I was going to drop this, til I read some truly gob smacking posts on Jake’s site.

Most of you will remember that after Derby weekend we posted the TG sheets for Oaks and Derby days, with what numbers they ran. There were only two ways to do the Oaks— give the top three new tops and have most of the field run poorly, or essentially have the top three pair up, and the rest of the field run really badly. I went with the first option, which is more likely in a high profile GI, but the second is possible, and we’ll review it when a bunch have run back.

What Jake (“Ragozin”) did (after adjusting for scale) was to go FOUR POINTS WORSE than the second, slower option. SIX points worse than the way we did it. He has, as noted by his customers on their board, the WHOLE field making backward moves. He has TA not only winning the top 3yo filly race in this country while going backward, but by running four points worse than her 2yo top.

What prompted this second post is the discussion on the Jake board that the bad figures the fillies “ran” are a sign that the track was tiring.

1– if the track is tiring and times are slower, you adjust the variant (and figures you assign) accordingly. THAT’S WHAT SPEED FIGURES ARE, and are for. That’s exactly what professional level figure makers get paid to do. If you’re not going to do that you might as well use raw times.

2- the theory behind making (and handicapping using) speed figures is that previous figures are predictive of future figures. If that’s not true we can all go home. Clearly, Jake did not make the Oaks figures based on the previous figures of horses in that race. So what he did was use the surrounding races, create an average variant, and apply it, IGNORING the horses in that race themselves. That is dogmatic nonsense in any event, let alone on a day with water in the track and an hour and a half between races.

I said before those figures aren’t at the level of a kid’s homemade work. I meant it. They’re a joke.