Stallion Selection Matters
by Roger Lyons
Bethany (Dayjur-Willamae, by Tentam), the dam of Met Mile (G1) winner Tizway, had good reasons for failing to produce a foal of any merit until her sixth season as a broodmare–I mean, besides her body refusing to cooperate in her fourth and fifth seasons. Or maybe she was trying to say she didn’t like the stallions she’d been bred to previously.
In retrospect, it’s clear she was bred beneath her station in 1998 when she conceived a foal by Benny the Dip. Seeking the Gold, sire of her 2000 and 2001 foals was her equal, more or less, but he lacked the commitment she required. Bethany is by Dayjur, whose broodmare sire is Mr. Prospector, and Seeking the Gold really didn’t want a foal inbred to his sire. Of the 24 mares he’d tried that with lifetime, only two produced stakes winners by him.
Finally, when bred to Capote, she had a chance with a sire that could have some affection for her. He didn’t like Danzig line much, but he was 3/8 with Tentam, sire of her dam, and 4/27 with Hoist the Flag, sire of her second dam. Not only did Bethany produce listed stakes winner Ticket to Seattle by Capote, but so did her half-sister, Ms. Teak Wood, the dam of Acceptable (G3). Bethany wasn’t the girl of his dreams, but Capote liked her well enough.
Tiznow, sire of Tizway, went downright goofy over her, and it was her speed. Her sire, Dayjur, was a Champion sprinter, and her broodmare sire Tentam was out of Tamerett, the second dam of Gone West. If a mare contributes the speed required to control or press the pace, then Tiznow will contribute the ability to carry that speed as far as it deserves to go. Tizway resulted from a match made in heaven.
Then Bethany went stone cold the next two years when bred to Gulch in 2005 and then to Aldebaran the next year. Lifetime, Gulch went 0/5 with Dayjur, 0/6 with Tentam, and only 1/48 with Mr. Prospector. Seeking the Gold, Gulch, Aldebaran–what difference could it possibly make? They’re all by Mr. Prospector!
Then, after a 2008 unraced foal by Vindication, she slipped in 2009, produced a 2010 foal by Elusive Quality, and that year went back to Tiznow. The good news, besides her second chance with Tiznow, is that Elusive Quality, by Gone West, by Mr. Prospector, is 3/10 with Dayjur–3/8 with daughters of Dayjur, including G1 winner Elusive City.
I’ve written in the past about how well daughters of Dayjur buffer inbreeding to Mr. Prospector, but every good thing has its limits. The lesson here is that, if the inbreeding notation on your pedigree printout says 2 x whatever, then just try something else.
Posted by Roger Lyons on Wednesday, June 1, 2011 at 6:46 am.
• Permalink • Comments Off on Stallion Selection Matters
Quantity and Quality
My last post emphasized the importance of the class of runners representing a given breeding method, as opposed to a high strike rate from opportunity. A conflict between the two arises, for example, in the case of foals that are by Malibu Moon and inbred to Mr. Prospector, which has yielded some few runners of very high class representing a very low strike rate from opportunity. My purpose in bringing up that case was to suggest that class trumps strike rate, but what I didn’t say in that post and must add here, is that such cases, while not particularly rare, certainly are not the norm. Generally, high class and a high strike rate go hand in hand.
Insofar as Zenyatta’s celebrity has transcended her beeding, it’s something of a sacrilege to cite her as a case in point of pedigree, but I’m going to do it anyway because her pedigree context is instructive and, in fact, not entirely unique.
Her sire, Street Cry, has sired foals (through his 2007 crop) out of seven mares with both Hail to Reason and Hoist the Flag in their ancestries, to which in both instances Zenyatta is inbred 5×4. Among those seven foals are Zenyatta herself, Tomcito (Street Cry-Inside or Outside, by Eastern Echo), winner of the Classico Ricardo Ortiz de Zevallos (PER-G1) and the Classico Derby Nacional (PER-G1), and dual-listed SW Alice Belle (Street Cry-Camporese, by Sadler’s Wells). That’s a strike rate of 3/7, including two multiple-G1 winners.
Hail to Reason happens to be one of Street Cry’s favorite ancestors, assured only in part by his strike rate of 5/17 with Seattle Slew. His overall strike rate with Hail to Reason is 16/90, but the gross numbers, as good as they are, actually understate the effect of Hail to Reason. Among those 16 superior runners are five G1 winners, a G2 winner, and four G3 winners–a total of 10 graded/group SWs. Also included in my unofficial tally of probable superior runners is Temple Street (Street Cry-Northside Star by Pulpit), which ran second in the 2009 Humana Distaff H. (G1).
Street Cry’s record with Hoist the Flag stands at 3/18. That’s not a great strike rate, but it’s a good one as far as it has gone, and it’s buoyed by two G1 winners–Zenyatta and Tomcito.
