Dr. Howard Sartin/John Meyers Controversy

[The Judge]

What is the Sartin/ Meyers controversy? It was stated the Sartin pirated material by Meyers and used it to become the Pace Guru without mentioning Meyers as a contributor or originator. My conclusion is this is not true.

This all started with a post by Wickel back in 2005 (wow!) Wickel asked what had happened to Meyers and got a e-mail from Jim Salvidge of “Hold You Horses “ fame” and Sartins name came up in a not so nice way. At that time I decided to look into the matter as much as I could. I am limited as I have almost no material on John Meyers. I do have Salvidges book and his 3 supplements. Salvidge also maintains a web site and of course has his and Thrillis Parkers material listed.

Time Line:

1975- We have all heard the story Howard was given a group of problem gamblers by the court system and told to cure them. Howard said the “cure for losing was winning.” So instead of abstained the group set out to WIN. The butcher paper went up around the class room and handicapping factors were written ala Tom Ainslie. They were making little progress then he brings “Dan the Feet Per Second Man” to class. Howard says he had been inviting a professional handicapper to class every couple of weeks. “He introduced us to the simple physics of velocity.

Is this true? I think it is “mostly” true and maybe all true. Something happened in 1975 to start Howard to try and beat a gambling game and in this case it was horse racing. In his An Introduction to The Sartin Methodology “The Dynamics Of Incremental Velocity and Energy Exertion” a technical paper for Handicapping Expo 1984 3rd edition 1989 had the reprinted article from the “Gambling Times, they later be came Win Magazine the issue is March 1982. The Gambling times article is important in other ways also. Howard states on pg.17 that “fortunately , during these first few weeks the western edition of the Daily Racing Form converted from showing only final times to printing the fractional pace line in the past performances. I far as I can tell at least on the east coast edition this happened in 1/1975. The western edition could have been much behind that date. Until then the factional times would only come from the results charts

In the Meadow’s Racing Monthly 10/1997 Berrys states the teaching member Tom Hambelton(co-author of Pace Makes The Race) told him that a seminar Howard introduced a man as member of the “original group”. The man later told Hambelton that what happened was nothing like what Howard had said”. It does however indicate that there was in fact an “original group” and it was before the ”public” knew about Sartin which would have been 1982 .

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1979- In Huey Mahls publication Frontline dated April 6- 12 1979 (The Follow- Up #68 pg. 24 reprint). Huey writes “I have received correspondence from one of my readers who has “grabbed the ball” from some of my Pace handicapping concepts and advance it a little further downfield. He’s a doctor and finds it makes a helluva good pension supplement to playing good outstanding PACE spot plays. He ties in a very necessary Class Evaluation. The article went of to say that the Dr. bets two horses per race and that he has had an average mutual of $10.80 1st choice won at 45% second at 25% at $13.80 over 14 months. This would be early 1977 .

Also in the Frontline article Hueys talks about composite ratings he states” It’s true, classier horse handle the turn better than cheaper one-SOMETIMES. But the first and last fractions tell us more about true class. The foregoing is important as this is part of the Sartin/Meyer problem.

What does this show, well if the Doctor didn’t know about Meyers work how could he pirate it? Something was going on with the good Doctor right around 1975 and in print in April 1979 and with a claim of records that go back at least 14 months from that date and a member of the “original group” that showed up at a seminar.

1981- Meyers published the National Railbird Review and he produced The Turf Investment Society Pace Report (T.I.S) it was an actually lesson in the Meyer’s handicapping correspondence course. System and Methods vol. 32 pg 47. On pg 46 it shows Meyers feet per second print out with Delmar 7/25/79 race 7 across the top but clearly the article was printed in 1981.

Example Horse A: 22 2/5--22 4/5---45 1/5----26 4/5---1:12. Horse B: 23---23---46---112 . Horse C:22 2/5---23/25---45 4/5--- 26 1/5---1:12. Here Ray Taulbot would prefer Horse A because the half- mile time was fastest ,Matheson would prefer Horse B: because he ran the fastest 3rd fraction and Mahl would prefer Horse C because his first and last fraction added up to the swiftest 48-3/5. “Meyers says: It is that matter of dispersion or expenditure of energy that I use to define the term pace and it is varying manners of energy expenditure that cause different handicappers to select different horses.”. Meyers goes on to mistakingly attack Mahl on the 1/5 of a second equals 1 length. Mahl never said this he simply said to use this as that is what the chart callers use. The 1/5 = one length is also part of the controversy.

