Poor season for Liaison

[Calzone Lord]

This has been a banner year for Bob Baffert, but no so for one of his Grade 1 winning 2-year-olds of 2011.

Liaison is 0-for-8 this year. He's managed only a single second place finish as well. He was last seen finishing 9th in the Travers.

However, he sure looks awful good on a Thoro-Graph sheet when compared to great names from the past.

In the Kentucky Derby, Liaison was soundly beaten by 7 lengths, he ran a Thoro-Graph figure of 3.

By comparison, here are the Thoro-Graph figures of late 80's Kentucky Derby winners:

'86: Ferdinand 7 (eight lengths slower than Liaison's Derby race)
'87: Alysheba 6 (six lengths slower than Liaison's Derby race)
'88: Winning Colors 6.5 (seven lengths slower than Liaison's Derby race)
'89: Sunday Silence 6.25 (six and a half lengths slower than Liaison's Derby)

Liaison ran back to back 1.5's while finishing 3rd in both the Affirmed and the Jim Dandy ... those figures would have won most Breeders Cup Classic races in the 80's and 90's.

Easy Goer might not have been a match for Liaison, but he looked competitive with Street Life and Steelcase.

Of course, none of this should be taken as a blemish against Thoro-Graph. They have horses across ALL variations of class levels, without exception -- MUCH faster now.

The viewpoint of TG's is that all horses are now faster (advancements in medication, breeding, and the like is what they say) the viewpoint of others is that TG's figure making methodology has at least as much to do with it as any advancements in medication and breeding)

However, even if horses are truly now MUCH faster among each and every variety of class... the same type of variant one uses to determine track speed ought to be applied to time periods... and that's no harder than making a variant so long as the needed data is there to do it.

Is the dismal and struggling 3yo Liaison faster than 3yo's like Ferdinand, Alysheba, Sunday Silence, Risen Star on TG? Yes. Is he better than them on TG with an era to era variant applied? Of course not. Not even close.

[Calzone Lord]

Obviously speed figures weren't around and being published by people who lived 90 years ago. But here's how one of the best racing minds and writers of that time period handled a subject like this in the fall of 1922.