There can be no doubt that Street Cry has a very special relation to Hail to Reason and probably, to a lesser degree, Hoist the Flag. Consider, though, how dubious those strike rates would seem if the class of the runners involved were below overall expectations of Street Cry, rather than above them.
Posted by Roger Lyons on Friday, December 17, 2010 at 11:22 am.
• Permalink • Comments Off on Quantity and Quality
Is Fly Down Up to the Belmont?
by Roger Lyons
When Frank Mitchell wrote about the classic breeding of Devil May Care here, I thought I might be in big trouble. I had already taken the position here that, while you can never rule out the possibility that a runner might be exceptional to its breeding, Devil May Care is not really bred to get the Derby distance.
The main problem is that she’s inbred 3×4 to Mr. Prospector. That’s a reasonable generational distance, but it still tags a runner as specialized for best efforts at distances of less than nine furlongs. That’s a norm that, like all norms, admits of exceptions, depending on other pedigree factors, such as the sire, the family, etc., and Devil May Care had already won the Bonnie Miss S. (G2) at nine furlongs. Still, . . . .
It’s now clear that Frank has a different view of close inbreeding to Mr. Prospector than I do because he’s just written here about how Fly Down’s (Mineshaft-Queen Randi, by Fly So Free) breeding puts the Belmont S. “well within his range.” Frank, once again, I must beg to differ.
Mineshaft has had 12 stakes winners, including Fly Down, that count when assessing his capability as a sire in matters pedigree. Five of those stakes winners have been inbred 3×4 to Mr. Prospector. It’s true that Cool Coal Man won both the Fountain of Youth S. (G2) and the Albert the Great S. at nine furlongs, but none of the other four have broken the 8.5-furlong barrier, and three of them never won a stakes beyond a mile.
Fly Down is Mineshaft’s sixth Mr. Prospector-inbred stakes winner, but not at 3×4. He has the added disadvantage, at least with respect to distance limitations, of being inbred 3×3, which is a huge difference.
Inbreeding and linebreeding, depending on the intensity, mean specialization around the capacities inherited from those repeated ancestors and their descendents. The increasing specialization in the population since the middle of the 20th century has almost certainly been a result of the increasing accumulation of linebreeding. Yes, some of this specialization favors the classic horse, but most of it does not.
So, Frank, if Fly Down wins the Belmont, I’ll take my hat off to you, but I won’t eat it because I remember all too well watching Volponi, another Mr. Prospector inbred, run away with the Breeders’ Cup Classic.
Posted by Roger Lyons on Friday, May 14, 2010 at 12:26 pm.
• Permalink • Comments Off on Is Fly Down Up to the Belmont?
What Linebreeding Really Is
by Roger Lyons
Most people think of inbreeding and linebreeding as two different things–inbreeding as a duplication of ancestors within four generations and linebreeding as a duplication of ancestors outside of that generational distance. Consequently, inbreeding is considered more intense than linebreeding because it involves less generational distance from the new individual.
What geneticists mean by linebreeding, however, has nothing to do with generational distance, and I know Blood-Horse pedigree columnist Les Brinsfield will back me up on this. It’s formed by the cross of two or more ancestors that share relatives on both sides of their ancestries. It’s what’s sometimes called crossing close genetic relatives. The generational distance of these ancestors from the new individual is irrelevant. The most intense form of linebreeding, in fact, consists in breeding a mare to her full brother. Clearly, linebreeding is a specialized form of inbreeding.
Well, then, if that’s what linebreeding really is, why is it that you can go to commercial breeding sites all over the internet and find it defined incorrectly–as a function of generational distance?
First, it’s important to understand that pedigree has no place in the science of inheritance. It has nothing whatever to do with genetics or its terminology. It was created out of whole cloth in the middle of the industrial revolution as part of an institutional structure for the new pure-breeding model. This was a time, don’t forget, when naturalists all over Europe, including Charles Darwin well into the 19th century, were preoccupied with exploring the biological frontiers of hybrid breeding–of crossing different varieties.
Besides wanting to see how weird a pigeon could look, they were interested in where to draw the lines between species. They had spirited debates in the Royal Academy about whether species difference should be inferred from the infertility of offspring, on the one hand, or, on the other hand, the inability of manifestly differing parents to reproduce at all. Hybrid breeding of English racehorses had been the dominant approach earlier in the 18th century, but the new pedigree breeding was at best tangential to prevailing, early 19th-century scientific interest.
At mid-century when Darwin was focused on how species adapt to their environments, the English Jockey Club had its hands full trying to adapt the racing environment to unanticipated changes in the population of pedigreed horses–and in such a way as to sustain the pretense that the horses were actually getting better in some absolute sense. Meanwhile, successive generations of horsemen since the first half of the 19th century have complained that the horses are not what they used to be, and they’ve been right all along.
