Vito raised a couple of issues.
First, about \"pairs\" (really meaning horses running in a tight figure range). The reason Vito has the view that horses running in a tight range is a negative is that as he himself says, he doesn\'t know anything about how figures are made, and doesn\'t want to.
All speed figures are made using the past figures of the horses, whether they are crude ones (made from pars), or much more sophisticated ones incorporating ground loss and weight, made by the \"projection method\", which just means looking at the figure histories of the individual horses you are making figures for today. That\'s the whole basis for not only making but using figures-- if there isn\'t correlation between figures horses have run in the past and figures they will run in the future, what\'s the point of the exercise?
But if that premise IS correct it means, by definition, that THE MORE HORSES RUN BACK TO PREVIOUS FIGURES, THE MORE ACCURATE YOUR FIGURES ARE.
Now, different figure makers have different ideas when it comes to figuring out how \"fast\" the track is-- I cover that in Changing Track Speeds (Archives of this site). Ragozin as far as I know was the only figure maker who assumed that tracks stayed the same speed all day, unless there was rain, a freeze, or a thaw (he says so in his book, co-written with Friedman). From the 2014 Derby numbers they have just posted it looks like Jake believes that too, more on that later.
But on one thing we all agree-- the relationships between horses WITHIN a race are fixed, in figure terms. For Beyer the relationship between the winner and the others, and the others with each other, is fixed by beaten lengths. For those making performance figures it\'s by beaten lengths, weight differentials, and ground loss differentials. (NOTE-- the above does not apply to those building pace into their figures, they can give a horse more or less credit than someone else in the same race).
That paragraph above has a very important ramification-- if a horse has a lot of 4\'s, and another has a lot of 8\'s, a figure maker can\'t give them a 4 AND an 8 UNLESS THE RELATIONSHIP, AFTER LENGTHS, WEIGHT AND GROUND, WORKS OUT TO 4 POINTS. Otherwise you can give one a 4 or the other an 8, but not both. You can\'t pair up multiple horses in the same race unless the relationships AND figure histories support it.
Now, horses come out of different races and tracks-- it\'s not like the same field runs against each other every time. So, if a set of figures has lots of horses running in a tight range, it means one of two things-- either the figures for all the races they come out of are right, and the data base is tight, or the figure maker is breaking a cardinal rule, screwing with the relationships between horses in races. Now, why would someone do this? It would make the figures LESS accurate, making it harder for people using them to win (including the figure maker, who in my case also recommends horses for purchase, by the way). So logic leaves the first possibility.
As an extreme example of what you NEVER want to see, Jake recently posted their figures for the 2014 Derby. Not a single one of the 20 (TWENTY) horses ran within a point either way of their previous top. One ran better, 19 ran worse (stake level 3yos, no less). The past figures had NO correlation with the figures assigned for the Derby. And I would love to hear Jake, Len F or Eric explain how they got to that result. On the face of it, they clearly didn\'t use the Derby horses to make figures for the Derby horses.
