eNicks Launches the A+++!
By Roger Lyons
From the very beginning, when the Werk rating was used strictly as an aid to recommending matings for clients, we were aware that nick ratings for certain crosses were more reliable than nick ratings for other crosses. That’s why the WTC staff, as a matter of routine practice, would take into account the quality of stakes winners bred from a cross. Generally, stallions from the sire lines that had yielded the runners of highest quality, along with other factors, would be recommended over others for a given mare.
The Triple Plus nick rating is the result of an effort to incorporate that assessment into the long-standing Werk rating method. It is NOT an additional interval on the variant scale, but rather a product of altogether different evaluative criteria. First of all, only crosses that otherwise qualify for A, A+, or A++ ratings can qualify for the Triple Plus rating. It happens that around 25 percent of Triple Plus ratings are represented by formerly A-rated crosses, the rest represented by crosses that would otherwise qualify for A+ or A++. So, the Triple Plus crosses are the most elite of the elite crosses.
The criteria used for identifying Triple Plus crosses follow from the well-founded argument that, when the runners a sire-line cross has yielded are of exceptionally high class, then the cross is 1) more likely to replicate relatively high performance and, of utmost importance, 2) more likely to transfer down the sire lines involved. The Triple Plus is more than a nick rating in the sense that it’s comprised of functions relating to 1) quantity of SWs from a cross, 2) concentrations of G1 and G2 winners among those SWs, 3) continuity of stakes production along the sire and broodmare sire lines, and 4) special consideration of the relations of sire and broodmare sire to their respective sire lines.
Here is an example of the sort of pattern we are trying to capture with the Triple Plus rating. The 2008 OBS August sale contained several yearlings by Snow Ridge, by Tabasco Cat and standing for $5,000 at Regal Heir Farm in Pennsylvania, among which was hip 617, a yearling out of Anna’s Girl, by Distorted Humor. This yearling, although its variant warrants an A++ nick based on the Tabasco Cat-Forty Niner cross, gets its Triple Plus rating from the continuity of stakes production between the Storm Cat and Forty Niner sire lines, a cross that has yielded 15 qualifying stakes winners by a variety of Storm Cat descendents and out of mares by a variety of Forty Niner descendents. Among those 15 SWs are four G1 winners, one of them by Tabasco Cat, and two G2 winners. Tabasco Cat line has had a total of three SWs out of Forty Niner-line mares, including one by Snow Ridge himself.
We learned from the development process that an elite nick rating is subject to the hazard of favoring elite breeding stock. Common sense says that, if two sire lines truly nick, then the cross of those two sire lines, although initially expressed by elite sires and their daughters, will inevitably have regional expressions by descendents of that elite breeding stock. That understanding has to be built into the system.
Anyone who thinks that the essence of common sense is its simplicity has never tried to teach it to a computerized information system. The structured logic that captures the Snow Ridge-Distorted Humor cross as well as others of very different, but equally compelling pattern, is a garden of forking paths. We knew we had come out the other side ourselves when all of the variety of elite crosses, including regional expressions–and only those crosses–could find their way through it.
I’m tempted to lay out the whole system in its elegant detail, but nobody would read it except WTC’s main competitor, so, on the whole, the incentives are largely against disclosing our secrets. I don’t believe a nick rating based on restricted stakes winners, as the Blood-Horse Publications system is, can get to the garden gate from where it is, but they’ve shown they can copy. Besides, it’s the result that matters, and in that regard the Triple Plus is completely unprecedented.
The 2005 Keeneland September sale catalogue–the entire catalogue, not just the first couple of books–contains 281 yearlings with current Triple Plus ratings. Now five-year-olds, that select group consists of at least 80.8% starters, at least 61.2% winners, at least 19.6% stakes horses, 13.2% stakes winners, 10.3% graded/group stakes horses, 8.9% graded/group stakes winners, 6.4% G1-2 stakes winners, and 3.6% G1 stakes winners.
