How a horse improves by 20+ lengths in a month...
 

I know of only two such ways.

#1.) The Shifty Sheik way. This involves a trainer change to a trainer who has great juice.



Notice trainer Oscar Berrera claims the horse on Aug 19th and less than a month later he gets said horse to just miss against Horse of the Year Slew O' Gold in the Woodward after winning 3 straight races - all with a week or less of rest between starts.

#2.) The Devil May Care way. This involves everything in the world thats humanly possible going against a horse in a race like it did in her 64 Beyer double digit loss to dog biscuit closer Jody Slew in the Silverbulletday.

Exactly one month later - she returned to slay the mighty Amen Hallelujha and did so in faster time than the Florida Derby even though she was anything but professional in the stretch.

I did deep post position research on every winter track in the country and concluded that - without question - Fairgrounds route races had the only compelling post bias of any track in the country.

Post position #1 has won 62 of 265 FG dirt routes this meet. That's 23.4% wins. Post positions 8 and out are a combined 66 for 907.

According to post stats, in theory, FG is the only winter track in the country where you get truly punished for racing wide and truly rewarded for riding the rail.

Devil May Care was 5 wide on the first turn and 3 wide on the 2nd turn chasing a pace set by a horse breaking from post #1 that surprisingly earned an absolutely blistering fast pace figure.

One thing turned me off in a big way about DMC's performance. She finished 13 lengths behind the horse who set the too fast to believe pace. Albeit the pacesetter had far superior tactical position.

I concluded that DMC's race was a total throwout and drew a line through it. Her last true running line was an unimpressive 89 Beyer Grade 1 win in career start #2. I basically concluded that due to healthy progression from age 2 to 3 she was going to beat the overhyped Christine Daae but had no chance of improving 20+ lengths off her last race to beat Amen.

Looking at DMC's sneaky good performance at FG where she ran a 106 pace fig for 6fs despite going 5w, 3w before finishing up with a 64 final figure .. her final figure improved over 20 lengths next out but when all factors are baked in I'm not so sure how much she really improved.

I don't buy any of Pletcher's nonsense that her poor performance at FG was the result of her acting up in the gate.

I'm not knocking her at all.

I'm excusing her FG race for legit reasons ... not idiotic Pletcher esque reasons like "she acted up in the gate and that's why she did no running at all that day"

So Pletcher should have said she needed a race, made an ill-advised middle move at FG and was facing an overrated N1X winner, a stretched out middle distance horse and a CA shipper from a trainer who's 0 for his last 13 with horses going from synthetics to dirt in stakes races.

NT

Maybe she just had throat surgery ;) it's fillies
they often to this

I'm not so sure she needed a race .. he said she was training big going into that race and was puzzled by her performance but blamed it on her acting up in the gate.

The performance was actually big... the result wasn't.

She ran an absolutely monster race for 6f considering she was only 1 length off a torrid pace figure at that stage .. consider further that she was 5w and 3w and the pace setter was rail, rail ... she actually covered 6 lengths more of ground than the horse setting the blistering pace. Which would skyrocket her pace number to the moon .. and that's not even considering that FG is the last track in the country where you want to race wide on the turns.

A decent farrier and a positive attitude.....works magic.

The Marty Wolfson "worming" is all they need.

When Left Bank won the Whitney in 2002 .. he ran 9fs at Saratoga in 1:47 flat and equaled the track record.

That Shifty Sheik horse ran 1:47 2/5 in the mud going 9fs at Saratoga just 5 days after missing the board in a claiming race in his first start for Oscar.

The very same year - Slew O' Gold beat Track Barron in 1:48 3/5ths in the Whitney. Obviously two different days ... but damn.

When I first started following racing - Oscar was a laughably bad trainer - I mean as bad as it gets. His son is a ham and egger at Finger Lakes and he's way better than Oscar was. I always thought my father was lying to me when he'd tell me stories about Oscar's greatness.

He once tried to convince me that a lot attendant at his car lot was the greatest Jai Alai player of the 80's .. he took me to some little musem at a fronton in Miami. The guy had the same name as the lot attendant - but obviously it wasn't the same person.

Oscar would never resort to bush league tactics like claim and drop like these 30% hacks do now. All other factors were moot. Distance, class, post, jockey, time between races, etc. meaningless.
Didnt even bother to send them to the track.

I can't believe Nike hasn't gotten into the horseshoe business by now...what a wasted opportunity....Just think about how a little corporate conjecture could have dispelled this "run a muck" witch hunting... Clearly the poor guy was jonesing for a pedi and a fly set of skids

Joey???....The great Jewish cesta snd pelota slinger?

Yes ... Joey Long was the name of the guy who washed cars.

My father was obsessed with trying to convince me that Joey Long was the great Joey.

I found a Beyer article on Oscar at the time of his death.

http://articles.latimes.com/1991-04-..._oscar-barrera

There was no crowd bias for Joey or anything. :rolleyes:

Combining the starters from post 9 and out doesn't give you a realistic picture. Only 1 horse can win a race and based upon your 62/265 stat there were 265 races. Post 8 and out has won 66 of the 265 races.

With respect to post position stats, just curious, how many of those races were at 1 1/8 miles and what post position won those races?

But there were 907 starters outside. If you want to expand it, you should compare posts 1-3 vs posts 8+.

There is a very strong inside bias at 1M 40y at FG but the bias is much less at 1 1/16 and there isn't enough data at 1 1/8 to determine.

FG 1-year race stats (so slightly different from Drugs)

1 40y - Inside (Post 1 and 2) 62 winners/182 races 34%
1 40y - Outside (Outside 2 posts) 24/182 13%

1 1/16 - Inside (Post 1 and 2) 21/85 25%
1 1/16 - Outside (Outside 2 posts) 18/85 21%

1 1/8 - Inside (Post 1 and 2) 0/3 0%
1 1/8 - Outside (Outside 2 posts) 2/3 66%

Thanks for this. Confirms my suspicions about the "route" bias.

So, essentially, and a bit more succinctly, you're basically saying that you had to do a whole lot of work in order to UNDO the damage done by the figure. :rolleyes: Well done.