ESPN.com article on synthetics

[Valuist]

The writer claims that horses moving from turf to synth are at no advantage whatsoever relative to horses moving from dirt to synthetic. The numbers can say what they want.....I find these hard to believe:

http://sports.espn.go.com/sports/hor...emy&id=4582956

[cj]

He has been a proponent of synthetics all along, which is fine, but that should be kept in mind when reading the article.

Numbers can be twisted any way you want to twist them. But any experienced handicapper knows the surface is a lot more like turf than dirt. One example, and how this is "evidence" is beyond me:

"2. Another phenomenal Hall of Fame turf trainer, Jonathan Sheppard, has won an incredible 47 percent of his surface switches to the all-weather track … with DIRT horses. He's merely mortal at 24 percent when moving a turf runner to the all-weather."

Well, gee, no shit Jeremy. Sheppard excels on turf and his horses are pretty weak on dirt. What a shock his horses would run very well when moved to synthetic. Doesn't this contradict his theory?

How many of his dirt to synthetic winners were racing against nothing but other "dirt" horses? How many turf runners were racing against nothing but other dirt horses? What were the abilities of the horses on the surface they had been running? How many replicated their form on the synthetic surface that they had displayed in their previous outing on a different surface?

Now, answering those questions would be tough and subjective, but like I said, the numbers can be spun any way you want to spin them. If you reach your conclusion first, you'll usually find numbers to support them.

[tholl]

Who cares what surface they RAN on before ? I'd like to see the number of dirt stakes winners and what they did when switched to synthetic vs the number of turf stakes winners and what they did when switched to synthetic.

[CBedo]

If you look at last year's BC (since I'm assuming this is why everyone cares abour surface switches this week), of the 86 Pro-Ride starters last year, 24 had made their last start prior to the BC on SA's Pro-Ride, 26 came from other synthetics, 22 from dirt & 14 from grass.

As far as results go, it's pretty clear (I know it's a small sample) that dirt is not where you wanted to come from. Of the 8 races, 4 winners came from the Pro-Ride, 2 from other synthetics and 2 from grass. 0 winners came from the dirt.

(This data came from an earlier Crist blog post)

[andymays]

Plonk actively promotes synthetic surfaces.

http://www.dmtc.com/handicapping/plonk/

Excerpt:

He created the Polycapping database for Keeneland.com in 2008.
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[Onion Monster]

As a bettor, this is the kind of article I love.

Media-types are terrible analysts of the sports they cover. We horseplayers have a much better grasp on which horse is better than general sports fans have of which player or team is better. And most of this ignorance, I believe, stems from misinformation.

Sadly, we don't have much misinformation at the track every day. Typically at the track there is just a little, bad morning lines for example, but on those rare major events like Derby Day, where the sporting world's attention is fixed upon it, there's an abundance of it.

Articles like this would be much more common if racing were back in the public's consciousness and would help bring more dumb money into the pools. Some poor rube would read this article and suffer financially because of it.