Among the runners captured by the Triple Plus rating in that sale are G1 winners Any Given Saturday, Curlin, Daaher, Great Hunter, Intangaroo, Mrs. Lindsay, Rags to Riches, Red Giant, Scat Daddy, and Street Boss.
That small group of 281 Triple Plus-rated yearlings–only 5.5% of the catalogue–included 37% of the G1 winners that came out of the sale. In fact, over 20% of the winners of G1 and G2 races run since 2004 worldwide are bred from Triple Plus crosses.
With stats like that, the Triple Plus is truly the Northern Dancer of nick ratings. An A is still an A, of course. As always, one should not strain to breed a mare to a stallion that yields a Triple Plus cross just to have one. A certain region and stud fee range may not offer a stallion that both suits the mare as an individual and yields a Triple Plus. While Triple Pluses are fairly easy to find for certain broodmare sire lines, others may not have Triple Plus crosses at all. After all, actual crosses representing the Triple Plus rating are quite rare. Roughly, 4-5% of the racing population is bred that way, and that’s a fairly select population, relative to “the general population” of foals. But, if you can identify a stallion that suits the mare in all other respects and is a Triple Plus cross, then you will have the most reliable assurance you can get anywhere that the cross is supported by a genuine affinity between the two sire lines.
As a long-time consultant to WTC, I don’t expect to be perceived as the most credible authority on the value of its nick rating system. For what it’s worth, though, I’m not kidding when I say it’s by far the better of the two major nick rating systems, as I’ve argued previously in this blog. Even so, the Triple Plus establishes an entirely new standard of effectiveness.
It has evolved in dialogue with Jack Werk, who hatched the idea, and WTC senior pedigree analyst Elaine Belval, who understands thoroughbred sire-line dynamics, as they relate to nick ratings, better than anybody I know. It’s the same team that formalized the WTC’s nick rating system back in 1993, and this new development shows that it’s still the A-team–with a Triple Plus.
Posted by Roger Lyons on Tuesday, July 21, 2009 at 10:12 pm.
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I Want Revenge and the Common Sense of Sire-Line Influence
Roger Lyons on Nicks: Part IV
In Part II of this series I wrote about the problems encountered by an opportunity-based nick rating system, such as the Blood-Horse Publications system, when dealing with a stallion like Stephen Got Even. I explained why such a system would tend to under-estimate the crosses of a stallion that had dropped in market value, and I used the Stephen Got Even/Mr. Prospector cross as an example. The upshot is that the WTC system rated that cross as an A nick while the competing, opportunity-based system rated it much lower.
Since then, I Want Revenge, by Stephen Got Even and out of Meguial, by Roy (by Fappiano, by Mr. Prospector) (click here to view pedigree) won the Gotham Stakes (G3) by more than eight lengths and became the leading contender for the Kentucky Derby. I don’t mention this just to gloat. Actually, I don’t have to because Steve Haskin, writing for bloodhorse.com on March 8, 2009 (“Ky. Derby Trail: The Total Package”), quotes I Want Revenge’s owner and breeder David Lanzman thus: “I spent hours on eNicks looking for a mating, and Stephen Got Even is who came up on the screen with the most quality points.” For WTC it’s impossible to buy advertising as good as that from bloodhorse.com.
Besides, the triumph of the Stephen Got Even/Mr. Prospector cross is not the lesson to be taken from the case. True, the Blood-Horse Publications system treats I Want Revenge as an exemplar of the Stephen Got Even/Mr. Prospector cross, but the eNicks system treats it quite differently. This difference is extremely important to anyone who still has doubts about which is the superior system.
