Quote:
Originally Posted by Psychotic Parakeet
Is there a way to look up information on past races for specific distances and surfaces? The StatsMaster feature on Equibase works sometimes, but is a PITA to sort through because distances are mainly grouped together. Handycapper was a total Godsend for what I wanted at one point, but is no longer viable.
I was wondering if other places have a way of looking for this stuff other than painstakingly going through chart-after-chart to find what you are looking for? Thank you!
|
This is a touch too vague to be clearly answered.
There are databases which allow a person to take, for example, every race run at 6 1/2 furlongs (and only 6 1/2 furlongs) at a particular track since a particular date during the Equibase era, and get post position stats for only those races.
For example, here is Parx, at races carded at exactly 5 1/2 furlongs on dirt, from September 11, 2001 through yesterday.
#1 post 468/4018
#3 post 548/4016
#7 post 398/3131
#12 post 16/ 199
But post position stats as typically presented in racing over the long haul are on the edge of worthless, as they don't account for field size. That is to say that while the #1 post sometimes knows a 25% (or 50%!) chance of winning, the #10 post never has better than a 10% chance of winning, so of course #1 is going to look better.
To be worth anything (other than as a means through which to count "field size" data for a certain window of time), they should be limited to fields of exactly 10 (for easiest example) runners, as only then could the independent posts be fairly compared.
(*** at Penn National, where they had a 'walkover' in recent years, the 'win' was recorded for the #1 post position, and nobody else had a chance)
So it is difficult to answer your question without understanding more about what you're seeking.
