Quote:
Originally Posted by King Glorious
So I have a question. It’s not a knock at all on Beyer so please don’t take it that way. It’s not saying that I think he’s right or wrong either. It’s just a question so hopefully, I can gain more knowledge. Reading Beyer’s article, he says that the track variant was the same from the start of the day to the finish. If that’s the case, why not apply it to the Brooklyn? I understand when he says that doing so would have caused an unusually low number for the winner and others in the field but my question is why does that matter? He says that they arbitrarily assigned a number to the race that made it make sense with what the runners had done in the past. But the problem as I see it is that with the way this race was run, with the extremely slow pace, this wasn’t a normal race for any of them so why try to normalize it by giving it a normal figure? Freddy made the statement that he was unsure how anyone could think Mo Donegal and Nest were faster than the Brooklyn horses and it’s a legitimate question. But that can only happen if you take figures at face value and say the horses that ran the higher numbers were the faster horses. I would think that most people that aren’t novices would understand that this is not the correct assumption as far as the overall ability of the horses but I would think it should be clear that absent the evidence of a changing track speed, on this day, the Belmont horses were faster. At that point, it would seem like a handicapper should be able to understand the difference between faster and better. We don’t know if Mo Donegal is faster/better than the Brooklyn winner but we can safely assume he’s not 14 points better as the raw data says. So I would think any decent to good handicapper could look at the chart and figure out that there were extenuating circumstances that led to huge difference in figures and react accordingly. Maybe even capitalize on it wagering wise on the next out races for the Brooklyn horses. I guess I just feel like Beyer didn’t need to “dumb it down” for people. Do we really need to be told that the Brooklyn was a normal race when it’s obvious that it wasn’t?
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I am no expert but IMO figmaking has a level of subjectivity, and creative educated license if you will. The fig was always going to be an interesting number to create and discuss at least the Beyer fig.