Here’s how the Blood-Horse Publications system works as I understand it, and I’ll take the case of I Want Revenge as the subject. It starts with Stephen Got Even and looks to see if he has at least 15 runners from Roy-line mares or stakes winners from at least two of them. It then drops back on the broodmare sire line to see if Stephen Got Even has met either of those conditions with Fappiano-line mares. Then it drops back to Mr. Prospector and does the same search. In this case, Mr. Prospector line meets those conditions, so that becomes the basis for the nick rating calculation.
Now, the Blood-Horse Publications system will go back a maximum distance of three generations, as in this case. If the third-generation sire line doesn’t meet the minimum conditions, then the system drops back to Stephen Got Even’s sire, A.P. Indy, and searches again along the broodmare sire line, counting for crosses to A.P. Indy line. However, the Blood-Horse Publications system doesn’t get that far in this case.
The sire-line search used by that system is entirely determined by the numbers it encounters. It has nothing to do with the identities or influence of the sires involved. Once the minimal quantitative conditions are met, the search stops at that point and calculates the nick rating on that basis. To the Blood-Horse Publications system, I Want Revenge is a Stephen Got Even/Mr. Prospector cross because that cross is the first one to meet the purely quantitative requirements of its search protocol.
Is that an effective way to capture the logic of sire-line influence?
Not according to Andrew Caulfield’s March 10, 2009 TDN column (click here for article) in which his discussion of I Want Revenge focuses on the A.P. Indy/Fappiano cross. Like Andrew, the WTC system knows that Mr. Prospector line is both highly populous and highly diverse, that the Fappiano branch is one of many distinct branches, each with its own peculiarities. It knows that, while some stallions will work well with some of these branches, no stallion will work well with all or perhaps even most of them. It knows, furthermore, that mixing branches together–some of them favorable to a given stallion and others unfavorable–can only serve to wash out the actual effects of individual branches. The WTC system can’t write an intelligent, insightful analysis of the pedigree of I Want Revenge, as Andrew has so ably done, but it knows enough to agree with him about the common sense of the cross.
So, instead of basing a nick rating on all of Mr. Prospector line, it selects the sire-line combination that is most likely to be pertinent to the case at hand and is significantly represented by stakes winners. In this case, it selects the A.P. Indy/Roy combination, the branch of Fappiano line that also yielded Great Hunter, a G1 winner by A.P. Indy’s son, Aptitude. It’s just a matter of common sense.
Common sense is not easy for a nick rating system to come by. Until 1993, the WTC staff looked up nick ratings manually from printouts in very thick binders and made the decisions that are now made by the automated system. When I began automating the WTC method in 1993–turning it into a system–I quickly discovered that my initial sire-line search, organized strictly by the numbers, yielded nick ratings that deviated substantially from those assigned by WTC staff. It was making the same mistakes as the Blood-Horse Publications system because it lacked the intuitive knowledge used by WTC staff to identify the sire-line foundation of a cross. In order to automate the system successfully, I had to discover programmable techniques that would model nothing less than an intuitive knowledge of thoroughbred sire lines.
Common sense has a logic to it, and, once I’d programmed that logic and applied it comprehensively enough to the variety of thoroughbred sire lines, the automated system achieved 100 percent agreement with WTC staff in test samples. The Blood-Horse Publications system, by contrast, went straight to automation, perhaps never had a sufficient level of human input, or was not tested against that input with sufficient rigor. In any event, it operates without the common sense that is so crucial to pedigree evaluation, and it shows.
Besides this important difference in operation, history also accounts for a very broad difference in principle between the two systems. During the first decade of its existence, the WTC system was used exclusively to advise breeders about mating decisions. There was no market for a nick rating system as a medium for stallion promotion. Experience taught that, when a breeder takes an interest in a stallion, there is usually a reason why–perhaps related to the quality of the stallion, its value relative to stud fee, its commercial appeal, its physical suitability for a mare. Breeders were asking the WTC nick rating system for any encouragement it could offer.
