not true, those races would not lend themselves to the analysis that we, Beyer and Time-Form use. We find the relationships in those races hold up very well in terms of the back figures the horses have run.

3-- In the example you used, Z Humor did run a better race than Pyro (which is to say that if they had run the race down a straightaway at level weights AND PERFORMED EXACTLY AS THEY DID, Z Humor would have finished ahead). However, you, the handicapper, are free to use your judgement to decide that since Pyro only got to run 1/8th of a mile he could have run much better. That\'s a COMPLETELY different thing than saying he DID run better. There are ways to deal with that issue (\"s. pace\", \"h?\"), but breaking out the relationships within a race is nuts-- it a) is based on an assumption that may or may not be true (that the horse could have run faster), b) is based on what, exactly, in terms of quantifying things, and c) means that to be consistent you would have to look at every race that way, and every horse.

4-- That\'s quite a definition of dominance. We do use figures to express how \"fast\" they ran, and interpret that in terms of effort.

5-- The Proud Spell/Z Humor question also applies to Proud Spell/Pyro.

[TGJB]

P Eck-- that\'s a different question. Some pro handicappers here do the same thing-- but if you put it into your figures, they will be double counting, or simply relying on your judgement.

[Chuckles_the_Clown2]

I think you\'re looking at the Risen Star, where the pass dawdled even more.

I was referring to the Louisiana Derby, where he ran closer to a dawdling pace and came home substantially slower.

Some really substandard horses finished with fair final fractions in those races.

Whats interesting is that the TFig for the Louisana Derby was on its face faster than the Risen Star \"Sonic Boom\" Close.

[fkach]

What this all comes down to is whether you want speed figures or figures that that attempt to measure ability.

There seems to be a general agreement that extreme paces tend to impact final times, but some people believe that the impacts are wider.

1. When weaker horses chase the pace of superior horses within the same race it tends to hurt them even though the superior horses aren\'t running especially fast for the class (just too fast for the weaker horses).

2. When moderately slow paces either hurt the deep closers more than the front runners or allow the front runners to do better than they would when challenged in a more typical pace scenario.

IMHO, whatever a figure maker does is fine as long as the customers know what they are buying and what is being done in each race so they can decide for themselves what to do with the figure.