Are you or have you ever been Alydar from California, or do you know him?

On a couple of points:

1-- The watering may or may not be arbitrary. My guess is that it is not, at least in the view of the one making the decision, but that it is a seat-of-the-pants decision, not one based on science, or on as many elements as Porcelli bases his on-- I base this in part on a conversation I had with a track superintendent at a MAJOR track who, when I said I noticed his track had been getting faster throughout some days, said times get faster because better horses run later on the card. Seriously. For the most part, these guys don't approach things the way Porcelli does.

But while the weather may have been a factor in the decision of when to water, my point about the watering still stands. If a track is not watered for two hours and then is watered, it will be wetter than it was before, even if the relationship varies with differing humidities, etc. And even if given one specific set of variables that was somehow not true, it would be wrong to ASSUME the track was the same failing information proving it was. As I said in several earlier posts, those variables (along with the moisture content at the start of the day, soil content on that day, etc.) make for an almost infinite number of variables and combinations, and make it impossible to draw straight line correlation between the info we do get and track speed. Erego no use by us of that data in formulaic terms, a point that a couple of guys on the Rag board failed (one intentionally) to grasp-- the point of the presentation was simply that Ragozin's assumption of track speed staying the same was a false premise, and that each day (and race) has to be looked at that with that in mind.

Which means that

2-- Even if is true that a smaller sampling makes it more difficult to be accurate, IT IS WRONG to combine disparate elements JUST to increase sample size. There are a lot of examples I could give you, but I'll use one I've used here before-- if you wanted to come up with a par figure for nw1x races at SA, you would be making a big mistake in combining similar races from all tracks around the country just to increase sample size.

ALL OTHER THINGS BEING EQUAL (which is to say, not "automatically"), more sample size is better. But just to give you an example, the horses that run 1 1/2 miles are almost always solid horses with extensive figure histories. It is easier to make figures for one race like that than two 6f maiden 2yo races filled with first and secound outers, barring other info.

3-- When you make your own figures, it is unlikely you are working with anywhere near the level of data we are-- meaning ground, wind, accurate figures for horses shipping in, etc. You would find that things fit together much easier (which is not to say it's easy) if you were, and that horses would repeat figures more often. And if you did you would know that those repeaters you refer to are signs of accuracy.

This is something I thought Friedman was going to bring up in Vegas ("Jerry gives them the numbers he wants to"), but I guess he was too smart to try that in a forum where I could respond. If you have made figures, you know the relationships between horses in a race are fixed-- you can't add to one without adding to the others. Which means you can't pair up more than one horse unless they actually do so, and since the whole PREMISE of making (and using) figures is that horses run back to previous figures, the more that do, the better. This is something I addressed in several posts a couple of years ago.

4-- No one is "standardizing" numbers, but ALL of us who make numbers do so by using the past figure histories of the horses. If you are not, I would love to know how-- that's the question I was trying to get Friedman to answer in Vegas about the Kee baby races.

Let me say this clearly and simply-- I look at the surrounding races, and all other information I can get my hands on, when making figures. But I know enough not to make the false ASSUMPTION that the track stays the same speed, or that the relationships between distances is fixed. And I knew it 15 years before I had scientific backup-- it is a simplistic position that is silly, if you think about it at all, and obviously false when you work seriously with figures, UNLESS YOU START WITH A DOGMATIC POSITION THAT DOES NOT ALLOW FOR ANY OTHER POSSIBILITY. Friedman gave a glib (of course) response to Beau's (Horsegoer's) question on the other board, but I think we would all benefit by his response to the science in my presentation.


TGJB