PTF: Maybe we should start out by telling the good people why we’re here. You go first.
ED:
During a Twitter discussion on September 10, I said that the gallop out
"never matters." My esteemed blog colleague at TwinSpires, P.T. Fornatale (no relation to Barnum), took umbrage with my statement,
asserted that I was exercising pure hyperbole and called said statement
"absurd."
Being
the successful author that he is with many gold doubloons sitting
around his posh Brooklyn apartment, he spent some of those ducats on
paying a messenger to deliver a singing telegram while wearing white
gloves. At the end of the telegram the performer removed his gloves,
slapped me across the face, and challenged me to a blog duel to state my
case. I'm a poor marketer so I pawned the white gloves and accepted the
duel via Twitter rather than ordering a singing telegram of my own.
PTF: Those things aren’t cheap. OK, tell me why you’re against the idea of using gallop outs.
ED:
Racing is sometimes criticized for being a difficult game to
understand, but really, what could be easier than "Whoever crosses the finish line first wins"? Granted, it's equally as easy to understand
that in baseball the team with more runs wins and in football the team
with more points wins, but explaining how teams score either is a lot
more difficult than explaining how a horse reaches the finish line
first. And the simplicity of the goal is what makes divining who will
achieve it frustrating yet beautifully maddening. The best horse doesn't
always win, but the first one to the finish line does, and everything
else that happens during the race is dissected to determine who else
could/should have won. To me, worrying about what happens after the line
just clouds a picture that’s tricky enough to understand as it is.
PTF:
Just like a baseball or football team can play better than the final
score indicates, a horse can run better than the bare form indicates,
too. But let me back up a second.
Handicapping
is fairly easy to teach: Speed, form, pace, class. Put them in whatever
order you like. Trainers, trips, raceflows, biases. All indubitably
important. And yet, USA horseplayers as a group, even the good
handicappers, win at a rate of less than 1% in aggregate over time.
Handicapping is easy, winning is hard, especially in what you might call
the post-Beyer era.
I
believe there is a new frontier in handicapping, and ironically, it’s
an area as old as racing itself: I’m talking about horsemanship. As
handicappers, our ability to truly be horsemen is obviously limited, but
that doesn’t mean we can’t learn a lot by observing what the likes of
Bill Mott, Graham Motion and Todd Pletcher observe themselves; i.e.,
watch the watchers. As many of you who know me know, I am a big believer
in paddock analysis. But handicapping from a horseman’s perspective has
another under appreciated aspect as well: watching gallop outs. But
don’t get me wrong: Like so many other things in racing, gallop outs
matter when the matter. And sometimes they do matter.
ED:
Unfortunately, in the days I've let this stew, my idea has turned,
spoiled, and is now emanating a foul odor. Leave it to a successful
published author to win a war of words with a former journalist, but I
was in a tough spot having to argue something never mattered considering
P.T.’s perfectly reasonable point in his last sentence above.
So
for a while here, I felt like one of Barnum’s suckers born every minute
by agreeing to this debate. Saying they "never matter" would make more
sense if he had said they "always matter," but he didn't. Still, the
gallop out is grossly overvalued and matters so rarely that spending
time assessing them is folly.
PTF:
But one man’s folly can lead to another’s full wallet. I don’t just
want to cherry pick specific, back-fit examples (a key intellectual flaw
in handicapping literature). Rather I want to look at a couple of key
situations. The first is maiden races. Specifically, “watch” horses in
maiden races. When a horse has issues in a race, either via classic
trouble (bad break, raced on wrong part of the track, checked, blocked)
or is racing against a raceflow or bias not conducive to his running
style, and he still has a lot of run past the wire, it pays to pay
attention.
Perhaps
the most obvious example where watching gallop outs pays dividends is
with 2 year old first time starters, especially sprinting. In many
cases, just by pedigree and trainer, you can identify horses who are
unlikely to thrive going short in the first two thirds of the year. When
these horses get predictably outpaced, yet finish OK and gallop out
well past the turn, I would recommend making a note of that.
ED:
It's conceivable that a horse is destined to go long on the turf but in
order to best prepare for that career, the trainer debuts said animal
sprinting on the dirt. Perhaps the trainer instructs the rider to
persevere through the finish even if hopelessly beaten--not for a check
but for fitness. The gallop out could be worth watching in that
instance, but to me that's as much a part of handicapping the trainer
(as well as pedigree vis a vis turf) and knowing that type of move was
potentially in play.