I will stop for now and continue later. I will say this I think the real controversy is over the value of a length and factor X the first fraction and the third fraction averaged.
Sartin does mention John Meyers twice that I could find once by name and once by the Doctors “well known expert “ label.

Lots more to come but I will try and cut it down some.

[46zilzal]

What does it matter? Many inventors are never the ones credited with the acceptance of an idea. It took Edison to improve Bell's phone, the inventor of the flashlight had no idea what he had until a little company called Eveready bought the idea of "plant lights" and saw the potential.

The idea is here, it works, give Sartin credit for his promotion.

[DJofSD]

A significant fact mssing from the above is the lawsuit.

The idea is here, it works, give Sartin credit for his promotion.

Right on.

[The Judge]

You all may be correct. What I was really trying to do was to clear this up in my own head and that I’ve done with the material that I have at hand and on the internet. I have about 2 or 3 more pages with dates and theories etc. but the bottom line is Sartin may have done all or most of what he said and just made it more of an interesting tale for us.

As far as theories go all that Doctor Sartin ever needed was the two books that he admits to using “The Race Is Pace by Huey Mahl 1974 (note later edition is 1985) and the works of Ray Taulbot. I just want to talk a second about Taulbots work, this man was far ahead of his time and think the word genius is not out of order. In Thoroughbred Horse Racing for Profit his lays out feet per second at pg.118, on pg 192 he lays out the numbers we know as Total Pace Rating (TPR) numbers in 80, 90, 100’s instead of fps which is difficult for some to grasp ( I know the Sartin numbers of TPR are better and have a deceleration in them, that’s not the point) . He even goes into energy and has form cycle graphs with wiggly lines that any Sartin player would recognize. Mahls book compares horse side by side on graphs and shows how energy is expended. Sartin had all he need from these two and he gives them credit for it and says thats where he got the original ideas from. What more could you ask?

Just to show how far this can go, a gentleman by the name of Allan H. Hickman wrote 19 page article entitled "Hickman’s Guide To Thoroughbred Racing (1975)" in which he took it a step further and broke down pace in not MPH or FPS but INCHES per second , how is that for fine tuning.

Oh Taulbuts book was written in 1942 and cost $3.50.

In the Follow -Up there is some of the best material ever written on horse racing. I don't know about the newer issues which may need the new programs but certainly the old editions are great. the Follow-Up came out 6 times a year the first article was "From the Publishiers Desk" this was Howard. Here Howard poked and jabbed every handicapper known ,every name that was out. He did it mostly by name ,but if not by name then by group "the value boys" , the "experts" the "mainstream handicappers". Notice I DIDN"T say he "ATTACKED" them, no, they were just jabbs. He would in a later publication seem to always find a way to praise these same people.
He always said there were many ways to win at the races.

Howard was in fact defending Huey Mahl when he said that Meyers needed to read Huey's material and Howard reprinted Hueys mathmatical work on what a length really was, 5 years before the 1 length eqauls 1/5 arguement. As far as factor X not working according to Meyer ,Howard said of course it didn't work Meyer always use the horses LAST running line which had nothing to do with factor X as Mahl or he use it.

[46zilzal]

"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it."

Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Isaac McPherson, Monticello, August 13, 1813

[Dave Schwartz]

Just a minute, here...

Just because John Meyer wrote about FPS before Sartin does not make it "piracy."

You cannot copyright an "idea" or "concept." You may be able to get a patent on something like that but writing about it or expanding on it certainly does not constitute piracy.

If that were the case, then Dr. Quirin should not have published Winning at the Races because Dr. Davis came up with Impact Values before him.

And let's not forget Hambleton/Schmidt's Pace Makes the Race or Tom Brohamer's Modern Pace Handicapping.


So John Meyer had a good idea and somebody else made it work. That happens all the time. Nothing illegal or immoral.


