Steven Roman - Dosage Index, Leaving the game
 

Dosage isn't used by most horseplayers these days, but still hurts when people leave the game.

http://www.chef-de-race.com/farewell.htm

He has posted here in the past. I learned a lot from his site in my formative years. We didn't always agree on things, but big respect all he has done.

Will continue to think about him every Derby season. His input will be missed.

This is unfortunate. He had a lot of information on his site and I'll be sorry to see it go. I found the Performance Figures useful for the Triple Crown preps and races. He mentions the guy taking over the dosage but doesn't provide an outlet where that info can be found. If anyone becomes aware of that, please post.

I Liked his Goodbye
 

His last line was a thank-you the rest was a long and I felt interesting reciting of his historical work and the state of racing today and how it got that way.

I enjoyed it, would have liked more on the people he met along the way.bbbb

This is a big loss.
 

I've been reading his material for years, and poof it's all over. The pf's are gone! A low recent pf was a good bet for stakes races. I'm surprised pf rating were not sold off.

He has a very mixed legacy.

He certainly cared about the game, wrote about it, and studied it. And he was very intelligent.

But Dosage was a classic example of the over-statisticalization of the game based on overly small samples. And every year, around TC or BC time, I hear a bunch of BS statistics based on small samples and retroactive fitting (such as that Exaggerator couldn't win the Preakness because Derby runners-up never do). And Dosage was the grand-daddy of such theories-- a completely arbitrary, back-fitted theory that tried to predict something that had a tiny sample size.

As usual, another good post, dilan.

I was a huge Strike the Gold fan and he was my Derby horse. But Dosage was just about at its peak and all the talk in racing. All I recall was my friends calling me an idiot because of Strike the Gold... that he couldn't win because he was over the 4.0 Dosage number that all Derby winners needed to be below to win.

I still bet him that Ky Derby day and of course, I was happy as hell when he won.

Then, all of a sudden, his sire, Alydar, becomes a chef-de-race, and Strike the Gold qualifies!! The Roman Dosage system still lives!

While I truly and sincerely appreciate Dr. Roman's research, etc., the Dosage Index was always a joke to me.

I disagree in part with your criticism of Roman’s methodology.

At its inception Roman’s methodology made statistical sense and was predictable when sires were limited to covering 32-36 mares per breeding season and the big farms dominated the TC races by breeding prized stallions to their very good mares.

This is not to say that the breeding today is inferior to yesteryear’s breeding, but it is to say that it is different and doesn’t fit Roman’s Dosage model.

As you very well might know that statistics is not a science but an evolving data driven methodology underlined by many of the other sciences.

Therefore many concepts put forth in racing today for handicapping and breeding is inept because of statistical evolution and modernization or lack of supporting science.

Yeah well When I played B-Ball I would have been benched if I took a Curry shot. The game changed. I learned a lot from Dr. Roman.

So true, good post. I don't think the younger people realize how accurate it used to be. No small sample, that shit was deadly for a long period of time. EVERTHING changes, people don't always like it but it always does and in sports, adaptation is essential. This game is not played like it was 40 years ago and we used to read his stuff ALL THE TIME.

I like how he took his parting shot at Beyer...called him Andrew instead of Andy as well, like he's his dad....jealousy runs deep and long....

If you go to a roulette wheel, black or odd will at some point be "deadly" for a period of time....

It is a clear post hoc fallacy to assume that the reason Dosage no longer "works" is because of changes in breeding. The most obvious explanation is that Dosage was working with a very small sample so that there was no reason to think it was making statistically valid conclusions in the first place.

If you read the entire document, he addressed handicappers using Dosage as an eliminating factor for the Derby. It sounds like it annoyed him because that was not the intended purpose and he felt the misuse by others diminished the value of the work.

Imagine I created a class rating to help estimate the quality of a field relative to PAR and people started using it to arbitrarily bet on horses coming out of strong fields and against horses coming out of weak fields. It would fail. The fact that it failed what it was not designed to do does not mean it wasn't doing what it was intended to do really well.