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Andrew Beyer, the Washington Post reporter for whom the Beyer Speed Ratings are named, wrote a book in the mid-1970s titled, Picking Winners: A Horseplayer's Guide (Houghton Mifflin Company). After all these years, the book is still in print.
It was in this book that Beyer first extolled his belief that we need to take real times and convert them to numbers based on a standard time for every distance at every class level.
When I first read that book I, like many others, thought I'd found the holy grail of handicapping. I spent countless hours making track variants. I found winners I might never have otherwise backed. Yet my overall win percentage and the amount of money I put in my pocket didn't change all that much. I still couldn't fulfill my dream. I couldn't quit my job and make a living at the track.
I'm not sure what Beyer thinks of his speed ratings nearly thirty years later. Does he personally practice what he preached all those years ago? Or, has he too come to the realization that horses don't run against a mythical standard time. They run against other horses. Trainers move horses up and down the claiming ranks for no other reason than to find a group of horses they can beat. This results in horses running nearly identical times while racing for tags ranging from $16,000 to $25,000.
With little trouble you can find a horse that won a $10,000 claiming race one week, then came back to win again at the $12,500 level two or three weeks later. Should that horse's winning times be used to generate par times at each level? Or should you only use the time of the $12,500 race when calculating par times? To add to the confusion, a horse can actually face stiffer competition in a $10,000 claiming race than he does in a $12,500 claiming race. It all depends on which trainers enter which horses in which race in an attempt to bring home a winner.
I will agree that there are days when a given race track appears to be faster than other days, just as there are days when a given race track appears to be slower than other days. My experience, however, has taught me that these days are few and far between. They generally stand out in past performance charts because they don't fall within the normal range of times at which a horse successfully contests a given distance.
The par time aficionados also want us to believe that we need to adjust times when horses travel from one track to another. This has some merit because there are differences between track surfaces in different parts of the country.
Horses that run at the State Fair at Sacramento, California, always produce times far superior to any time they might run at Santa Anita or Hollywood Park. The times at the Fresno, California fairgrounds are also extremely fast. These tracks are located in a part of the country where humidity levels are very low. As a result, these tracks are extremely dry. However, adjusting the times of horses that run at these tracks based on average times for horses that ran for a $10,000 claiming tag does not deal with reality.
I have found that the amount of time and effort involved in properly comparing times from one track to the next is not worth the effort. It would require comparing winning times of a large group of horses that have contested races at both of the tracks for which you are trying to set variants. A properly conducted study of this nature could take years.
So let's look at the track records for six furlongs in various parts of the country.
CALIFORNIA
1:07 1/5 Bay Meadows Race Course
1:07 1/5 Santa Anita
1:07.52 Hollywood Park
1:07.55 Golden Gate Fields
1:07 3/5 Del Mar
NEW YORK
1:07.54 Aquaduct
1:07.66 Belmont Park
1:08 Saratoga Race Course
ILLINOIS
1:08 Arlington Park
1:08 1/5 Hawthorne Race Course
1:08.85 Sportsman's Park
FLORIDA
1:08 Hialeah Park
1:08.85 Calder Race Course
Notice that in California, the track records for six furlongs group between 1:07 1/5 and 1:07 3/5; in New York, they group between 1:07.54 and 1:08; in both Illinois and Florida, they group between 1:08 and 1:08.85.
Notice also that the times on both the California and New York circuits each group within three-fifths of a second of one another, with a two-fifths of a second difference between west coast and east coast groupings.
In Illinois and Florida, where lesser quality horses compete, the groupings are identical and fall within a larger spectrum (one and one-fifth second).
I feel track variances between different parts of the country have as much to do with the quality of horses running on each circuit as they do with differences in track surfaces.
Based on the above observations, I would be inclined to adjust times by two-fifths of a second for horses moving between New York and California tracks, while most handicappers would have you adjust final times for those same horses by as much as one full second because the par times for cheap $10,000 races show a greater disparity between tracks than the track records set by more gifted horses.
Gerald Cohail
RaceCapper.com
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