Marc,

I can't spend as much time on the board as I did yesterday, but this one could be productive.

1- The issue of "staying in one piece" I brought up in ROTW was in regard to the way top 3 year olds are pushed in the spring and through the triple crown, which very few survive-- they seldom become good older or grass horses. Buddy Gil has already had 3 hard races, and sure enough bled through Lasix Saturday (usually a sign of stress)-- and now faces a LOT more stress.

If the scenario you described were in effect-- if the ONE race in Feb had set him back--
it is much more likely he would have gone back in his last.

2- The whole point of my drawing attention to this stuff is that I DO know how fast the horses ran, and SHOULD have run on Ragozin (about 3 points slower)-- that's why I try to get them to post the figures. This is a parallel universe situation-- your acceptance of the premise that Ragozin figures are correct and therefore their methodologies must be correct, and explanations for their behavior justified, make my position an impossibility. I know, I was there, although even then I challenged more things than you guys do. So I try to get you guys to look at the data itself to point out the internal contradictions, and conflicts with basic logic (Chilukki, Keenland 4 1/2f races) that believing in what they do must produce. And I try to get them to post the races so that you guys can see what I see.

3- The "exception" paragraph-- this is worth a 2 page response on its own, and I havn't got the time. Let me just say this-- you are absolutely right that it would be wrong to place much reliance on Ragozin off-track figures, either as a bettor or in making future figures, because he simply gives out almost exclusively bad figures in those circumstances, and on windy days-- I would guess he assigns figures averaging at least 2 points slower (which is a lot) than on fast tracks, and there is no reason to believe it is justified. I have discussed this here before, but I don't have any idea where the post is.

The reason drying out and wet days are in the most dispute is because those are the days when the variant tends to change during the card, which is one of the things that is effectively not ALLOWED to happen under the rules the Ragozin office uses to make figures-- the use of broad averages is a big part of that. Hence the problems with the Chiluuki day, Wood 2000, Preakness day 2002, Storm Flag Flying last fall, Laurel 2/22, etc. If nothing is going on with the day (BC 2002) it's pretty easy to get it right. But the exceptions are the important part of what we do-- while I used the above examples on this board because they were dramatic because of the importance of the horses running, there are thousands of lesser examples.

And very often the figures from the disputed days play a pivotal role in future figure making-- FP's Wood figure detemined that years Derby figure, regardless of what Friedman says, and if you looked carefully at the Derby figures at the time you know that.

4-- BG jumped up a lot in that grass race on ours too. But both what the other horses in that race ran and what BG did pairing up in his very next start (a figure Ragozin and I agreed on) are pieces of evidence that our figure is right. And leaving aside both your position and the far more negative one of several Ragozin players, Friedman thought he was just one of 6 contenders in the SA Derby, while I said he was "the horse to beat". Proof? No. Evidence? To some degree.

5- Your follow up point goes in the right direction, but not far enough-- the horses from those races will spread out into other races, and be used to make future figures, and since Ragozin ties days together to an extreme degree, LOTS of figures have to be affected anytime there is a mistake.



TGJB