Regards,
Dave Schwartz

[The Judge]

Taulbot was doing feet per second in 1942 and who knows who before that pg. 118 of Taulbots book "Thus a six-fulong race run in 1:11 (71)receives a feet-per- second rating of 55.78." So no Doc didn't get this from anyone but Taulbot/and or/ Mahl thats all thats needed. This is what he has always said, Dan the feet per second man, Mahl, Taulbot and to a lesser degree Matheson.

[DanG]

Judge…I’m not directing this at you at all. Just a general observation on the subject.

In my view most of these arguments of “who did it first” are just thinly veiled attempts at character assassination.

Example;

I give Ragozin and his dad major credit for their approach with figures. But if anyone thinks that graphing performance cycles wasn’t being done on Wall Street many years before Len’s dad adapted it for racing, they are kidding themselves. At the same time this takes NOTHING away from the unique contributions the Ragozin's brought to our game.

In closing; Thank goodness the Chinese didn’t put a patent on cooking techniques or our domestic menus would be printed on the back of a postage stamp.

[Joe Conte]

Ragozin's genius was more than graphing figures. His main thing was actually the "run up" and how much acceleration had or hadn't occurred by the time the lead horse(s) triggered the teletimer beam at the "start" of the race...which could have been 10 feet at 20 mph or 75 feet at maybe 40 mph. Such differences could have a radical effect on the final time of the race. Nobody ever thought of doing this until he came along. He also turned speed-charts upside down, so that a traditional 95 became an easier-to-work with 5, etc. Other innovations (later copied by Jerry Brown, who had worked for Rags) included spacing the graph in such a way that "days out" became "visual" as never before. All told, Ragozon was a brilliant innovator!

[DanG]

Originally Posted by Joe Conte

Ragozin's genius was more than graphing figures. His main thing was actually the "run up" and how much acceleration had or hadn't occurred by the time the lead horse(s) triggered the teletimer beam at the "start" of the race...which could have been 10 feet at 20 mph or 75 feet at maybe 40 mph. Such differences could have a radical effect on the final time of the race. Nobody ever thought of doing this until he came along. He also turned speed-charts upside down, so that a traditional 95 became an easier-to-work with 5, etc. Other innovations (later copied by Jerry Brown, who had worked for Rags) included spacing the graph in such a way that "days out" became "visual" as never before. All told, Ragozon was a brilliant innovator!

I knew when I posted that the Raggies would launch an offensive.

I never said he wasn’t a brilliant innovator; I was attempting to point out how one aspect… (The graphing of form cycles for example) doesn’t necessarily have to be completely “original” for a product to be unique.

For the record… (Is there a record?) I was a Rag user for several years and have the utmost respect for them.

[kev]

Joe, this was going on before Rags was making it. I have post this once before. Got this from Thorograph.com, sounds like this guy was doing the same thing back in the 30's, Rags brought it to light years later.

The book is “Consistent Handicapping Profits”, by E.W. Donaldson, published by Montee Publishing of Baltimore. The second edition, which I have, is from 1936. It is apparently a series of articles that first appeared in a publication called Turf and Sport Digest (and if anyone knows any more about them I would love to hear about it). And before I go on, I want to point out that the articles make it clear that individuals other than the author were ALSO making figures at the time, and that one of the ads following the text of the book is for ready made figures that can be purchased by mail on a monthly basis—IN 1936. But the articles assume that the reader will be making his own figures, and discuss how to do so, and to use them, and with one exception do not claim to be discussing anything new.

Among the contents:

1—A pretty good “Parallel Time Chart” (speed chart), and explanation of why beaten length corrections change as the distances do.

2—A ground loss chart (with underlying reasoning) that is pretty close to what we use. Donaldson calls them “widths”, not paths, and says this is the first time anyone has put forward a usable lengths correction for figures.

3—A couple of articles discussing weight, some of which are better than others. The better one uses a weight correction close to ours (he uses 4 pounds = 1 point), and it is worth noting that the horses might have weighed less then (certainly the jocks did), and his correction might work out about the same as the one we use for the average horse today. And it is also worth noting that there is a discussion of weight relative to the size of the individual carrying the weight, a point that seems to escape Friedman to this day. (As a practical matter there is not much we can do about this, unless they start giving us the weights of the individual horses).

