Looks like it is time to revisit an interesting discussion Jerry and I had two years ago regarding the 'variant' question -- Rags vs. TG.

While I will admit that there will never be a true and final answer as to who whether TG or Rag have it right, my preference is to use factual data for my variant as opposed to one's personal assumptions so that my numbers make a nice clean line.

Cases in point: Jerry's post today. Let's take each point in order:

1) Magic Weisner. First, a correction. Rag does not have his pre-Preakness race as being a 9 point move from his 2 y.o. year. The move was 6 points, which makes a huge difference in how you would read his line going into the Preakness. The 3" off of the 6" is thus surprising (I thought the horse was a toss at 45:1) but not totally shocking, given the generally explosive line that MW exhibited previously.

Additionally, to claim that Ragozin's Delaware Valley numbers are systematically too slow is absolutely false. I cannot count the number of times I have bet Laurel and Pimlico runners at NY tracks because they had faster numbers than the NY horses but were underbet b/c they came from MD.

2) The winner in the first race at Pimlico. She was not much of a stretch at all on the Rag sheets. She had already run a 9 sprinting and my experience with Rag sheets is that fillies who just badly x'd off of a distance that they are not particularly strong at often come back and run around 0 to 2 points off of their top. I personally thought that the race was unplayable given the odds.

3) The two grass races. You have got to be kidding! There is not a single number in race 5 that is at all surprising. The field was a bunch of first time grassers and horses coming off tops. The winner ran back to his second best number and the bounce candidates bounced a few points. Also, wet grass courses always produce a lot of x's simply because horses often don't like running on the soft turf. As for the 7th race, same analysis. The only semi-quizzical numbers were Watch and DeAar. However, Watch was coming off a layoff and had not run particularly well on a wet turf before. DeAar had x'd in her only prior wet turf start and had just run her eyeballs out three races in a row. Again, upon further review, no surprises.

4) The 11th race. Now, talk about dogma, Jerry!! Apparently it is written in THE BOOK that a horse can't bounce six points. First, it was not the whole field. Most of those horses were slow to begin with. Second, every single horse going into that race that had run fast in their last or second to last race was a horse with a high probability to run negatively. Tenpins didn't get his 'slow' numbers at a Delaware Valley track. He got them in KY. Given his jumpup I had him pegged to run between a 6 and a 10 (he ran an 8). Lightning Paces looked terrible. Tactical Side was a huge bounce candidate with an ugly line. Bowman's band was a bit of a surprise but a semi-ouchy horse coming off of a 2+ figured to bounce 2-4 points. Lyracist was slow always. Ground Storm was still going backward off of his 1 (War Emblem fans, take note), Full Brush was slow, Grundlefoot was a horse running an average of 8s coming off a layoff, and First Amendment figured to bounce off of the 6 in his last.

The bigger point here, Jerry, is where is it written that a bunch of ouchy older horses with bad patterns can't all 'x'? It happens all the time. And for you to just assert that it's 'ridiculous' merely unmasks you as the most dogmatic of all but dogmatic in a religious 'I believe it therefore it must be true' way instead of a 'I have looked at the evidence and this is how it is' way. I will take the second kind of Dogma any day.

5) Agree here. He looked better on your sheet but that's true of just about every horse who winse because that is how you have decided to make your numbers. You have a belief as to what horses can and should do and massage your variants to make the results fit your theory. No one can ever prove that wrong just like I can't prove that God didn't put the fossils there to fool me into thinking that the earth is billions of years old.

5)