Officer’s Opportunity–How Real is it?
by Roger Lyons
It’s understood as a commonplace in using sire-line nicks that in the absence of information relating to a given broodmare sire, how a stallion has done with the sire line of the broodmare sire in question is the best predictor. That’s certainly true, but other important considerations apply.
Let’s take the case of Boys at Tosconova (Officer-Little Bonnet, by Coronado’s Quest). Through his 2007 crop, Officer has had only two opportunities with mares by Coronado’s Quest. Of course, I’m talking about nominal opportunity here, not real opportunity. We don’t know how much real opportunity Officer has had with Coronado’s Quest without examining it mare-by-mare.
It’s like the difference between nominal wages, which have increased in America since the 1970s, and real wages, which have substantially declined. Just as real wages are a function of inflation in the prices of consumable goods, relative to nominal wages, real opportunity is limited by the “marginal disutility” represented by certain mares that have been bred to a given stallion.
The difference between nominal wages and real wages is not subtle. Ask any American wage earner who’s been around for awhile. Then, consider how absurd it would be to shift that distinction from wages to salaries, which have been virtually unaffected by rising prices. I mention this only to suggest that a wage-earning stallion like Officer is far more subject to variations in the quality of his mates than a salaried stallion like, say, Distorted Humor. The point is that how closely the real opportunity of a given stallion corresponds with his nominal opportunity, like the question whether or not one is likely to benefit from prosperity in America, is largely determined by class.
Therefore, Officer’s nominal opportunity with Coronado’s Quest’s sire, Forty Niner, consisted of 11 mares through 2007, and from those mares he got U. S. Cavalry, winner of the listed Turfway Prevue S., and Cuff Me, winner of the Silent Turn S. It would seem that Forty Niner would have been a fairly reliable indication of Officer’s potential with Coronado’s Quest.
But the broader pedigree context tends to muddle this conclusion. Officer has a fair record with Coronado’s Quest’s own broodmare sire, Damascus, at three superior runners from 31 mares. Among those three were Officer Cherrie, winner of the Mazarine S. (G3), Alpine Lass, and that same Cuff Me, whose broodmare sire is Gold Fever, by Forty Niner and out of a granddaughter of Damascus. Thus, Gold Fever and Coronado’s Quest, broodmare sire of Boys at Tosconova, are similarly bred in that respect.
U. S. Cavalry is out of a mare by Distorted Humor, by Forty Niner, and it happens that with Danzig, which is Distorted Humor’s broodmare sire, Officer has a record of four superior runners from 25 mares.
Clearly, ancestors other than pertain to the sire line come into play as conditions for the possible effectiveness of crossing a given broodmare sire with a given stallion. For Officer, the effects of Danzig and Damascus can’t really be separated from the effects of Forty Niner.
Consider, for example, how much less likely it now appears that Officer might sire a stakes winner out of a mare by Forty Niner son, Tactical Advantage, whose broodmare sire is Roberto, with which Officer has a current strike rate of 0/18. He’s 0/2 so far with Tactical Advantage. That’s the same nominal opportunity Officer has had with Coronado’s Quest, but is it as real?
Real opportunity for pedigree crosses, especially in regard to a sire like Officer, varies not only with respect to the range of quality among his mates, but also in regard to important pedigree factors unrelated to the sire-line cross as such.
The economics of sire-line crosses says that nominal opportunity is a poor measure. Similarity between any given mare of certain breeding and the peculiarities of crosses that have actually been successful is far more important. That’s because those successful cases are more likely to reflect what should be counted as real opportunity.
Posted by Roger Lyons on Tuesday, September 7, 2010 at 10:41 am.
