Graded Stakes Results & Divisional Standings (9/17/12)

I've been keeping a database of graded stakes winners for several years now but this is the first year where I've attempted to assign points in order to attempt to judge the performances throughout the racing season. As each month has passed, I've thought of different ways to try and improve on the concept going forward, specifically relating to determining the strength of a specific stakes race

I won't be able to make the changes for this year, but going forward I'm going to add another "race strength" component into the mix. Right now I'll be adding in a speed figure bonus at the end of the year, with the horses that ran the fastest figs in a winning effort receiving bonus points. While that is a crude way to measure race strength, I've also thought a lot about awarding bonus points to certain races based on horses coming out of that race winning graded stakes races later on in the year. Or perhaps a penalty to races that fail to produce any other stakes winners.

The idea for this change goes back to the whole notion of "not all Grade x races are alike". A grade 3 race at Tampa might produce zero stakes winners the rest of the year, while one at Santa Anita might provide multiple. If we're trying to assign points that determine which horses are "the best" (and, of course, that term is almost always relative), then we need to find some way to differentiate races beyond simply grade or a speed figure.

Unfortunately, this still won't be a perfect system, especially with respect to three-year-olds that develop greatly over the course of the year. But regardless, I think a bonus for stakes winners exiting a specific race would help be a good extra.

I've been playing around with the mechanics to implement a system to reward points for later stakes winners but am trying to balance it against giving myself too much work to do on the backend. After all, I've only got so many hours in the day to pour through results charts. A streamlined method would be to only look at the future races of the top 3 finishers, since I'm already collecting that information. Unfortunately, I just don't think that's adequate for what I'm looking for. If horses that finished 5^th, 6^th, 7^th or 8^th come back to win a graded stakes that's a good sign of the depth of a specific race and needs to be quantified in some manner.

At the end of the day, I'm probably going to have to just manually enter in the entire running order so that I can analyze the data from top to bottom. If that proves to be too cumbersome... well, necessity is the mother of invention.

Anyway, that's my thoughts going forward with this whole Divisional Standing experiment.

On to the standings...

A couple of notes before looking at the Top 10s:

• Wise Dan currently sits 2^nd in the Turf Mile category to Mr. Commons, the result entirely due to the fact that Mr. Commons has raced at a mile on the turf many times this season, while the connections of Wise Dan have only recently focused on turf miles. I think most of us would agree that Wise Dan is clearly the best turf miler in North America and I would expect that by the end of the season, he'll sit atop the rankings for the category. However, this does point out one issue of trying to assign points within certain classifications: horses that run more stakes in a certain division will naturally gather more points.
  
  Like the race strength changes I discussed above, I may have to look at tweaking the assigning of point or perhaps a heavier emphasis on winning over just running second or third multiple times. I don't know. We'll see how it shakes out by the end of the year.
• The Wise Dan problem crops up with Questing (GB) in the 3YO Fillies category.
• One change that I haven't done so far this year but will do before the end of the season is split the 3YO Colt and Filly categories into "Dirt" and "Turf" categories. It will dilute the sample size but needs to be done given the inherent differences between each surface.

Below are the Divisional Standings Top 10 as of Sunday's races. You can find the full Graded Stakes Results/Divisional Standings via Google Docs.