Historically, the emergence of pedigree is understandable only from the standpoint of its commercial utility. Its form of development has been oriented, first and foremost, toward limiting the size and regulating the commercial value of living populations. The changing conditions of racing that at any given time reflect the thoroughbred population’s capacity for performance, the forms of genetic representation, typographical conventions, statistical formulations, cataloguing styles, pedigree analysis, and the terminology in which thoroughbred horses are discussed all comprise the system of signifying practices we call pedigree.
What does it all signify? It very convincingly signifies commercial value even if it’s not that good at predicting performance.
The new sense of pedigree, as represented by the English Stud Book, had much to do with the emerging industrial values of efficiency and scale, but it was also a form of commercial packaging. For the most part, science is welcomed to the party only at times when commerce has run so far afoul of biology that something needs to be fixed.
It’s not surprising, then, that linebreeding would be understood one way in a system of practices whose purpose is to represent its measurable effects and quite another way in a system whose purpose is to invest it with commercial value. Accordingly, linebreeding is a salient technique in the packaging of pedigree. Because inbreeding has a bad name in the world at large, commercial breeders, whether of dogs, cattle, whatever, don’t want to say the animals they’re selling are inbred. Instead, they say their animals are linebred, and they’re careful to make sure the breeding fits the definition that’s been especially adapted to the commercial interest in pedigree. It’s really just inbreeding packaged to sell.
To their credit, thoroughbred breeders are not so squeamish about inbreeding, but the commercial motives underlying pedigree so forcefully distort language and sense that the perception of linebreeding as a specialized–and often more intense–form of inbreeding has been almost hopelessly suppressed.
Posted by Roger Lyons on Saturday, April 17, 2010 at 11:00 am.
Odysseus/Devil May Care, Take Two
by Roger Lyons
In a recent post about the breeding of Odysseus and Devil May Care, I argued that Odysseus is not bred to win a major stakes beyond 8.5 furlongs, as Devil May Care had just done. So, you can imagine how eagerly I anticipated Odysseus’ start in the Bluegrass Stakes (G1). Or perhaps, instead, you imagine trepidation. Either way, I was looking forward to it.
I didn’t expect him to win, but didn’t expect him to run last, either. Then came the sad news of the bone chip, which might well have happened during the race. As so often happens in racing, some questions never find ultimate answers, but that misfortune pales by comparison with the bad luck for Padua Stables, and I’d rather have been proven wrong than have it turn out that way.
In any event, my quarrel with his pedigree has largely, but not exclusively, to do with his close inbreeding to Mr. Prospector (3×3), based on Malibu Moon’s past success and opportunity. Statistical information like that only tells you what to expect based on a norm. Strictly speaking, you can only hypothesize. You can say something like this: if Odysseus is able to win a major stakes at 10 furlongs, then he is not at all typical of his breeding. Any given horse can become an exception to its breeding, but most don’t.
In that same post I also argued that Devil May Care is much more likely than Odysseus to be exceptional relative to the past performance of Malibu Moon’s Mr. Prospector inbreds. First of all, her inbreeding to Mr. Prospector is at 3×4, which is a huge difference. Secondly, she comes from the Roberto sire line, with which Malibu Moon has had good success from opportunity.
Of Malibu Moon’s five SWs inbred to Mr. Prospector, Devil May Care’s breeding is exceptional, especially in regard to her pattern of inbreeding to Mr. Prospector, and readers of my last post (if there are any) might guess exactly how. Odysseus’ dam is by Conquistador Cielo, by Mr. Prospector, which means Mr. Prospector is returned by the sire line of the dam. Devil May Care, on the other hand, is out of a mare whose second dam is by Mr. Prospector. That is to say, Devil May Care is inbred to a sire in the female line–the pattern shared by Eskendereya (inbred 4×4 to Northern Dancer) and Real Quiet (inbred 4×3 to Raise a Native).
The numbers are important. Of all the foals Malibu Moon has sired out of mares in some descent of Mr. Prospector, only five mares had Mr. Prospector as a sire in the female line. Two of those mares had foals inbred at a distance of 3×3. Throw those out because it’s too close. The foals of only three of those five mares were inbred at the much more effective distance of 3×4, like Devil May Care. So, Devil May Care comes from precious little legitimate opportunity.
We don’t know what is typical for that kind of breeding. It’s a new thing for Malibu Moon. Devil May Care has already gone farther in a major stakes than any other of Malibu Moon’s Mr. Prospector inbreds when she won the nine-furlong Bonnie Miss S. (G2). She’s done enough already, but, if she wins the Oaks, her pedigree is the new take on how to get a very high-class Malibu Moon runner inbred to Mr. Prospector.
Posted by Roger Lyons on Thursday, April 15, 2010 at 11:30 am.
• Permalink • Comments Off on Odysseus/Devil May Care, Take Two