Jeradi DRF article on the San Antonio

[FrankD.]

Done for the day at noon and searching for a bet somewhere today I stumbled on a DRF article that was posted in the last hour.

WOW is all I can say. A veteran DRF writer writing such a simplistic article about any speed figure and how it was earned truly shocks me. An article that may have been enlightening  in the 80\'s before most of us knew any better!!!

Thank GOD these are the people I wager against pari mutually and double thanks that people read this trash and are influenced by it.

Incredible is all I can say.

I\'ve also found an alternative entertainment source for the next hour on the REELZ channel about the infamous Chicago loan shark Mad Sam De Stefano.

Who says day time TV ain\'t what it used to be!

Good luck,

Frank D.

[Rich Curtis]

Frank D. wrote:

\"WOW is all I can say. A veteran DRF writer writing such a simplistic article about any speed figure and how it was earned truly shocks me. An article that may have been enlightening in the 80\'s before most of us knew any better!!!
Thank GOD these are the people I wager against pari mutually and double thanks that people read this trash and are influenced by it.\"

Yes, articles like this are a big reason why this game is so ridiculously easy to beat.

By the way, do you agree with the article or disagree with it? Why?

[ajkreider]

I\'m not sure I disagree with the point Jeradi is making, if I understand it.

I know there are figures folks that say, \"the number is the number is the number\", and I get what they\'re saying.  But if I\'m trying to work out whether a horse will be running at the end of 10 furlongs, by looking at their 8 furlong numbers, how they do it matters.  Going out in 1:10 and coming home in .26 says something different that going out in 1:12 and coming home in :24.

Further, if I know from recent form that that horses like CC and SB have been able to sustain their speed in a route, the fact that an unusually slow pace results in a 2 instead of their usual 0 isn\'t evidence of a regression.

Or maybe, looking around the table, I\'m the sucker.

[FrankD.]

Rich,

I post quite a bit and have never been shy about expressing my \"humble opinion\"
for sure. I\'m quite certain I have never expressed an opinion about \"how easy the game is to beat\" I\'ve posted enough losers to prove DAT!!!

I\"m assuming your inference of agreement or disagreement is a tad sarcastic or you\'re just trying to start a lively debate on a dead winter board?

My opinion of the relevance of Beyer numbers has been expressed here more than a few times over the years. Miff has actually corrected me as to their relevance pertaining to ML and final odds. Hence my reference to my fellow pari mutual punters.

I read all the books in the 70\'s and early 80\'s as did all serious players of my generation. I made my own Beyer PARS and numbers well before they were in the DRF and made my own crude figures over the years. I danced with the Raggies in the late 80\'s and have found IMHO the only true relevant speed figures here over the past 10 years.

The Beyer camp swears it no longer uses PARS in figure making.

In the words of my all time favorite Cuban Ricky Ricardo: Lucy Splain those numbers please.

Frank D.

[Rich Curtis]

Frank D.,


I still do not understand your original post. The author was making a point about pace. You called the article \"trash.\" You supplied no reasons. I wish you would supply the reasons you called the article \"trash\" rather than shifting over to a thing about TG being better than Beyer. Of course TG is better than Beyer, and of course a DRF writer is not going to base his article on that fact.

[FrankD.]

Rich,

Maybe I gave you too much credit accusing you of being sarcastic?
So I\'ll be very literal as to what I said. I called the article trash due to the authors SIMPLISTIC approach as to how the said figure was earned and for his comment about looking at the number as being a 115 strictly on the grounds of pace.

What did Beyer do with the SA 3rd race that day, MSW 3YR olds that went 6F in !:12.27 and finished the mile & 1/16 in !:44.10 or what would be the authors interpretation of it? There in lies the relevance or lack there of.

Frank D.

[Rich Curtis]

Frank D. wrote:

\"Maybe I gave you too much credit accusing you of being sarcastic?\"

Any credit that you give me is too much, Frank.

\"What did Beyer do with the SA 3rd race that day, MSW 3YR olds that went 6F in !:12.27 and finished the mile & 1/16 in !:44.10\"

If you are going to give me a homework assignment instead of simply making your point, kindly tell me where you got the final time for race 3.Then we can go from there.

[FrankD.]

AHHHH
With my glasses on it was 1:44.41

[Rich Curtis]

\"AHHHH
With my glasses on it was 1:44.41\"

OK, now keep your glasses on and look at the title you put on this string. See anything wrong with it, given that you are calling the author\'s work \"trash\"?

Then tell me whether you think the pace in race 3 was fast, slow, or average. I am up to my ears in pace figures. They vary. I want to know what your assumptions are.

Then tell me how Ragozin, TG, and Beyer habitually handle slow-pace situations. Which approach do you think is best? Why?

Or skip all this nonsense and simply make your point instead of employing the tired technique of trying to make yourself a narrow target.

[Boscar Obarra]

Is it really such a mystery?

 Hypothetical.

 5 decent horses match up 3 times and the jockeys decide in advance to grab until the 1/4 pole in all 3 races.

 Then in the 4th matchup, they all ride \'normally\'

 What do you think happens to the figure?

[Rich Curtis]

\"5 decent horses match up 3 times and the jockeys decide in advance to grab until the 1/4 pole in all 3 races.
Then in the 4th matchup, they all ride \'normally\'
What do you think happens to the figure?\"

Your wording hints at the problem here. What happens to the figure? That depends on who makes the figure. What happens to the final time? It speeds up.

The problems begin when you start asking yourself whether the makers of final-time figures should try to adjust for these slow paces.

If they do, should they adjust every horse in the race by the same amount? Even though this would mean adjusting frontrunners and  deep closers by the same amount? Does doing that seem entirely kosher to you?

And if they do adjust for the slow pace, there is another problem. They might end up having to give very fast figures to horses who, simply put, did NOT run fast over the distance. Rather, they ran fast in a narrow, strategic sense. Whether this will translate to fast in a fairly run race is a different question. To exaggerate for effect, you could take a bunch of Grade 1 horses and throw them into a swimming pool and have them do the backstroke for a mile. Then you can cut the race loose from the dirt races that day and give the swimming horses numbers that fit best with their previous dirt races. This will work beautifully if the swimming horses duplicated their dirt form, but one can imagine the possibility that they didn\'t.

In other words, this is an extremely complex subject. The details are all full of devils.

Finally, if you\'re going to be literal-minded and give out very slow figures for slow-paced races, be sure to tell someone like Jerardi to alert people so that they don\'t take the numbers literally. And of course that was the real point of the article.

[Boscar Obarra]

There may be some clever way to normalize a final figure for pace, but imo that creates additional problems for the analyst.

  For instance, if you\'re trying to get a read on what kind of effort was expended, a \'bumped up\' final fig (off a slow pace)  would probably be misleading, in that regard.

[kevb]

Timeformus posts a speed figure and a pace adjusted speed figure. It will be interesting and instructive and relevant to this conversation to see their figures for the San Antonio.

[miff]

Pace adjustments inside Timeform US figs seem overweight on some occasions.Quantifying the \"value\" of pace in the whole figure is a slippery slope at best.

As to Jerardi\'s article, I could not disagree more with his take on what type of pace produces fast final figures.

[kevb]

I agree on both counts. A slippery slope and sometimes the TFUS adjustments seem unusually large. Still I like the idea of a pace adjustted final figure. What do you do when you see h_pace or s_pace?