BSF 'Doldrums': Figure Dives

[Dunbar]

Originally Posted by King Glorious

This whole revision based on next outs is extremely ridiculous. I've always been told that it's impossible to compare races from different days and run on different tracks and under different conditions and that's where speed figures come into play. But then when they look at a totally different race with tons of different variables involved to tell me how fast a PREVIOUS race was, that's too much for me.

I agree that revising based on next outs is ridiculous, but perhaps for a different reason than you. Beyer figs have always used past races to get some kind of baseline for the expected performance in the next race. That's okay, IMO, because it is not based on a single horse's performance, but rather every horse in the race. What I don't like about the Summer Doldrum's revision is (1) it appears to be primarily due to the poor showing by a single horse in its next out, and (2) it smacks of backfitting, which makes all the figs more suspect.

In essense, revising that figure from a month ago downward based on how the horse ran this weekend is admitting that Beyer had no clue what kind of figure the horse ran 3 weeks ago. It would be far better to just admit that, instead of assigning it a number based on how it ran 4 (?) weeks later.

--Dunbar