It’s not the job of a nick rating system to pick winners and losers, any more than it’s the job of an industry-owned institution like Blood-Horse Publications. That’s a function of the market system. The WTC system does not rest until, within the constraints of common sense, it has exhausted its effort to represent a cross in its most favorable light. That approach serves the interests of breeders as well as it suits the purposes of stallion farms. Make what you will of the fact that the Blood-Horse Publications system has a quite different orientation.
Posted by Roger Lyons on Wednesday, March 11, 2009 at 8:17 pm.
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More Means Less for Regional Breeders!
Roger Lyons on Nicks: (Part III)
An elemental consideration in the construction of a nick rating system is the question, what will be taken as evidence of good crosses? For two decades regional breeders have been well served by the WTC system, which has based its nick ratings on unrestricted stakes quality.
From time to time, regional breeders have asked whether or not regionally restricted stakes would provide a more comprehensive basis. It’s also been suggested that a breeder who is trying to breed a good allowance horse might take the winners of open allowance races as the model for how to breed one. It’s a slippery slope.
It sounds sensible to think that evidence of effective crosses should be based on the class of horse you’re trying to breed. Consider, however, the many variables besides the sire-line cross that can determine the performance of a given runner. An exceptional individual can result from a mix of the quality of sire and/or dam, a very good physical match, a favorable inbreeding pattern. Then there is the set of conditions under which a given horse prevails in a given race, including his handling, training regimen, race selection, not to mention racing luck. A horse may be bred from a bad sire-line cross, but perform well at its level for a variety of other reasons. You just can’t tell to what extent a horse’s sire-line cross figures in his performance.
What distinguishes runners of high class–and this is extremely important–is that their performance is much more likely to have been determined by a combination of favorable factors, including the sire-line cross. The highest racing class requires a rich variety of many factors working together. For this reason, runners of high class are much more likely to provide reliable evidence of a favorable cross–or any other value. That’s why, regardless of the class of horse you’re trying to breed, you should look to horses of the highest class for your breeding model.
This logic has been turned on its head at the Blood-Horse Publications website dedicated to its nick rating. They confuse the standard of evidence by saying that “patterns of successful breeding turn up in good and bad runners.” It’s not a matter of where a breeding method can “turn up.” In order to see that a bad runner is bred from a good cross, you must already know it’s a good cross. You can’t make that determination on the basis of bad, mediocre, fairly good, or just lucky runners. It has to be based on truly superior runners.
What counts as evidence should be determined by a balance between two opposing requirements of a nick rating system: 1) the selection of winners must be broad enough to encompass the array of sire-lines that might be crossed in the population; 2) the system must take as evidence winners of the highest possible class. In order to make a system useful to everyone, it has to yield numbers large enough to evaluate the range of sire-line crosses that occur. However, the farther down the class scale it goes, the more compromised that evidence will be.
Graded/group stakes provide the most reliable basis for evidence of the quality of sire-line crosses. The problem is that winners of those stakes do not adequately represent the array of sire-line crosses that must be covered by a comprehensive nick rating system. So, the WTC system includes unrestricted stakes. For 20 years that has served to strike a balance between the need for reliable evidence of good crosses and the numbers that are needed.
If restricted stakes are not needed, then, considering how they would affect reliability, what compensating value could they possibly add? Since the Blood-Horse Publications nick rating system is the only one that includes restricted stakes, let’s see what they have to say.
Surprisingly, Blood-Horse Publications has little to say about it, other than that competing products “are not able to accurately identify and report specific regionally-successful nicks.” I suspect that the designers of the Blood-Horse Publications system have not reflected on the impact a large volume of restricted stakes would have on the reliability of those so-called “regionally-successful nicks.”
I suspect, too, that they haven’t thought through the idea of “regionally-successful nicks” beyond its potential as a selling point. Had they done so, they would surely have discovered the disastrous consequences that idea has for a comprehensive sire-line nick rating system. More about that in my next post.
Posted by Roger Lyons on Monday, March 2, 2009 at 8:26 pm.
