How do you.....

[King Glorious]

Originally Posted by blackthroatedwind

I'm not sure King that you don't make a better argument against your point by using your baseball stats. What it shows to me is that Maddox and Pedro are great and the others aren't. If horses want to prove they are great then they need to do it on the racetrack....not in our minds and in our hopes. The simple fact is that King Glorious and Java Gold, while perhaps showing flashes of greatness, didn't prove it even close to conclusively on the racetrack. That's what really matters.

Silver Charm is actually an interesting example. He raced a full career and danced a zillion dances. He was a wonderful racehorse but by racing as much as he did he also proved conclusively that he wasn't " great. " But, at least he gave us a full resume with which to evaluate him. These other horses just leave us with conjecture. Because they have rewritten the rules doesn't mean evaluation should adapt. It shouldn't.

" Great " is a poorly used term these days in many fields. It needs to be reserved for the very few that rise way above even the extraordinarily talented.

You see that I did (grudgingly) admit that horses like KG and JG would not be included in my list if I had to list those that had proven their greatness. I understand that difference.

The way the game is currently going, there won't be very many horses that are top of their class at three that get to continue racing till they are four or five. The racing secretaries will never put 135 lbs on their backs anymore. With so many racetracks and races around the country, actually the world nowdays, the chances for top horses to meet each other are becoming increasingly rare. The way the industry is now, it's unlikely that any horse will ever even have a chance to reach the standards of greatness that the horses of the past had. Does that mean that none of them have it in them? I don't think that's true.

I do absolutely agree with you that the term is overused these days. I saw someone say that this Lecomte field is great and I wanted to throw my computer out of the window. I do also agree with you that it needs to be reserved for those that rise far above the level of good and reach extraordinary. The key is in deciding what's ordinary and what's extraordinary for any given era. It's not going to be the same for every era. I talked about home runs earlier. If next year, the league average is four and one guy hits 20, he will have had a great year. Those 20 will look like nothing compared to 73 and 70 and 60, etc but when taken in it's context, it will look like 200 in comparison.