Frankel

[EJXD2]

Over on the TwinSpires blog, I took a look at Franke\'s place in history using Brisnet.com\'s Class Ratings, which is sort of a riff on the \"who beat who and by how much\" motif made popular by The Jockey Club\'s Performance Rates that Thoroughbred Times publishes.

Anyway, Workforce has the highest rating of all time as the only horse to crack the 130 barrier, but Frankel\'s steady stream of 125+ numbers IS impressive and about equal with Sea The Stars and Ghostzapper in my mind.

LINK: http://j.mp/NZBAlT

[HP]

Mike you put up good ones so I can wade through a few of the others.  No one bats 1.000.  Have a great weekend!  

HP

[TGJB]

I love NY, no joke.

[TGJB]

Enough.

[TGJB]

I\'m not going to get into that today, too hot, but if Rich Curtis sees that he can.

[Rich Curtis]

Beyer\'s Secretariat number was a publicity stunt. The number is worthless. Beyer might as well have gone with the first number that Geraldo Rivera saw written on the wall of Al Capone\'s vault.

Beyer linked his database to par in the 1970s. He cannot go home again. He cannot compare old to new. What he tried to do with that Secretariat number was akin to following a trail of breadcrumbs across the Pacific Ocean.

The proper response to any mention of that figure is laughter.

[TGJB]

Rich-- why don\'t you explain the par thing, as well as the two turns at Belmont...

[miff]

\"Beyer linked his database to par in the 1970s. He cannot go home again. He cannot compare old to new. What he tried to do with that Secretariat number was akin to following a trail of breadcrumbs across the Pacific Ocean\'

Rich,


Yeah, what would Andy Beyer know about making numbers anyway.On the other hand, the geniuses that made sheet figs at the time claim that Secretariat ran a fig like a TG neg -2.75 in the Derby and only paired that same TG -2.75 fig in the Belmont,guess Sham regressed about 15 points.

Brilliant!!!

Mike

[moosepalm]

TGJB Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Rich-- why don\'t you explain the par thing,


Never mind, Rich, I got this.

Par is what JB and I don\'t get on the Spa golf course in August.

Actually, there\'s a ball sitting on the tee right now for Mr. Curtis that he could absolutely crush if he was so inclined.

[TGJB]

What Beyer knows about figures now and what he knew then are two different ballgames. By the 2004 DRF Expo he knew enough to say on stage that he doesn\'t use pars any more (which as it happens was directly contradicted by Dick Jerardi, who does figures for Beyer, in a recent DRF article).

Also as it happens I had this very conversation with Randy Moss (who also makes figures for Beyer and is a good guy, as is Jerardi) a couple of nights before the Belmont. If you use pars, for example saying 10 claimers average going in an 8, then at the end of the year they will average an 8. You will bring them to that par, by definition. And ten years later you\'ll still bring them to that par, whether the breed has gotten better or not-- no way to tell doing it that way. If you use pars you can\'t compare horses from different generations-- you can only look at the RELATIONSHIP between stakes horses and claimers, of the SAME generation.

As for that Belmont, unless there was another 1 1/2 race on the card all Beyer (and Len, and Connie, and anybody else) had to work with once Sham broke down was Secretariat, and 4 horses behind him who got beat a stretch of highway. Not one of those horses ever won a race of any kind after that, by the way.

Moose-- okay, that was funny.

[Rich Curtis]

Miff wrote:

\"Yeah, what would Andy Beyer know about making numbers anyway?\"

 The correct question is: Given his methods, was Beyer equipped a few years ago to make figures for a race that was run in 1973?

And the answer was no. And Beyer has admitted in his books that the answer was no. And Beyer himself would not take that Secretariat number seriously. And the problem I have with the DRF is that they knew other people would take it seriously, and yet they went through with that ridiculous stunt anyway.

Miff wrote:

\"On the other hand, the geniuses that made sheet figs at the time claim that Secretariat ran a fig like a TG neg -2.75 in the Derby and only paired that same TG -2.75 fig in the Belmont,guess Sham regressed about 15 points.\"

I don\'t understand what you\'re doing with Sham here.

[Rich Curtis]

The following is cut and pasted from a post I made a couple of years ago. Part of it has since been overtaken by events (the Jerardi column being just one of those events):

I said that Beyer \"ruined the historical comparability of his figures by anchoring them to par.\" This is a point that JB has made 50 times over the years. When you anchor your database to par, as Beyer did years ago, then when it comes to horses as a group, par is what you are going to get. This makes nonsense of attempts to compare, say, Seattle Slew to Rachel Alexandra. Seattle Slew was running at a time when Beyer was having an awful problem with \"figure shrinkage.\" Beyer\'s figures were getting slower by the month, due to faulty projections. He \"solved\" the problem by locking his database to par, which proved to be a slowly opening can of worms. Later, according to his most-recent book, he stopped doing this. But he can\'t ring the bells backwards.

[miff]

Rich,

If you witnessed the race and followed closely back then and now, it becomes rather easy to opine that was the fastest race ever run by a thoroughbred at any distance.The track was extremely fast, yet a very sharp figure type guy concluded an adjustment of 42 beyer points off the raw was appropriate and came to a 124 Beyer(equal to a neg -7 on TG).Understood no other distance races to tie to and much creative license taken.

I\'ll agree the figure can be whatever ridiculous number one wishes to make it but the performance cannot be tarnished by track speed, cushion size or whatever since ALL runners in that Belmont ran on the very same surface.

Best,

Mike

[TGJB]

Mike-- depends on your definition of runners...

There is of course no way I can offer any opinion of that day. But I would like to know what Beyer gave him the rest of the year, at distances and layouts it was easier to make figures for-- on Ragozin (by memory) his best going forward was about a zero, in the Marlboro.

[Rich Curtis]

Miff,

  Much to agree with here. I have plenty of problems with Beyer\'s methods and columns, but I have no problem with Secretariat. I loved him, and if I\'m not arguing that Seattle Slew was the greatest horse I ever saw, then I\'m usually arguing that Secretariat was.