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The best argument for Ruffian is she won all those races. It's hard to win a bunch of races in a row!
The problem is that she was beating up on New York 2 year old and 3 year old fillies race after race, and as is often the case in a situation like that, the competition wasn't that good. It's like what Zenyatta's record would be if she didn't have the BC Distaff, the 2 BC Classics (one of which she of course lost), and the 2 Apple Blossoms. Most of Zenyatta's non-BC races in California were beating up against awful competition over and over again. And Ruffian was even facing a narrower band, because she wasn't even meeting older horses.
As I said, part of the tragedy is that they really did plan to run her against tougher competition. The match race was the first step in that direction-- she also surely would have started meeting older horses, and I even saw one article that mentioned that Janney was interested in shipping her to California (which would have put her up against Tizna, who was quite good during that period and who would have been a real test for her). So she never got the chance to show us how good she was. She might not have ended up undefeated even if she beats Foolish Pleasure (which wasn't assured), but she surely would have continued to do quite well and could have had one of the great careers. It just didn't happen.
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