What It Takes

My first article at the Otsego Insider. The site's fearless leader, Jim Webber, has already made the "exciting announcement". Various Photo Finish players, like Karen and Donny, have chimed in on the subject. Chelsey is already talking about deadlines. Deadlines?!?! What have I gotten myself into?! Great. Now I have to come up with something to write about. Not to mention the fact that it has to be at least a little interesting. These people want to be entertained! I'm in soooooo much trouble.

 I do have a title for the article though. What It Takes. The Aerosmith song? There is that "What Are you Listening To?" thread up on the forum. Hmmmm. It could work. There isn't much of a chance that I'd be listening to that though. Well, there is the very slightest of chances that I could listen to it. I mean, it is one of the 7,718 songs in my iTunes. But, it's not anywhere near the heavy rotation area of my iTunes player. It's in one of those dusty, cobweb-riddled recesses of the library. What's actually playing is Godspeed You! Black Emperor "The Dead Flag Blues", but that doesn't have anything to do with What It Takes.

There had to be a reason why that title came to me. What was I thinking? About what it takes to come up with a good foal name? No, that's not it. Besides, there's enough talk about names on the forum at the moment. What it takes to find a decent horse on the sales page? Yeah, like I'm going to share how to find the next Wild Wonder for $1,000 with everyone! What it takes to win a race? Hmmmm, that has some possibilities. A good courage rating is always nice. A little luck doesn't hurt. I don't really think that's what people are expecting from me however. There are the numbers though...

OK, there they are. The numbers. Those are pretty jumbled though. Random. That isn't going to tell us much. Let's see if we can organize them a bit and maybe get some semi-useful information from them.

In the 2016 racing season. See that, I just put those in order and now we're talking about last year's racing season. Progress! OK, where was I? 2016. What It Takes. Oh yeah, now I remember! What we're going to let the numbers show us is what it took to win during the 2016 season. Yes, that was a very roundabout way to get to the point. I'm getting paid by the word. Deal with it!

We might as well start at the top, since that's what everyone pretty much strives for. The Grade 1. By highly sophisticated use of my fingers and toes, I was able to determine that there were 251 G1 races run during the 2016 season. Yes, that's a large number to count using fingers and toes. I never claimed to be normal.  Anyway, the average winning PSR of a G1 last year was 105.7483. If we break it down even further, in the 87 G1 races on dirt, the average winning PSR was 103.4938. In the 164 G1 races run on the turf (how's that for balance?!), the average winning number was 106.9443. What does this tell us? It takes a pretty fast horse (usually) to win at the G1 level. Where else are you going to get that level of analysis??? Just call me master of the obvious.

OK, so you don't have a horse that's capable of dropping a 105. On average. Never fear, we have Grade 2's! So, breaking out the trusty fingers and toes, we find that there were 263 G2 races run last year. More opportunities for the less fortunate horse owners! At the G2 level, all it took to win last year was an average of 101.3931. Hmmmm. That's not exactly slow. The G2 dirt horses won with an average PSR of 100.0586 in 109 races. Their turf counterparts posted an average of 102.3376 in their 154 wins.

So, G2 didn't turn out to be the break that some may need. Well, it's off to the 345 Grade 3's. That took a while to count. Plus, I had to start over a few times as I ran out of fingers and toes. On average, it "only" took a 96.83667 to win at the G3 level. If you went the dirt route, you needed an average of 95.40327 to take down one of the 135 races. On the turf side of things, the 210 races were won by an average of 97.75815.

Still looking for the proper level? Average of almost 97 still a little rich for your blood? Yeah, me too. We're troopers though, so onward we march. The ungraded stakes level. 584 races! Yes, I needed a little help with these. My digits were no longer sufficient to deal with the counting. Where were we? Oh yes, the average. Let's see. Carry the one. Multiply the sine by the square root of pi. Divide by the difference in the track variant of this year's Kentucky Derby and the Sandpiper Stakes. All of that and we get an average of 91.91876. Just to win an ungraded race. For the 314 ungraded dirt races, the average was 90.79022. While the 270 turf races, took an average of 93.2312.

What should we take from all these numbers?  A better understanding of where to place horses? An appreciation for actually being able to win a race? Nothing at all? I don't know about you, but what I take from it is that I need the sales page to open so I can start selling off all my stable-full of hopeless cases.