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Originally Posted by CSC
His last race was not visually impressive, nor was it impressive from a beyer standpoint (96).
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I got curious about the 'slow Beyers' thing and went back to my Davidowitz book where he talks about how to calculate speed figures. As I remembered, the pars have to be based on historical data over the track. But the kicker is, the SA surface is brand-spanking new - first used in October 2008. Mr. D. suggests that you need at least 15 races at a particular level and distance for your pars to be useful (and I, as a mathematical statistician, would prefer 20 or more for the normal approximation to hold). How many G1 races at 9f have been run at SA on Pro-Ride? Four? Five? Not nearly enough to have reliable pars. I don't see how anybody can pretend to have accurate speed figures for Santa Anita stakes races this year (except for the turf, which they haven't dug up lately).
You don't suppose they have been using data from races run on the old dirt track and/or the wildly variable Cushion track mishmash from last year? How lazy and intellectually dishonest that would be.