The SeeSaw Effect

Oh Brother, here we go again. Could this be the return of Lost in The Fog - he’s parading around as 3 year old in a zipped up Brother Derek horse suit?

See Saw! Slow pace…..big Beyer (BRIS, Thoro- Graph, Sheets – take your pick)…..up, down. Unreliable speed figure. Don’t fall for them.

James Quinn said it right, “Thus, whenever the pace of the race has been unusually fast or unusually slow, the resulting speed figures can be outrageously false.

Let’s do last weekend’s Derby prep race pace report. You will notice the, uh, playground affect. (I use the Beyer figures here and before because I believe they should be the industry standard. Use any other fig you want but let’s use the Beyer figs so we know what we’re comparing.)

Illinois Derby – pace of the race Slow 9 – Beyer 109 – Sweetnorthernsaint
Santa Anita Derby – pace of the race Slow 5 – Beyer 108 – Brother Derek
Wood Memorial – pace of the race Fast 9 – Beyer 93 – Bob and John

Now let’s have some fun. Let’s adjust these speed figures for pace of the race. And let’s say that the adjusted speed figure is the number the horse in question would have run if the pace of the race had been par. In other words, let’s bring them back to ground zero and see where we are. I used the Beyer length adjustments for 1 mile and an 1/8 th, of course.

Sweetnorthernsaint – 109 Beyer - 93 Giles
Brother Derek – 108 Beyer - 99 Giles
Bob and John - 93 Beyer - 108 Giles

I know, I know, it’s heresy, a joke even, but the inverse relationship between pace and final time is alive and well, as you can see, so I just can’t resist.

But back to Brother Derek - He does not own the only early pace running style in this year’s Ken tucky Derby. There’s a bunch. Will he show another dimension? Can he handle a fast pace? We just don’t know. But speculating on racehorses is not really about picking THE winner. It’s about backing a horse that has a better (and realistic) chance of winning than the odds the betting public has given it. All the handicapping tools we use are there to do one thing, assess value.

Brother Derek will be a screaming underlay. The pundits will tell you that his final fraction demonstrates that he’s a real racehorse. It has to be fast! The pace was slow so the final fraction has to be fast. There’s just no way around it.

Win – throw him out. Exacta – throw him out. Trifecta – throw him out. Pick 3, pick 4, pick 6 – throw him out. But Randy? What if he wins, shows something like more versatility and/or superior pace ability? Well, I would say you did the right thing, anyway. You threw him out. You didn’t reinforce the piss-poor behavior that will only send you to the poorhouse if you continue that kind of practice long term. Reward yourself with one of those mint juleps.