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Can Stephen Get Even? Nicks and the Fallacy of Equal Opportunity
Roger Lyons on Nicks: Part II
As long as I’ve been associated with Werk Thoroughbred Consultants, Inc., the company has never claimed that its nick rating is a "true" reflection of the compatibility between a sire line and a broodmare sire line. The company’s advertising has always set a tone of moderation appropriate to statistically based information products, which, no matter how good they are, can only estimate how things work in the real world.
This contrasts with the approach taken by Blood-Horse Publications on behalf of its competing nick rating system, which they say reflects "true" compatibility, largely because it measures "true opportunity." That’s either the best statistical system I’ve ever heard of or the loosest use of the word "true" on record. Let’s see which.
Blood-Horse Publications constantly reminds us that their system exploits "massive database resources" to give their nick rating the "advantage" of measuring the stakes production of a cross against the number of times it’s been tried. To be sure, the amount of information their system encompasses is impressive. However, if the WTC system is based on all the pertinent information that is needed, as I believe, then, clearly, the Blood-Horse Publications system is using more information than is required.
This is not a virtue, as Sir William of Occam (you know, the guy with the razor) reminds us when he says, "The simpler the explanation, the more likely its correctness." He taught that, since the logic of an argument must ultimately answer for its assumptions, the argument requiring the fewest assumptions is probably the strongest. Mindful of the sting of Occam’s razor, let’s see if their system has any assumptions that bleed.
Back in 2005 I wrote a piece for WTC’s TeamWerk newsletter explaining, with uncharacteristic clarity, why reducing opportunity to the number of times a cross had been tried would NOT be a reliable way to evaluate crosses. It’s too blunt an instrument to work in a nick rating system without an adequate adjustment for the uneven distribution of quality. It’s like bringing boxing gloves to a knife fight.
So, you can imagine my surprise at reading that Blood-Horse Publications had found "a way around" the broad problem I had described. I read with interest the account of this at the Blood-Horse Publications website dedicated to its nick rating, anticipating an ingenious adjustment for variations in the quality of opportunity.
All I found was a formula whose reliability depends on the assumption that mares bred to a given stallion "have generally been bred to other stallions of similar quality." In attempting to put a lid on the broader problem (and I’m not saying they succeeded), the system opens a can of worms. It’s locked into what might be called the equal opportunity fallacy–the assumption that, while the quantity of opportunity varies, the quality is always the same.
Given how critical that assumption is to their system, as we shall see, it’s surprising how easy it is to think of circumstances under which a stallion’s quality might differ significantly from the quality of other stallions his former mates had been bred to. I’ll mention just one common scenario and point out the consequences.
It’s common knowledge that Stephen Got Even’s sire, A.P. Indy, has done exceptionally well when crossed with Mr. Prospector-line mares. Accordingly, three of Stephen Got Even’s 11 unrestricted stakes winners are from Mr. Prospector-line mares. Partially on that basis, the WTC nick rating system assigns an A rating to the Stephen Got Even-Mr. Prospector cross. Yet, it will be a challenge for Stephen Got Even to get even with the way the Blood-Horse Publications system treats opportunity as a variable.
To find out how well he did with Mr. Prospector-line mares, the Blood-Horse Publications system looks at the proportion of stakes winners among runners that are by Stephen Got Even and out of Mr. Prospector-line mares. It then compares that with how those same mares did with the other stallions to which they were bred.
Now, what would those "other stallions" be like relative to Stephen Got Even? The problem is that, although Stephen Got Even stands for a stud fee of $7,500 in 2009, he initially stood for $20,000. Given that those Mr. Prospector-line mares were bred to Stephen Got Even at that higher level, his former mates were undoubtedly bred largely to other stallions that were at or near that level.
Since stallions that find their level at $7,500 are generally inferior to stallions standing for $20,000, the odds are overwhelming that those other stallions are, on the whole, substantially better than Stephen Got Even. So, contrary to the assumption on which the Blood-Horse Publications nick rating is founded, Stephen Got Even is not of the same quality as those "other stallions."