PTF:
That’s a good point about the overlap of trainer handicapping and
gallop outs, I hadn’t thought about it that way. Just like the
traditional handicapping factors can overlap, so can the newer ones.
Another application of gallop outs involves 3-year olds in the spring.
This time, I can’t resist the somewhat back-fit example of Turbulent
Descent in the Santa Anita Oaks. Anyone who watched her nearly fall down
past the wire after gutting out that win at 1 1/16 miles would never
consider backing her going any farther. At the same time, on that
evidence, you (OK, well, me) might have pegged her then and there as the
future Grade 1 winner of the Test.
At
the same time, I recognize that our eyes can easily deceive us.
Sometimes a horse looks super strong after the wire simply because the
conditions in the race favored him. I remember Nehro in this year’s
Arkansas Derby ending up seemingly 50 yards in front three strides after
the finish. Many took this as a sign he would thrive at a longer
distance. I kinda thought it was because he made the last move in a race
that favored closers (though, to be fair, he did acquit himself well in
the Derby).
ED:
I will say that gallop outs NEVER, EVER matter when trying to determine
who the more accomplished horse is among winners and losers. I don't
care who "had his nose in front" a yard, foot, or picometer beyond the
finish line. Who was ahead after 1 9/64 miles of a 1 1/8-mile race has
as much bearing on who won the race as who was ahead after 1 7/64 miles
of the same race.
They
also never matter if they never matter to you as a handicapper. If you
are not someone who normally appraises horseflesh after the race as a
way to measure a horse's ability then you should not attempt to handicap
based on that information just because it has become apparent to you.
The
same rule applies to horseflesh before a race. I appreciate that
inspecting horses in the paddock and post parade can yield clues about a
horse's readiness to run, but I do not make those assessments myself
because that is not a strength of mine.
PTF:
Let me take the second part first. Fair enough. Clearly, every
handicapper needs to stick with what works for them. I guess I’m just
suggesting that players who aren’t happy with the results of their
existing methodologies might consider learning to look at things from a
horseman’s perspective, and one of the easier ways to do that, in my
opinion, is by watching who is going well at the finish. Consider a
scene I saw at Saratoga. One of Todd Pletcher’s runners -- there were so
many I can’t recall which -- won a stake. The people in his box are all
high-fiving. He keeps his eyes right in the binocs, watching the gallop
out. How can they not matter?
As
for the first part, about not using gallop outs to measure a horse’s
overall body of work, I’m with you there. To me, they are really just a
handicapping cool. Let’s say Horse A beats Horse B but Horse B gallops
out better in the Breeders’ Cup Classic. I wouldn’t be voting for Horse B
for Horse of the Year, but maybe I’d be looking to bet Horse B if the
two faced each other again. Often, it makes me crazy trying to express
myself in the 140 characters that Twitter allows. But this time I feel
like I got it right in tweet form: gallop outs matter when they matter.
ED:
Evaluating a horse's behavior beyond the scope of how the race is run
(e.g. handicapping based on the gallop out) is as much a part of knowing
the jockey as knowing the horse. Some jockeys have earned reputations
for not riding through the wire. A key jockey change in that regard
could make a horse appear to gallop out more strongly than as in the
past, but that's hardly a sign of form reversal.
This
discussion started by noting that racing is easy to understand because
the goal is easy to understand: reach the finish line first, and I'm a
big believer of understanding the motives behind a horse being in the
race when handicapping that horse's chances in a race, which is where
understanding trainers come in.
Really,
though, a hopelessly beaten horse is more likely to look good running
past the wire because those so far ahead of him are already slowing
down, so the gap will close quicker.
Which gets back to my point that it's just a tricky assessment and one that most should avoid.
First it states that most players over time only have about a 1% win ratio...If your half way good it should be around 25% of the time. In answer to your question, "should a winner of a race be watch after wards..or perhaps drug tested is a better answer to have! Especially if your wagering with a NHRA (New York Horse Race Association) track or a few Calif. ones! But is notories in the horse racing industry...and scum bags who use it should be hanged as the scum they are! That is my opinion from my 40 + years of horse gaming! ~Atomic Bomb~
ReplyDeleteIf you are going to watch the gallop-out, then you need to take it one step further and watch the horse after he turns around and heads back to be unsaddled. Watching a horse jog back can many times be very telling about soundness and fitness issues. More often than not, this is what those trainers are looking for through the binocs...HOW did the horse "come back?"
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