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Racing as Business
The Saturday Evening Post ran a feature article in its February 13, 1932 edition about how racing was being transformed into a business. The article quotes “a wealthy sportsman who operates a big racing plant in the North,” thus:
‘”We may find ourselves with too much money,” he said. “When that happens every politician will want to own a track. And when racing is commercialized it is spoiled. It should never be a business.”‘
Too much money? Let’s see. In 1932, depression had gone well beyond the looming threat it poses in 2010. Unemployment was well on its way to 25% while plans were on the drawing board to employ 60% of the unemployed in public works that would, at bargain costs, develop infrastructure so crucial to future economic prosperity. The no-deal-at-all had yet to be replaced by the New Deal. It was three years before Social Security, which offered dignity and a decent quality of life for the elderly, all paid for by the working generation, would begin its tenure as an enduring, socially integrating, inter-generational, American public trust.
Today, it’s difficult to imagine racetrack operation as anything other than a business, but you can get a feel for the sensibilities of the past by retrojecting something from the present. Let’s take the current notion that it would be a good public policy move to privatize social security and transform it from a highly successful public trust into a Wall Street investment scheme. Now, retroject.
If dignity and a decent quality of life for the elderly are commercialized, . . . .
Well, perhaps that goes too far, but it does approximate how those whose interests lay in racing strictly as sport felt about the change that was afoot.
The new scheme then was not only to make racetracks capable of sustaining themselves during hard times, but also to make them progressive (things like public address systems, electronic totalisators, tote boards, photo-finish cameras, electric starting gates, the trifecta, etc.)–quite a new idea in the operation of racetracks. The lynchpin was to induce states to authorize a 10% takeout from wagers (only in your dreams, you thought), 3% going to the state and 7% retained by the racetrack.
The trouble was that the large purses that could be offered by a racetrack like the ultra-swanky upstart, Arlington Park–the one that burned down in 1985, I mean–would draw horses away from that “big racing plant in the North,” operated strictly for sport–you know the one I mean.
Thus was racing sucked into the business-competitive vortex. You can blame that on FDR, too. Where do you think those American workers who built the Chicago lakefront went for entertainment after cashing their public works paychecks? Back then, you couldn’t see the great horses run unless you went to the racetrack, but Arlington Park was also a window into a brighter future.
Posted by Roger Lyons on Wednesday, August 18, 2010 at 10:57 am.
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Finley vs. Veblen
Advanced industrial society has long since held as a matter of common sense that, to put it bluntly, all that is not business is trash. This view underlies Bill Finley’s July 10 TDN op ed, in which, on business-survival grounds, he persuasively argues that the quantity of racing “product” should be cut in half; and I mention it, not to derrogate his point of view, but, on the contrary, to establish that it conforms perfectly with what passes in our age for common sense.
The business premise of Finley’s piece caught my attention because, ever since the demise of the Deep Water Horizon and the incineration of its crew, I’ve been collecting, insofar as possible, and reading the works of Thorstein Veblen. It’s the least I could do. He’s the renegade American economist who’s most notable for writing The Theory of the Leisure Class, published in 1899, and for coining the term “conspicuous consumption.”
Eschewing more straightforward and morally laden terms like envy, pride, venality, and profligacy to characterize Gilded Age excesses, Veblen preferred the more academically distant “invidious comparison,” “emulation,” and “honorific waste.” None of them quite captures the mood at Keeneland on those summer evenings during the early 1980s than his term “pecuniary complacency.” But that was all for satire.
His sense of humor all but exhausted after the Great War, Veblen thought it too late to don his satiric mask when he wrote The Engineers and the Price System, published in 1921. In that book he excoriates the investment bankers, which by then had superceded entrepreneurs as the “Guardians” of the price system. His argument goes something like this.
As industry by “machine process” becomes increasingly complex and increasingly dependent on management by the engineers, financial control by the captains of industry, which Veblen lumps into the category “absentee owners,” becomes increasingly untenable. The reason is that the absentee owners, ignorant of the machine process, have a strictly business interest in the production of consumable goods; and, insofar as their interest is vested entirely in profit, it runs at cross-purposes with competent production and distribution. Eventually, Veblen thought, the absentee owners, in their pursuit of profit, would so thoroughly sabotage the system of production that they would be forced to abdicate their role in the price system and leave it all, by default, to the engineers.