Again, Stephen Got Even’s Blood-Horse Publications nick rating with Mr. Prospector-line mares is derived, in great part, by comparing his proportion of stakes winners out of those mares with that of the other stallions to which those mares were bred. That being the case, the cross is highly likely to have a very low Blood-Horse Publications nick rating, but not because it’s a bad cross. Those "other stallions" will have done better than Stephen Got Even with those mares because they are better stallions.
So, instead of measuring Stephen Got Even’s compatibility with Mr. Prospector-line mares, the Blood-Horse Publications nick rating actually measures the difference in quality between Stephen Got Even, a $7,500 stallion (if the market is to be believed), and a group of stallions at the $20,000 level. This is likely to happen even if only a minority of those stallions are substantially superior to Stephen Got Even.
For Stephen Got Even this is no small problem. His nick ratings with all broodmare sire lines will be adversely affected by that difference in quality. They will be artificially deflated in a system that Blood-Horse Publications claims has "a way around" the qualitative dimension of opportunity, but, in fact, does not have.
Moreover, it will be a problem for any stallion that has experienced an appreciable drop in market value. Mineshaft comes to mind since he is also by A.P. Indy. His stud fee dropped from a high of $100,000 to a 2009 stud fee of $30,000. In order for him to have favorable nick ratings, he’ll have to get better runners from his former mates than stallions standing for upwards from $60,000.
Mineshaft is still enjoying his birthright as a son of A.P. Indy, but just as soon as he has the requisite number of runners out of Mr. Prospector-line mares, his Blood-Horse Publications nick rating is going to plummet–and, quite possibly, just as unwarrantably as did that of Stephen Got Even.
Keep in mind that Stephen Got Even and Mineshaft represent an entire category of stallions–those whose market value declined appreciably. Strictly as an artifact of an over-reaching system, their Blood-Horse Publications nick ratings, like his, will be deflated. The opposite effect will apply to stallions whose market value increases appreciably since their performance with any given broodmare sire line will be compared with that of the lesser sires to which those mares were bred. Theirs will be inflated.
This might be acceptable to Blood-Horse Publications, but not to Sir William. He would go to work with his razor, and, after he’d pared away the offending parts of the system, what remained would resemble the WTC system, except that it would have a lot of work ahead of it.
Democratic societies can address the ideal of equality of opportunity through social policy. As we now know, certain things shouldn’t be entrusted to the market system. Thoroughbred breeding, however, is a game in which opportunity is systematically determined by practical arguments of the marketplace. The only way for a statistical system to deal with the inevitable inequalities of opportunity is to adjust quantitative measures for variations in quality. As far as I can tell, The Blood-Horse Publications system doesn’t do that.
Reducing the rich texture of actual opportunity to the number of times a cross has been tried plays better in a full-page ad in The Blood-Horse than it actually works in a nick rating system. If the Blood-Horse Publications system were able to yield a "true" measure of compatibility in the kinds of cases cited above, it wouldn’t be a typical result of the system’s logic. It would be a miracle.
Roger has more to say in future posts about the problem of estimating opportunity, but, in his next post, he will deal with how a nick rating system is affected by the standard of racing on which its evaluations are based.
Posted by Roger Lyons on Monday, February 16, 2009 at 9:07 am.
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Too Many A Nicks? I Don’t Think So.
Roger Lyons on Nicks: Part I
The TOBA’s Blood-Horse Publications used to run ads for Werk Thoroughbred Consultants, Inc.’s nick rating and its other pedigree consulting products. Blood-Horse Publications stopped doing that late last year because WTC became their competitor. Well, that’s not exactly true. It’s not that WTC started a publishing empire. Rather, Blood-Horse Publications became a competitor of WTC by entering the pedigree evaluation business. In support of that new venture, they have staged an all-out assault on a product and company from which for many years they happily banked advertising revenue.
