Why don't we have any good jockey ratings?

[Rick Ransom]

Ok, here I am again stirring up the hornet's nest.

Why can't someone easily come up with a jockey rating system that measures how much a horse's speed rating improves over average when that jockey rides the horse? It seems like such a simple thing to do! I'm not really big on jockeys (usually overbet), but if something like this were available I might test it for a while and see if there was any edge using it. I'm sure the person who produced these ratings could make a good business of it.

[GR1@HTR]

Rick,

There are software programs out there that have jockey ratings. We have found a couple queries where certain jockey factors can really boost the win% and ROI. Currently I am working on a Jockey dB...cherry picking certain jockeys who do well on specific types of pace horses. These jockeys have produces ROI's between 1.30 to 3.25 with win% from 20% to 47%. Now the true test will be to see how these little people perform in the future based on past data. Only time will tell...Back to the salt mines for now...

[Rick Ransom]

GR1,

Thanks for the info. Glad to hear someone is working on that. What I was thinking about was comparing different jockeys on the same horse as a way of making comparisons. In small (a few hundred races) I've seen some good results on jockey switches back to one who has done better with the horse before (last race speed compared with speed when today's jockey last rode). It's hard to tell what would happen in a larger sample, though because there were some huge longshots in there and only about 14% wins.

I remember reading something in the Thoroubred Times (I think) letters to the editor a couple of years ago by a guy named Darrell Hancock from Texas. He was mainly talking about Lasix, which he claimed reduces a horses final time by about 0.15 seconds based on his 275,000 PP line database. He also mentioned that he rated jockeys as well, said Gary Stevens was his top rated jockey and about two lengths better than the average jockey but only marginally better that the other jockeys he races against in Southern California. I think if you could find even a half length difference on a jockey switch that you might really have something worthwhile.