Veblen didn’t live to be proven wrong about that, but only because he died in 1929. Yes, the absentee owners did indeed thoroughly wreck the system of production, even sooner than he thought, but clawed their way back from the Great Depression; and here we are in the Great Recession of 2008 with crude spewing up through a hole in the bottom of the Gulf, leased by a corporation that’s essentially an investment bank, all the engineers saying, “I told you so.”
Now, pedigree and horsemanship constitute the machine process in the production of racehorses, and breeders and horsemen are the engineers. As a practical matter, to talk about the system of racing as “the product” misses the point that the product is actually the horse, along with its inherent capacities. That’s the end-in-view of the machine process. The system of racing has nothing whatever to do with the product other than to package it and sell it, which, in Veblen’s analysis, are business functions alien to and contingent upon the productive elements. Put another way, raceplayers bet horses, not races.
It’s a matter of course that any perturbation in the system of racing, especially of the scale suggested by Finley, is bound to derange the machine process. One can only hope that, when it’s decided which 50% will be cut in the interest of economizing the system of racing, it doesn’t sabotage the breeding industry.
Posted by Roger Lyons on Tuesday, July 13, 2010 at 6:44 am.
Fine Tuning the Distorted Humor-A.P. Indy Nick
by Roger Lyons
Because of injury, Endorsement (Distorted Humor-Charmed Gift, by A.P. Indy) didn’t get to compete in the 2010 Kentucky Derby after qualifying with a runaway win in the Sunland Park Derby, but he did enough to confirm the value of the Distorted Humor-A.P. Indy nick. He also illustrates that the fortunes of a sire-line cross are not just a matter of chance, that nicks always arise from specific pedigree contexts, and that what can be learned about those pedigree contexts can profoundly affect the fortunes of the cross.
Distorted Humor has an especially discriminating taste for mares with Northern Dancer in their ancestries, perhaps because his own dam is by Northern Dancer’s son, Danzig. Let’s see how Northern Dancer plays in the pedigree context of the Distorted Humor-A.P. Indy cross.
Two mares by A.P. Indy contributed superior runners to Distorted Humor’s record through his 2006 crop, from 11 chances, yielding Any Given Saturday and Z Humor. His 2007 crop has yielded Endorsement and Bank the Eight, recent winner of the Frederico Tesio S. (L), bringing his strike rate with A.P. Indy mares to 4/23.
However, note that Z Humor is the only one of these four to be produced by a mare with Northern Dancer in her ancestry and that his dam, Offtheoldblock, has Northern Dancer through a daughter, Linda North.
This contrasts sharply with the opportunity Distorted Humor had through 2006. Seven of 11 mares with A.P. Indy in their ancestries also had Northern Dancer. Two were out of mares by Danzig, Distorted Humor’s broodmare sire, and, therefore, closely inbred. Two were out of Nijinsky II mares, with which Danzig himself crossed pretty well (8/33), but which tends to take the winning edge off runners by Distorted Humor. Another was out of a Deputy Minister-line mare, another out of a mare by Nureyev, and another out of a mare by Storm Cat. In other words, in all cases Northern Dancer descended through a son.
But, contrast those mares with the 13 contributing to Distorted Humor’s 2007 crop. Seven of those mares had Northern Dancer, six of them through sons. However, none of them had Northern Dancer through Danzig, and only one had Northern Dancer through Nijinsky II. A seventh mare had Northern Dancer as the sire of her second dam, and one out of a Deputy Minister mare also had Northern Dancer as the sire of her third dam.
Among the 12 Distorted Humor-A.P. Indy crosses of 2008, the shift away from linebreeding through Danzig and Nijinsky II–and the avoidance of male strains of Northern Dancer generally–is even more pronounced. Only three mares had Northern Dancer through a son, including The Minstrel, Deputy Minister, and Storm Cat–the latter two of the three being among the most adaptable strains of Northern Dancer in the North American racing environment. Even more significant, four of those 12 mares had Northern Dancer through females, ranging from the first to the third dams of the mares.