I want to set that straight because, from what they’re saying at a Blood-Horse Publications website dedicated to their new nick rating, you’d think the WTC nick rating is the one that was born yesterday. Of course, everyone knows that’s not true, so you can only get it by implication. It’s quite vivid, however, in a particularly thoughtless, disrespectful, and idiosyncratic post, dated October 29, 2008, titled "No Apologies: TrueNicks Reports the Bad with the Good," and written by Byron Rogers, Australia’s William Inglis & Sons’ National Sales Manager and a partner in the Blood-Horse Publications nick rating system.
The central point of that post is that their nick rating sets an uncompromising standard of measurement despite the interest of its stallion sponsors in associating a stallion with the broadest possible range of A nicks. The post was occasioned by a complaint from a stallion manager about the small number of A nicks, relative to the number yielded by the eNicks system of WTC. True only to form, their post defends its rating by attacking the WTC rating.
Thoughtless: The post exclaims in bold-face type that their "competition (WTC, presumably) routinely awards nearly 60% of the entire population an ‘A’ or better rating!" The post explains that this proportion was yielded by "a series of trials of up to 1,000 horses." Its reference to "the entire population" implies that they used samples that were representative of all registered foals. I submit that one or the other of the two claims they make–one of them explicit, the other implicit–is quite simply false. Should either of them fail, then the statement itself is wholly false.
Of course, you don’t need to survey samples of 1,000 horses in order to find out the proportion of A nicks. Samples of 100 will yield very consistent results across samples, but only if the samples are consistently representative of the population of interest–in this case, "the entire population." If you select samples from different sectors of the population–say, from the most elite runners, the major commercial population, a regional auction catalogue, a racing card, and the foal population at large, respectively–then, in that case, you’ll get five significantly different frequencies of A nicks.
So, I requested from WTC a breakdown of nick ratings for the 136 horses entered on a Saturday card at Turfway Park. Again, as any statistician will tell you, that sample size is quite sufficient. It consisted of 39 percent A nicks or above, including 6.6 percent A+ nicks and 6.6 percent A++ nicks. Keep in mind that these are horses that made it to the races, a vast majority of them winners. The frequency of A nicks would be significantly smaller for a group truly representative of "the entire population."
If their sample came up with 60 percent A nicks, then, clearly, they sampled a group that is utterly unrepresentative of the population, without so much as disclosing the source of their sample. Thoughtless.
Disrespectful: That same post also charges, without any historical evidence whatever, that the WTC nick rating was "created with the sole intention of ‘selling seasons’," a wildly irresponsible indictment of the very origin of the WTC nick rating.
That indictment forgets that the WTC rating, unlike their rating, was created 20 years ago, long before it had entered anyone’s head that a nick rating could be used to sell seasons, long before they created their nick rating. The WTC nick rating could not possibly have been "created" with the "intention of selling seasons," much less the "sole intention." Its potential for revenue lay entirely in its appeal as a measure used for advising breeders as to stallion selection.
Nevertheless, they publish a "study" amateurishly concocted to misrepresent WTC’s nick rating, and then, on that basis, launch insults at WTC, its products, the stallion farms that subscribe to WTC’s service, and the intelligence of the post’s readers. Disrespectful.
Idiosyncratic: A curiously cryptic banner ad recently appeared at The Blood-Horse website: "If everything is an A++… is it really an A++?" I’m guessing this bizarre ad is intended to reinforce the cynical, utterly misleading, and, yes, idiosyncratic message of Byron Rogers’ post. Here’s a story that explains just how odd that message is.
When WTC created its nick rating 20 years ago, there were no letter grades. There was just the variant score, and it was used strictly for its input into WTC’s advice to breeders. As soon as the nick rating was available for that purpose, clients began to ask what it meant. So, after a time, WTC applied the letter grades–A, B, C, D, F–scaled to the variant.
