Ummmm....

[ajkreider]

I would think this is how TG would do it.  You have a bunch of figs on West Coast, Gunny, Pavel, etc.  You pick a number that has most of them running a representative race, give or take.  And then look at time and ground loss to make a number for Mendelssohn.  Not sure how else you\'d do it.

I also think that two people working independently coming up with the same result is some reason to think you did it right, if no definitive.  There are, of course, the inherent failings of Beyers.

[Furious Pete]

It makes no sense to make figures for Mendelssohn by assuming that horses in another race ran their race, it wasn\'t even ran at the same distance. For anyone following Dubai racing it is obvious that noone ran their race in there either, it was a strong inside bias and Thunder Snow got away with a pretty soft lead. TG is in better shape because they at least have figures on Rayya, Reride and Gold Town to go by. If they really said something like that on air I find it pretty shocking, to be admitting such incompetence in public. As I said, they sound lost.

BTW, what\'s the reason for not using ground from Meydan anymore? Hawkbill would have looked a great bet on the sheets by still including it.

[Niall]

FWIW, Moore has a mount in the Blue Grass and in the Shakertown. I guess they are serious about getting him some experience. Also, this horse is a late foal. May 17th. Will run on Lasix and not the 1st time. Whats that worth? To me it all adds intrigue because he has to be considered, where in the past the overseas horses were tosses. Yeah, lots of questions but dont they all?

[ajkreider]

Obviously, they should use those figures too. But the older horses have, for the most part, a greater body of work and have probably done the bulk of their improving. Most are just going to run what they typically run. Further, the back figures are probably more reliable on US based horses than those running a handful of races at Meydan or in Europe - that means relying on Reride\'s sheet for making the number, and that seems risky.

[johnnym]

Those Ifs are for every horse

[Furious Pete]

Sure is. That\'s the puzzle. But it isn\'t just a bounce that could produce off efforts from good ones.

[dsipes]

I encourage all of you to get on Twitter or Facebook and search DEREK SIMON, who\'s a very astute capper and wrote a profile yesterday for US RACING on Mendelssohn.  Derek created his own measurement of energy in a race known as EARLY SPEED RATION, which looks at the amount of energy a horse used early in a race.  Same scale as Thorograph (the lower the better --- a -15 is superior to a 0).  Mendelssohn received a 0 in the UAE Derby and Derek stated that horses that had only a 0 in their final prep before the Derby are just 6 for 182 since 1992 with an ugly 0.61 impact value.  What say you, Ask The Thorograph Experts???

[toppled]

I don\'t know if there\'s anything to make of Simon\'s numbers.  Doing the math, on average over 7 horses a year are zeros.  Only one horse can win the Derby each year, so in 25 years, 6 horses with 0s have won, a pretty good 24% of Derby winners in the last 25 years are horses with zeros.  
I don\'t know what the .61 impact value means, please explain that one.

[mjellish]

Niall, I\'ll chime in my two cents here regarding figure making.  Not sure if this will help or not but here goes.  

One way to make figures is to come up with a set of pars for different race levels.  You then take a look at the times the horses ran for the day and calculate the figures for all of the winners and compare what those raw numbers look like to your par charts to try to measure how much the speed of the track affected final times.  You want to come up with a track variant for the day.  So using Beyer numbers, assuming you\'ve got 5 races all run one turn on the dirt, lets say you get this:

Race 1 Par 80, Fig 87 = 7pts fast
Race 2 Par 65, Fig 75 = 10pts fast
Race 3 Par 80, Fig 84 = 4pts fast
Race 4 Par 75, Fig 82 = 7pts fast
Race 5 Par 90, Fig 93 = 3pts fast
Average = about 6pts fast

So your variant in this case would be 6pts fast.  That\'s the speed of the race track that day.  So you would adjust all of those winning figures down by 6 pts, giving those horses an 81, 69, 78, 76, 87 respectively.  And you would then give the figures to the horses who finished behind the winners their associated figures based on the number of beaten lengths they were behind the winner.

Some of the inherent problems with doing it that way (among others but to keep it simple) is you are assuming that the track speed didn\'t change at all during the day, you are also assuming that the field was an average field for that racing level, you are assuming the teletimer was accurate for each race, and you are letting each race potentially impact the figures earned in the races before and after it.  Those are very big assumptions that often turn out to be wrong.  

Another problem is that you often won\'t have enough data to support a variant (you may only have 1 race at two turns on the dirt that day and everything else is run 1 turn on the dirt or on the turf).

Another problem is that very often you will find days where your variants would look like this, +10, +9, +17, -4, +8.  So if you average those you get 8pts fast.  But when you apply the variant of +8 to all the winners and then the horses that ran behind them, in that 3rd race it turns out that every single horse in that race now gets a figure that is about 10pts faster than they have ever run before.  Is that very likely?  