That 2008 crop is also locked and loaded as to quality. It includes Supercharger (dam of 2010 Ky Derby winner, Super Saver, by Maria’s Mon), Weekend in Indy (dam of G1 winner Any Given Saturday, by Distorted Humor), Tomisue’s Delight (dam of G1 winner Mr. Sidney, by Storm Cat), and Offtheoldblock (dam of G3 winner Z Humor, by Distorted Humor). That crop also includes a foal by Showpiece, by Holy Bull and a daughter of multiple graded stakes producer She’s a Winner (by A.P. Indy and dam of G1 winner Bluegrass Cat, by Storm Cat, and G2 winner Lord of the Game, by Saint Ballado), and a mare by A.P. Indy son Pulpit, but 10 of the 12 foals are out of mares by A.P. Indy.
Opportunity for the Distorted Humor-A.P. Indy cross has undergone a profound tranformation since 2006, not only as to the quality of mares, but also as to the form of Northern Dancer’s presence in, and absence from, their pedigree contexts. It will be interesting to see how that adjustment works out.
Posted by Roger Lyons on Friday, June 11, 2010 at 11:21 am.
Drosselmeyer Equipped with Dynaflow
by Roger Lyons
The first car I drove as a teenager was a 1950 Buick Special. The starter was engaged by switching on the ignition and pressing the accelerator all the way to the floor. It never failed to start. The way Mike Smith guided Drosselmeyer to the outside, keeping him in stride and in the clear and then wore down the leaders in the stretch reminds me of that 1950 Buick Special. When you take off in a 1950 Buick Special, it goes from zero to whatever without any gear changes. That’s because the 1950 Buick Special had a Dynaflow transmission, and that’s exactly what Drosselmeyer has.
Bob Baffert has been quoted on his preference for horses with tactical speed, horses that can adapt their run to the way a race unfolds. That’s certainly an advantage in most races, just as surely as not having tactical speed–quick acceleration, the ability to shift gears during the running of a race–is a limitation. It’s been a problem for Drosselmeyer all along.
It’s truly a beautiful thing, though, when observation yields a plan based on a realistic assessment of a horse’s strengths, and then that plan is perfectly and successfully executed. Bill Mott, Mike Smith, and the team behind Drosselmeyer showed how the Belmont, perhaps more so than any other race, can play to the smooth ride, the horse equipped with Dynaflow.
Posted by Roger Lyons on Monday, June 7, 2010 at 5:32 am.
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Ice Box and the Graustark Jinx
by Roger Lyons
Pulpit gets a superior runner out of about every 11th mare that produces at least one foal by him, which is not as good a strike rate as is expected of the very best stallions. This is due in great part to Pulpit’s extremely low strike rates with certain important ancestors of his mates. One of those is Graustark, which, by the way, is nemesis to a lot of stallions.
And the word “nemesis” is meant here to be understood in its mythic sense, fully loaded with as much determinism as it can carry. Maybe it takes an ancestor like Graustark to remind us that a horse’s pedigree is its fate. Graustark is one of those ancestors that asserts his influence routinely and persistently across multiple generational divides, despite ordinary inducements to variation. This can be inferred from the abysmal strike rates some stallions have with mares in descent of Graustark, including Pulpit.
Whatever traits are implicated must disagree profoundly with Pulpit’s idea about what his offspring should be like. Through his 2007 crop, he’s gone through 54 mares with Graustark in their ancestries, and Spice Island, the dam of Ice Box, is the only one of them that has managed to produce a superior runner by Pulpit. Spice Island is by Tabasco Cat, whose broodmare sire is Sauce Boat, by Key to the Mint, by Graustark. That’s how far Graustark’s influence has to descend in order to affect Ice Box adversely.