4—A brief discussion of how wind affects the time of races, in some cases significantly. Some of his reasoning here is flawed (he sees that a wind behind them on the backstretch is canceled by the headwind in the stretch, but mistakenly thinks a crosswind has no effect in one turn races, missing that it is either helping or hurting them on the turn). He does not discuss how to adjust the figures for wind here, but there is a good chance that happened in later articles, and for sure Connie knows of guys making wind corrections going way back, far before Ragozin.

5—DISCUSSES FIGURE PATTERNS. On Donaldson’s scale higher is better, and in the book he shows two examples (not on a graph)—“Horse A 10-11-12-13”, “Horse B 17-16-15-14.” He recommends betting the improving horse, and says “The handicapper, looking back at the figures for the last race, made the foolish error of taking it for granted that the horses would duplicate their last performance. Although they had been changing up until that race, the worker somehow believed that they would remain stable for him in the next race. He did not figure on the change although his ratings predicted it for him.”

He also uses graphs to compare the FORM CYCLES of “cheaper” horses, who peak suddenly and quickly go out of form, and that of “higher class” horses. The graphs are hand drawn line graphs, and he does not specifically refer to using speed figures on a graph IN THIS ARTICLE, but does anyone think that no one made the logical jump to put the two together? I would very much like to know what was in future articles.

6—A statement that moisture affects track speed (!)

I have to say that it never occurred to me to find out anything about the history of figure making until recently, or that it would be in print. If I have time I’m going to try to find out more , and it turns out that the cousin of someone who used to work here is going for a degree in Library Science at, of all places, University of Kentucky, in Lexington. So stay tuned, and I welcome any additional information.

[classhandicapper]

One thing everyone should keep in mind is that serious horse players sometimes gain original insights independently. Just because you didn't publish, that does not mean you weren't aware of and using techniques that were published and made more famous by others at a later date.

I'd bet my life against a dollar that some of the very best horseplayers were using pace techniques long before any of the people mentioned in this thread published (including Talbot, who I think doesn't get enough credit for his work).

[The Judge]

After my digging around I am conviced (and its obvious) the real controversy was not Sartin/Meyers but Selvidge/Sartin. Selvidge made that clear in his publication "The Race Fixers" pg.45. He starts out on Dick Mitchell and then goes to "his partner Dr. Howard Sartin.

O.k thats it I'm through with it.

[njcurveball]

I am starting to lean toward John Meyers now since he has dumped Jessica SImpson and is dating Cameron Diaz. Guy must know a whole lot about hot fillies.

[Wickel]

I applaud your research, Judge. I believe kudos should go to Meyer and Sartin, as well as Mahl, Matheson and Taulbot. Each made a major contribution to pace handicapping. I was a longtime subscriber to Phillips Newsletter, and that's where I first heard of Meyer. He then had since intricate rating services that he sold, which included trainers, jockeys, feet per second and three others I don't recall. He also published the National Railbird Review and Turf Investment Society (TIS), which you mentioned. I haven't really thoroughly gone through my "stuff," but when I read your post, I pulled out a folder I had and surprisingly found at Railbird Review that was dated November 1978. I know for certain that the rating services predated this work. He, of course, went on to produce the handicapping course and several individual reports on Class, Pace, Last-Fraction Handicapping and Speed (there might of been others). He was also big on using computers. He mentions in the 1978 Railbird Review that he was using a micro-computer to help with the ratings. Later, he incorporated hand-held calculators for his clients. He was especially big on the Texas Instruments 59, and later the Radio Shack version (in which he programmed his handicapping course).


Being a youngster then, I finally got a real job after college and lost touch of Meyer. About six years ago, my Radio Shack hand-held computer showed up. Battery was dead, of course, and the so was the handicapping program. I couldn't find any trace of Meyer and started asking around. One fellow mailed me the orginal programming booklet. Said I had to reprogram the method back into the hand-held. Finally, a couple of years ago, I was e-mailing Selvidge about his new service and asked about Meyer. Without mentioning Sartin, Jim brought him up in the e-mail. Said there was bad blood between him and Meyer. Jim said Meyer disappeared about 1988 and hasn't been heard from.

That's where it stands. Like I said in the other thread, I wish Selvidge and Meadows would weigh in on this issue. In the meantime, I'll search through more of my handicapping stuff. Hope this helps a bit.