Recently Eric said that no matter how many times we said it, there was no problem with the Ragozin Derby figures. He was referring to what follows, which was originally posted back in May, and based on how the Ragozin office responded, their idea of a trial would presumably be, one side presents evidence, and then the other side says, "Nope, not true", without answering the evidence. Of course, with the recent problems that I pointed out with their BC ground and figures, they haven't even done that.

Anyway, here it is. Draw your own conclusions.


There are two times of year when I look at the Ragozin figures and comment on them here-- in the spring with the 3 year olds, and for the Breeders Cup. I have pointed out an awful lot of problems in the past of all kinds, some of them of the variant (figure making decision) kind (SoCal sprint/routes,etc.), some of the ground loss kind-- Touch Of The Blues and several others being given wrong figures based on the ground being wrong in the 02 BC, Senor Swinger wrong in the 03 Wood (an error that resulted in wrong variant decisions being made and patterns being wrong on top 3yo's for months).

Now, we take the Derby pretty seriously. It's a big field, it's an important race, so we have two people do ground, and compare them. This year they came up slightly different on 3 horses, so we had them go back and look again (they had already looked a few times), and we eventually got it all worked out, and I did the race. It was a little tricky to do-- you clearly could not tie it to other races on the card, and an awful lot of horses did not fire, presumably because of the slop, so there wasn't much to work with. There were really only a few possible scenarios that needed to be examined, though-- from giving SJ his previous huge top, to giving him 3 points worse than that. Giving him his top would also have given Imperialism a 3 point top and LH a new top as well, and that seemed unlikely, especially under the conditions. At the other end of the spectrum we could have just paired Imp, which would have had 3 horses running 1-2-4 in the Derby while going backward, which also seemed unlikely. So it came down to doing the race either where I did it or giving them 1 point better, and the most likely scenario had SJ and Limehouse pairing their last, Imp going a little forward, and LH going a little back. If it ain't right, it's damn close, and considering the conditions (and commensurate lack of information) the best that can be done.

Anyway, when Ragozin posted his Derby figures I looked at them with great interest, as usual. At first glance it looked like he was giving them a couple of points slower than I did, which on their scale would mean a point or two faster-- they run 3-4 points slower than we do. I started with the winner, and there were some individual differences due to ground loss-- trackmen have tendencies, some use more of the "fan" than others, etc. This creates looseness of 1/2 point or so in everybody's figures, but I was looking for horses where the differences came to more than that-- like I said, we had two guys check the race thoroughly, so I was pretty confident ours would hold up.

But as I worked my way down, a funny thing happened when I got to Limehouse. All of a sudden they had given a horse 3 3/4 point worse. Aha! A ground loss error! The next horse, TCE, 3 1/4 point worse-- another one! And as I went down the list, it was true of all the rest of the horses! So we set up a chart, and this is what we found:

First 3 finishers, average deviation TG to Ragozin 2.33 points.

Rest of field, average deviation, 3.875 points.

Now, 1 1/2 points is a lot. In fact, it is 3 lengths at this distance. So there were 3 possibilities that I could see.

1-- Ragozin's trackman got the ground wrong for the first 3 horses by the same amount (about 3 paths each, combined 2 turns), getting them all wider than they were. That would be a hell of a coincidence, not likely.

2-- They got the other 15 horses wrong, each by the same 3 paths, all tighter than they should be. Even more unlikely.

3-- One of us got the beaten lengths wrong between the third and fourth horses, affecting all the figures from the fourth horse down.

3 was by far the most likely, so I immediately checked to see if we had it right. Equibase (where we get our data) had it at 2 lengths, we had them check it, they did and confirmed. I looked at the tape myself 3 times-- it looked to me like a fraction of a length more, but certainly not the extra 3 lengths that would account for the difference. We got it right.

But how could Ragozin get it wrong-- he does all that video frame counting stuff, right? We have a conundrum.

Look, guys-- this is THE KENTUCKY DERBY. If they get this one wrong, what does that tell you about their day to day work? Those small "condition moves" those guys are talking about all the time? You now know what the margin of error is for those-- plus or minus 1 1/2 points. IN THE BIGGEST RACE OF THE YEAR. And that is assuming that all else is done right-- see my DRF expo presentation on our home page.

Ragozin customers-- there are 2 ways you can react to this. One is to shoot the messenger-- get angry at me for letting you know. The other is to aim your anger and questions where they belong. As I said after the Touch Of The Blues fiasco, it will be instructive to see how the Ragozin office deals with this information.



TGJB