So instead, what most figure makers have realized is that using par charts is a bad way to go.  So instead they go off of the horses.  What I mean by that is if you have 3 horses in a one turn dirt race who last ran 85, 80, 80, and your winning figure for today\'s race based off the raw time gives them 95, 90, 88, (all 8-10 pts fast) you would make an assumption that if you adjust each horse\'s figure down by about 9 pts that probably was the variant for that race that day because its very unlikely that all 3 of those horses improved by 8-10 pts at the same time.  And by adjusting them down by 9 Points you get figures of 86, 81, 79 for each - which would seem to line up pretty well with what they have run before and make sense.  So in this case you are using all of the horses in the race to come up with the figure for that race to see if it makes sense.  So what you do is you do the entire day, assign the figures for each race, and then take a look at all of your data to see if it all seems to make sense.  You aren\'t necessarily concerned if the variants for each race seem to be similar because you aren\'t coupling the races together.  You are going off the horses established form.  But its even better when they all seem to line up because it can give you an ever higher degree of confidence that your figures are correct.  But even if not, lets say you have that one race that seems to make sense internally to the horses who were in it, but does not make sense externally to other races that were run that day, you probably leave your figures as they are and schedule the race for review at a later time by flagging those horses and seeing what they run next time out.

So what Beyer and assoc. are saying is they have established figures for some of the horses that ran in the Mendelssohn race, and if they use those figures to help figure out the variant for that race they come up with a beyer fig they are pretty confident in because by assigning him that figure the figures for the other horses who ran behind him seem to line up, and that two people used that same method independently and arrived at the same figure.

You can still have some problems no matter which way you do it because you either wind up with bad assumptions or some \"art.\"  But going off the horses is the far better way to do it IMO.

When a horse freaks and wins by the length of the stretch like Mendelssohn did, I mean he ran off the screen first time on dirt, you don\'t have anything to really go by in his own pp other than what he has run on turf and synthetic.  You\'ve got the teletimer and the horses who ran behind him that you have figures for.  He massacred all of them and it\'s probably wrong to assume they all bounced and ran OFF races.  So you have to assume a few of them still ran their race.  And if you do that you have to give Mendelssohn close to a negative 5.  So come Derby day, we are going to be looking at a TG sheet where the UAE Derby winner is probably the fastest horse in the race by a fair margin, and this is a fast group of 3 year olds this year.  If he repeats that race he is probably gone, but his sheet will scream bounce.

This game is never, ever easy.

[TempletonPeck]

I\'d say Derek Simon should probably think about opening up his own forum. Sounds like he\'d have one member at least.

[Furious Pete]

This is a good explanation. Mind you my response was to the proposed method of making figures on Mendelssohn by assuming that the horses in another race, the world cup, ran their race which would be insane. But I have not heard the actual episode so this might not have been what they meant (in fact, probably not, reading back I think I misunderstood. The assumption that the american world Cup horses all ran their races is flawed, though).

However I have a question regarding this that could prove useful to discuss, and that is: when you have a horse that clearly is so superior to the rest in the field, and they all try to chase him/challenge for the lead, is it still fair to assume that they ran their race? How much better must a horse be for it to be more likely that all the horses trying to follow, runs off races as a consequence. It\'s very hard to prove/quantify, but those runaway winners does seem to produce some odd numbers that never replicates.

[mjellish]

Agreed.  I\'ve made that point before.  When a jock knows he\'s hopelessly beaten, is he really going to persevere with his mount or is he going to try to save something for the next one?
 
But when you watch the replay, the jocks behind Mendelssohn still rode hard.  2nd place purse was pretty fat.  And speaking of that, why the hell was Moore whipping Mendelssohn the final 200 yards of that race when he was already 15 in front?

[Furious Pete]

That is true and certainly one aspect of this \"problem\", the other one is that it seems plausible that chasing a superior horse might make one go too fast for the horses liking. In this race the jockeys didn\'t even know that the horse they were chasing could be so superior.

As for Moore I wouldn\'t know, but it sure got them some extra publicity.. That could possibly add value to the stud fee down the road, especially if he were to win the Kentucky Derby too.

[dsipes]

Impact value: 1.00 is the average.  Anything less than 1.00 means you\'re winning at less than the average and anything greater than 1.00 you\'re winning more than average.  In short, you want to see numbers above 1.00 and not see numbers less than 1.00.  On the last page of every Brisnet past performance, they give impact values for which running style  and post positions are doing best for the race being conducted.

[dsipes]

I think of you got to know Derek, you\'d really like him and maybe appreciate his work.  Maybe not.  To his his own.  But he\'s a good dude and good for our industry.  Big guy too.  Someone you\'d want having your back if things got bad for you in a bar one night