Just finished with this day, and it was very tricky. It rained the night and morning before racing, they sealed the track with water in it at 10:00 AM, opened it again at 11:30 (which is a lot better than if they had it sealed for some races and opened it up for others, as they did for the 00 Wood, Chilukki debut at CD, etc.), and it was drying throughout the day (listed good for first 5, fast afterward).
Anyway, those 1-5 were sprints, 6-12 were routes with the exception of the Swale, and the variant for the routes got gradually slower. The card featured rained off grass races, small fields, a number of horses (some normally grass horses trying dirt) running x\'s, and other lightly raced horses exploding, making things very tricky, and the Florida Derby came at a point in the card where the track for the previous and following races was almost 4 points different. Bottom line, there were two ways to do the race. I don\'t intend to give out numbers on a regular basis, but the way I chose, which is slightly more likely, gave EM a 0 1/4, while the other would have given him a couple of points better. There is no chance the race went any worse. I gave Frankel\'s other horse a couple of points better.
This means that TNL bounce to a 6 or 7?
Not quite that bad.
I do not mean this in a hostile way, but in this very message, TGJB, you acknowledge the \"trickiness\" of making accurate figures, suggesting EM could have easily have run 2 pnts faster. And this was on the best day of racing for this particular track.
In fact, it seems that groups of horses can in fact run unpredictably enough or perhaps in sufficiently confusing ways, figurewise, so that you are unable to produce figures with which you have sufficient faith.
As the route varient got slower, I would speculate that the \"very tricky\" conditions you encountered could produce inaccurate figure for any number of the route races.
Figure making is nowhere near a pure science-- there is a lot of judgement involved. There are a lot of \"data bits\" that can be used in forming that judgement-- the raw figures that horses within a given race ran relative to each other, relative to what those in surrounding races ran, to those run at similar and dissimilar distances (1 and 2 turns etc.), and on surrounding days. There are also other bits of information-- weather, track work-- that can be used to piece together a picture of what is going on. But in the end, all \"projection style\" figures are made using the figure histories of the horses, and judgement.
Obviously, the more data, the easier the decision making process. By that I mean the more apples you have to work with, the better your ability to judge one individual apple. One of the mistakes one figure maker (Ragozin) makes is to blindly use broad averages combining various types of fruit-- sprints with routes, different races on a day where the variant is changing, different days (details on this in \"Figure Making Methodology\", 1/31/03 this site, and other posts).
Florida Derby day was the kind of day that tests a figure maker\'s judgement because the amount of each fruit was very limited. The track was obviously changing speed, making it impossible (and incorrect) to narrowly correlate (tie together) races with each other. The fields were small, meaning the number of data bits within each \"apple\" was limited, and within the small fields were grass horses running on dirt (so their figure histories were of limited value), and young, lightly raced horses jumping to new tops (meaning thoses horses can\'t be used to nail down the variant).
So yes, there is more judgement involved than usual, and more chance of getting it wrong (meaning by up to a point or two-- if there is more doubt than that I leave a box instead of a figure). As it happens, the Florida Derby was the only race that was seriously in question-- the groups of routes on either side were different from each other, but pretty solid. The sixth and seventh were at minus 6, the ninth, tenth and twelfth at about minus 10. I ended up doing the eighth (Fla. Derby) at minus 7.5, and the more I\'ve looked at it the more I think it\'s right.
By the way, I think that despite the sliding variant Ragozin will get this figure about right, because the track speed for that race actually ended up being close to the average one for the routes on the day. If he does things the way he usually does he will give the ones in the two preceding routes a little better than they deserve, and rob the ones in the later races a little.
TGJB wrote,
By the way, I think that despite the sliding variant Ragozin will get this figure about right, because the track speed for that race actually ended up being close to the average one for the routes on the day. If he does things the way he usually does he will give the ones in the two preceding routes a little better than they deserve, and rob the ones in the later races a little.
TGJB
This day is not going away just like the Laurel 2/22 day is not going away, the 00 Wood, Chilukki day, 9/14 last year at Belmont, a recent day at Aqueduct.
I have been a little to busy lately to hammer away at these flawed \'figs\' produced by Len and Jake. But people can rest assured that as long as they keep producing them. the pounding will continue.
Just curious as to why nobody has mentioned that C. Velasquez totally screwed up the ride on the only speed horse in the race going 22 and change and 46 and change.