Spice Island’s ancestry is otherwise loaded with ancestors highly favorable to Pulpit. He has a strike rate of 7/43 with Tabasco Cat’s sire, Storm Cat. Ice Box’ second dam is by Alysheba, with whose sire, Alydar, Pulpit has the phenomenal strike rate of 10/43. With Speak John, sire of his third dam, Pulpit’s strike rate is 2/13. Moreover, the numbers in the background of those ancestors are so strong that, in spite of Graustark’s theoretically negative impact, Spice Island scores in the 96th percentile of mares that have produced foals by Pulpit, as determined by an aggregation of strike rates with all ancestors within six generations of each mare.
Graustark lurks in the shadows of ancestors that have had highly positive effects on Pulpit’s stud record. Therefore, whatever limitations Ice Box might have as a racehorse, especially insofar as they distinguish him from Pulpit’s more typical runners, are most likely attributable to Graustark’s influence. However, if it has anything to do with his distinctive closing style, it might actually be an advantage in a race like the Belmont.
Posted by Roger Lyons on Tuesday, June 1, 2010 at 9:59 am.
The Travails of Drosselmeyer
by Roger Lyons
Distorted Humor gets at least one superior runner out of about every seventh or eighth mare that produces at least one foal by him, counting winners of unrestricted stakes and horses that run at least second in a G1 or G2 race. In order to have a record like that, a stallion has to have a broad reach into the genealogical range of the broodmare population. Yet, inevitably, even the best stallions are challenged by certain otherwise important influences.
This brings up the interesting case of Drosselmeyer (Distorted Humor-Golden Ballet, by Moscow Ballet). He qualified as a superior runner in my system when he beat every horse except Fly Down in the Dwyer S. (G2), but anyone who’s watched the horse could see he has talent. Even so, he still hasn’t won a major stakes, nor was he able to meet the expectations represented by his challenging route to qualifying for the Kentucky Derby despite talent superior, arguably, to some of the horses that actually did qualify. For some reason, Drosselmeyer hasn’t been able to keep the promise. It’s a mystery.
It happens that Drosselmeyer’s dam, Golden Ballet, by Moscow Ballet, represents one of Distorted Humor’s most prickly issues with the broodmare population. Distorted Humor is out of a Danzig mare, and popular thinking about pedigree would suggest that Distorted Humor would work well with mares that resonate with Danzig, mares that have strains of Northern Dancer, the dams of which, like that of Danzig, trace to Teddy–maybe even mares that return Danzig himself.
Well, it isn’t so. The two most notable Northern Dancer strains whose dams trace to Teddy are Nijinsky II and Storm Bird. Of the 68 mates with Nijinsky II in their ancestries through Distorted Humor’s 2007 crop, only five have produced superior runners; and of the 56 mates with Storm Bird in their ancestries, only four have done so. What tells the tale, though, is that not even one of his 27 mates with Danzig in their ancestries has produced a superior runner.
The problem is that Distorted Humor wants strains of Northern Dancer whose dams contrast genealogically with his own strain, which is Danzig. After all, four of his seven mates with Sadler’s Wells in their ancestries have produced superior runners. Obviously, the problem is not Northern Dancer, with which Distorted Humor has an average strike rate overall in spite of his poor records with Nijinsky II, Storm Bird, and Danzig.
Drosselmeyer’s mysterious problem could be that he is out of a Nijinsky II-line mare whose second dam is by Storm Bird. Fortunately, on the other hand, his dam has a lot going for Distorted Humor.
Moscow Ballet, although by Nijinsky II, is out of a mare by Cornish Prince, with which Distorted Humor has a strike rate of 3/13. The big push, though, probably comes from Slew o’ Gold, sire of Drosselmeyer’s second dam, with which Distorted Humor has a strike rate of 2/6. That’s confirmed by his strike rates of 14/88 with Seattle Slew and 22/137 with Slew o’ Gold’s broodmare sire, Buckpasser.
How Drosselmeyer’s complex pedigree mix will resolve in his Belmont effort remains to be seen, but a horse’s pedigree is his fate, and fate gives no quarter.
Posted by Roger Lyons on Monday, May 24, 2010 at 9:00 am.