Anticipating that clients would only want to breed A nicks, WTC scaled the grades in such a way as to reserve broad latitude in recommending stallions–25 percent A, 25 percent B, 25 percent C, and 25 percent D and F ratings. To assume a normal distribution, relegating A nicks to only a small area of the curve–say, 13 percent–would only have served unduly to exclude from consideration creditable stallions representing reasonable potential for a given mare.
Subsequently, when clients began requesting individual nick ratings, WTC added the A+ and A++ grades. A+ nicks are as different from A nicks as A nicks are from B nicks, and the A++ category is reserved for a very small proportion of crosses. Contrary to what Blood-Horse Publications would have you believe, the WTC scale is well adapted to distinguishing the relative value of sire-line crosses.
It’s not as if Blood-Horse Publications, by some marvel of statistical ingenuity, discovered that 13 percent of all actual crosses are A nicks. No, they decided that only 13 percent would be A nicks. They decided the question of grade distribution–just as WTC had done–when they set up their grading scale. Whoever sets up a grading scale is the decider of how many crosses will be given an A, at least initially.
By the simple logic of cause and effect, the practical use of the WTC system was bound to affect the actual distribution of grades. Over time, the proportion of the population qualifying as A nicks increased because breeders were using nick ratings. It would be irresponsible to raise the standard down the road in order to limit the number of A nicks just because more foals are bred from good crosses. After all, to reflect good crosses is precisely the role of an A nick rating.
Here’s my point. When the deciders at Blood-Horse Publications set up their grading scale, they assumed that WTC’s nick rating was born yesterday, just like theirs was. They disregarded the years during which it was used to advise WTC clients, the ten years when it was distributed in batches by major regional and some Kentucky stallion farms by way of WTC’s Software for Stallions product, and the five years when it was distributed wholesale by the hundreds of thousands through WTC’s eNicks website.
It’s preposterous to suppose that, after all that, the proportion of A nicks bred in the population would decline, rather than increase. When I write that there are more A nicks being bred now than ever before, Byron Rogers calls it "a dangerous attempt to make a virtue out of a vice." Nonsense. The truth is that, when people buy a product, it’s because they intend to use it. When Blood-Horse Publications and its partners feel endangered by the truth, it’s time for them to establish a closer relationship with it.
Even if the proportion of A nicks in the population has increased to as much as 35 percent, which is probably not the case, that is hardly a surprising result of 20 years during which nick ratings have been available and, especially during the last decade, used in the industry on a grand scale. In view of that, the actual population-wide increase in A nicks is really quite small.
The reason is that, although nick ratings are used very intensely in the major commercial tier, for obvious reasons, A nicks are far less frequent among horses bred in contexts where expectations of commercial potential or of a racing career are more remote. After all, one-third of the foal crop never start.
In spite of the demand that grew around WTC’s nick rating, a demand that Blood-Horse Publications is eager to exploit, they assume that its immense popularity had no effect whatever on breeding decisions. Idiosyncratic.
None would question how fitting it is for an organization owned by the Thoroughbred Owners and Breeders Association to defend standards. However, the manner in which Blood-Horse Publications pretends to do so–at least in regard to its nick rating–falls far below the standard that ought to be expected of an industry-owned institution. They would have done well to copy WTC’s approach, which I have closely monitored over the years. Its products and marketing have always been done thoughtfully, respectfully, and in accord with a community of interests.
In his next post (look for it next week), Roger Lyons examines the dubious practice of using quantitative estimates of "opportunity" in the statistical evaluation of sire-line crosses.
Roger Lyons is President and CEO of Roger Lyons Consulting, Inc., specializing in pedigree information services and pedigree consultation. He has participated in the development and distribution of the Werk Nick Rating since 1992.
Posted by Roger Lyons on Thursday, January 29, 2009 at 3:01 pm.
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