Alydar, Alydar, you just don't know how to change leads, do you?

Rolling up the shirtsleeves for another go-round here.

First, however, some preliminaries.

1) Yes, you have correctly identified Sandel. I'm shocked that anyone would have picked that up here. He may be well known in political philosophy circles but 99.9% of the people in this country think Sandel is summer walking footwear. I have not tried to tell anyone that I'm a Harvard-educated anything. I will always let my points speak for themselves. BTW, I said I used to be a lawyer. I haven't practiced in 5 years. I have had three other careers, including an entrepreneur who ran a business for two years, so no wing tips, no bowtie.

2) Re: my views of Ragozin. Yes they are sometimes wrong on a variant. To err is human. I'm not claiming perfection, I'm claiming superior underlying methodology. Do I ever take them to task? Yes, I have, esp. on customer service and their failure to make their product available online. Luckily I can get it emailed to me now so the latter problem has been solved. Do I like their editorial policy? As a rule, No. Specifically, I think it was dumb to delete Jerry's responses. Will whining about it help anything? No. They delete most of my posts when I raise the issue of JB -- one recent exception being the Havre de Grace variant joke. Am I grateful for this forum over here? Yes. Will it make me buy JB's product? No.

2) Your advocacy on behalf of JB must surely be clouding your judgment. Your boy has humiliated himself at least 3 times now in his spat with Rag's Pimlico numbers:

Exhibit A:
JB Assertion: Ragozin blew the 13th race.
Fact: Even JB admits they got the 13th race about right.

Exhibit A1:
JB Assertion: 'I had to use a variant eight (8) points slower than the previous race, which happened to be the Preakness...
If they are consistent with their avowed methodology, the figures will come up ridiculously slow.
Fact: Ragozin used the same variant and got the right number.

Exhbit B:
JB Assertion: Ragozin can't post the 13th race because it will expose him as the scoundrel that he is. $1,000 bounty offered.
Fact: Race posted. Now JB has to pay $1,000 to his sworn and deadly enemy. What a revoltin' development.

Exhibit C:
JB Assertion: They split the route/sprint variant.
Fact: They did not split the route/sprint variant -- "There was no short/long on Preakness day--the first two races (where the likelihood of a short/long would be the highest) have the same relationship to each other as the last two races have to each other." -- Len Friedman

Alydar, don't you ever ask yourself why JB is so obsessed with not only Ragozin, but 5 races on a card; actually 1 race on a card -- a race it turns out he was completely wrong in his assumptions on? Shouldn't he be spending his valuable time making those great figures? If Jason Kidd wasted as much time talking trash and getting in the face of his opponents as Jerry does, he'd be playing in a pick up game at the 'Y' real soon.

Now, onto your latest missive.

The tight range hypothesis.

Sorry, Alydar, but I am right here unless you are taking my general statement to a ridiculous extreme (my money's on that one since that is the pattern I see in these strings). I am not claiming that every horse in every race gets a nice pretty number. Obviously I can see that TG gave MDO a 10 (or something like that) in the Preakness. The theory behind TG is that horses don't do certain things or are unbelievably unlikely to do certain things, like run 6 points off a top (just an example here, don't jump down my throat for using this illustration). If you start with that or a similar assumption about the volatility of equine performance then your numbers will always be in a tighter range than someone who believes that horses can and do run 6 points worse. That's just the basic math. Yes you will have outliers, usually for horses beaten by 10, 15 or 20 lengths. But overall your patterns will be tighter. Are you disputing that? And the repetition of tight patterns does not prove that your numbers are right, it only proves that you are applying your methodology consistently.
The only way to 'prove' that I'm right is to sit down with you and draw up some mock sheets using various assumptions. If you want to fly to Vegas, I'll be happy to do that.

The Math

Alydar, you either missed the distinction between the two math questions or are just trying to score easy points with the crowd. My point was that I would not dispute that 3.6 points was about 2% of the final time. The math I disputed was whether 2% was the proper way to analyze the change in track speed. But, to get around the point of disagreement I asked JB to show some history showing that a similar turf course under similar conditions will always or almost always get faster by 3.6 points. So far, no response.

The Bet

Thanks to JB for reposting the bet. Maybe I am inept but I got lost in the strings -- that's why I like to start new ones -- avoids the digging.

So, I will gladly accept the bet but don't hold your breath. I go to the races maybe 7 or 8 times a year now -- KY Derby, Preakness, Belmont, BC, and whenever my wife goes home to visit her folks. Sorry if that sounds like a copout but I think Brown would probably just say that Ragozin blew the variant once we do find such a race and I am proven right. That's his M.O. (see the 13th race debate).

TG vs. Ragozin

Once I learned what JB's methodology was, I didn't need to do much more comparing. As I have said over and over and over again, I think that the underlying assumptions and resulting behavior (changing a variant several points up then 8 points down one race later) will result in a product that is not useful to me.

Track maintenance

Alydar, read my post again. I said routine watering of the track does not, in my view, change the variant from one race to the next. Track maintenance can and does. My point was and is that the superficial watering done in between races does not change the variant. If it did, wouldn't we see a consistent pattern that JB could identify for us. After all, it's routine -- it's done pretty much the same way on pretty much the same schedule at a given track. Given the number of similar weather, wind, sun, etc. days at any track over a number of years, you'd think that JB would have an automatic number he could plug in -- the 'water truck' change. But I will bet you (gentleman's wager) that JB moves the variant up and down due to water truck maintenance depending on the situation.

The political make-up of Ragozin's office

True but I'm not speaking of the hired help here.

Motive and Philosophy

The term 'motive' as it was used by the poster to whom I was responding, was given a sinister tint, as in 'motive for a murder'. My response was simply that JB has a philosophy about equine performance. That is what drives his variants. The track surface is malleable, assumptions about equine performance are not. Thus, it is accurate to say that he does not care about the track surface. Any adjustments made are in service to his ideology about 'tight ranges'. Does that not make sense? Is that at all inconsistent? No, I didn't think so.

Your assessment of me

Gosh, Alydar, please don't call me a joke. A 'damn' one at that. I might just go throw myself from the Eiffel Tower (the local one).

Looking forward to the next one.