I believe that the only likely starter in this year\'s Derby with a Dosage Index (DI) above 4.0 is Dullahan. The dosage proponents would, therefore, assert that Dullahan is not bred to go the Derby distance. Interesting assertion in light of the fact that Dullahan\'s dam has already produced a Derby winner in Mine That Bird!
In recent years very few Derby starters have DIs above the 4.0 level. Yet, I believe that several of these runners have won or run well. From a statistical viewpoint, they were more likely to run well than the majority of starters who qualify under the dosage theory.
Does anyone have the statistics pertaining to the performance of recent Derby runners with DIs above 4.0?
Please save your brain and your time....this is such a statistical quagmire and, ultimately, such utter bull. It\'s infantile and irrelevant. It pretends the Derby is some kind of search for a Holy Grail. It is not. It is a horse race; a real life contest between mammals of a certain species. There\'s no mumbo jumbo here. I think we are interested in TG because it is a \'science\' that attempts to identify real statistics and interpretations of them. Get with it. If you are really desperate to be able to tell friends you picked the winner, bet them all. If you are trying to do what Jellish has done on occasion, pay attention to the real information you can get here.
Alm:
Did you read my post?
Does it sound like I\'m an advocate of dosage?
Through the 80s & 90s I followed the Dosage path & still feel some loyalty to that thinking. IMO, you can\'t count Mine That Bird as a true Dosage buster, the fact is he was the ONLY horse to grab the racetrack on that rainy day. It was like whiching a man among boys down the stretch. Like watching a 4 wheel drive truck vs a corvette slip & slide all over the road on the first snow of the season. That was NOT breeding as we know he went on to be a washout.
Dullahan\'s turf breeding is a different story for KY Derby picks.
Marlin, that washout did run a nice second to the horse of the year in the Preakness and ran 3rd in the Belmont. Three straight zeroes. Not the strongest year for colts, perhaps, but in the spring he beat those that showed up. Respect.
Please forgive me for overreacting. I\'m from Brooklyn.
But let me put this another way. Let\'s say I came on this site and announced I had discovered a \'method\' for picking Derby winners that was 80% effective. Let\'s say I called it the Italian Consigliere Methodologie.
Under the ICM, if a horse ran fast as a 2yo and ran fast as a 3yo one month before the Derby and shared the closed thoroughbred gene pool to the extent that 50% or more of its sires and grand-sires were classic runners, THEN it was a Derby pick.
If I came here with that announcement,would I be hailed as a genius or an idiot? I know what I would think. I would call myself a moron.
Let me posit one other idea. What if the stories about Native Dancer\'s sire are true, that his mom was impregnated in a field by some unknown stud, not Polynesian, who is listed officially? Whoops, all of a sudden the Dosage Index suffers one very tremendous setback. They won\'t be able to adjust it for a stallion they don\'t even know and the rest is history: Native Dancer, Northern Dancer, Raise a Native, etc, etc.
I\'m not just being snarky. There\'s a ton of doubt in the Dosage system that goes way beyond the statistical crap that permeates it.
\"I\'m not just being snarky\"
Al,
Everyone from Brooklyn has snarky in them!
Mike
I\'m from Brooklyn too. Here\'s one of my baby pictures.
http://images.search.yahoo.com/images/view;_ylt=A0PDoQ51x5pPYzwAx1yJzbkF;_ylu=X3oDMTBlMTQ4cGxyBHNlYwNzcgRzbGsDaW1n?back=http%3A%2F%2Fimages.search.yahoo.com%2Fsearch%2Fimages%3Fp%3Dbrooklyn%2Battitude%26ei%3DUTF-8%26fr%3Dyfp-t-701%26tab%3Dorganic%26ri%3D44&w=283&h=353&imgurl=www.islandmix.com%2Fbackchat%2Fattachments%2Ff6%2F5477d1063134089-gee-dawg-its-called-life-attitude-baby.jpg&rurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.islandmix.com%2Fbackchat%2Ff6%2Fgee-dawg-its-called-life-30365%2F&size=29.1+KB&name=Gee+Dawg+-+its+called+LIFE%21-attitude-baby.jpg&p=brooklyn+attitude&oid=40d886698195e84a4f6213ddddeba122&fr2=&fr=yfp-t-701&tt=Gee%2BDawg%2B-%2Bits%2Bcalled%2BLIFE%2521-attitude-baby.jpg&b=31&ni=180&no=44&ts=&tab=organic&sigr=124d1d3lo&sigb=1382tf2po&sigi=134kgodgc&.crumb=skhvuqfT3Lp
HP
There\'s a ton wrong with dosage, I did a segment about that on Post Time years ago. Aside from a) only selecting certain sires in a pedigree to count (as if the others don\'t affect the genetics), and b) using extremely dubious methods to measure racing performance, they don\'t use any of the females in the pedigree. As I said back then, most of us would agree that our mothers had something to do with the way we turned out, for better or worse, and in the case of horses (and genetics in general) some traits are also only handed down through female DNA.
There\'s also this-- only a small number of males are used for breeding, as opposed to virtually all females. This means the males all come from a very small segment at the top of of the horse population, and the difference in stallions \"top\" to \"cheap\" is much smaller than on the dam side (sire is 99 or 98 percentile, dam can be 99 or 1). The reality is that almost any stallion can sire a good horse, but not all mares can throw one-- dams are far more important as a practical matter. The \"top\" stallions, however, get the top mares, which are hugely different than the ones the \"bottom\" stallions get. The \"Chef De Races\" got way better mares than the \"average\" stallion, and that has as much to do with their success as anything else.
We\'ve looked at doing a real Dosage using our data, it can be done-- one that would correctly measure performance and use all the pedigree influences (very tricky since you have to know how to weight different generations, and mares have a much smaller sample size of runners to go by). Some day, after the breeding industry has caught up with bettors and there\'s a market, we\'ll do the work.
Alm:
Just to be clear. The purpose of my post was to point out that Dosage Theory has in recent years been a reverse barometer of Derby performance. In other words, horses who don\'t qualify under Dosage are statistically more likely to run well than those who do qualify. I was also asking others to provide some examples to help prove this point.
Since I am in agreement with your position, I didn\'t understand why you would be \"snarky\" toward me. In any event, I recognize that you have strong opinions and respect your passion for the game. So, should we actually disagree on something in the future, I am hopeful that you will pay me the same respect.
Albany