#27
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Quote:
To answer Danzig's question, I don't know how often they get adjusted. I do remember the case with Lava Man a few years ago and his number from the Californian was adjusted several times, appearing in a couple of subsequent pp's with different numbers. I've always taken numbers from 2yos and 3yos in the spring with a grain of salt. First, trainers are often adding new dimensions to each race so the horse is attempting something he's never done before. Whether that be two-turns, added distance, shipping and racing, etc. With so many new variables thrown into the mix, I think it's very difficult to project what a horse should do in a given situation that he's never tried before. A good example would be a horse that's running in two-turn races because they are trying to get him to the TC and say he's running consistent figures in the 80's then when returned to one-turn, he puts up a 105. That figure seems out of whack but it could be that if he had been running one-turn races the entire time, he might have been closer to that 105 and nobody would have looked twice at it. You also have horses at different stages of their development and trainers with different goals and objectives in a race. For instance, because of his win in the Hollywood Futurity, Baffert knows he's pretty much assured a spot in the Derby based on earnings with Pioneerof the Nile. With that in mind, he can work more on getting the horse closer and closer to his goal with each race. But take a horse like Papa Clem, who just ran second to Pioneer last weekend. He HAS to win a big race soon in order to get the earnings. So his trainer might tighten him up a little bit more than Baffert will Pioneer because they have totally different goals for the race. You might look and say that Pioneer is 10 points better than Papa Clem but if PC is at 90% for their next meeting and Pioneer is at 75%, it would be logical to not expect the difference between them to be 10 points so if Pioneer beats him by a neck, you can't look at their previous figures and say what the figure should be. Likewise, you can't take a figure earned today in a sprint and then look at the subsequent form of the horses and then downgrade today's race. For example, if horse A runs a 110, horse B runs a 106, and horse C runs a 100......then next time out in a route, horse A runs a 94, horse B runs a 92, and horse C runs a 90......perhaps none of them are good routers but that doesn't mean you should downgrade what they did in the sprint.
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The real horses of the year (1986-2020) Manila, Java Gold, Alysheba, Sunday Silence, Go for Wand, In Excess, Paseana, Kotashaan, Holy Bull, Cigar, Alphabet Soup, Formal Gold, Skip Away, Artax, Tiznow, Point Given, Azeri, Candy Ride, Smarty Jones, Ghostzapper, Invasor, Curlin, Zenyatta, Zenyatta, Goldikova, Havre de Grace, Wise Dan, Wise Dan, California Chrome, American Pharoah, Arrogate, Gun Runner, Accelerate, Maximum Security, Gamine |