A list distributed to Southern California horsemen on Wednesday shows more than 140 fillies and mares who would be eligible for one of the new “ratings” handicap races that Santa Anita added to its overnight for the Oct. 24 card.
The list, which provides an algorithm-derived rating for each horse on the Southern California circuit, was distributed by Santa Anita’s racing office to provide horsemen with guidance on which horses would be eligible for the new races. For most horsemen, it was the first time that they had seen a rating for any of their horses. The list was distributed four days prior to the Oct. 24 card being drawn.
The overnight ratings race with the highest purse, a $65,000 contest restricted to fillies and mares 3 and older going about 6 1/2 furlongs on the track’s hillside turf course, is open to horses rated between 80-95. With more than 140 fillies and mares eligible under that rating, the racing office has a substantial pool of horses to hustle for the race, although certainly only a fraction of those are willing to run a sprint race on the downhill turf.
The other ratings handicap races on the overnight, which were added as extras for the Oct. 24 card, are open to horses 3 and older rated 70-79, going 6 1/2 furlongs on the dirt for $35,000; and a $25,000 race for 3-year-olds and older going six furlongs on the dirt. By raw numbers, more than 400 horses on the list are within the rating bands for each of those races.
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Extra races are not carded unless one or more races in the condition book for that day do not fill. The Oct. 24 overnight has a total of 14 extra races on it for a nine-race card.
The addition of the races marks the first time in U.S. racing that ratings have been used as a condition of a race. Ratings races are in heavy use in foreign racing jurisdictions, though most of those jurisdictions rely on human handicapping experts to determine the ratings.
The algorithm generating the ratings was created by Equibase, the data company that is co-owned by The Jockey Club and a racetrack trade association. The algorithm has been in development for nearly a year, and Equibase released the precise formula on Thursday.
The rating is calculated using 12 factors that are grouped under three definitions – a Performance Score, which includes factors relating to an individual race; Race Strength Adjustments, which includes both in-race and post-race factors measuring the competition in the race; and Track and Distance Adjustments, which take into account variants related to post position, ground covered, and how fast or slow the track was playing that day.
Unlike a variety of figures already available to handicappers, the ratings are not intended to measure a single performance, but rather assign a horse a number assessing its overall quality. The ratings are adjusted daily, according to Equibase, since any performance by a single horse can have downstream impacts on the horse’s former competitors, as well as the horses they competed against, and so on. All horses in North America with two or more starts have already been fed into the algorithm, according to Equibase officials.
“The Equibase rating is a single, performance-based number that summarizes a horse’s ability relative to the quality of competition and race conditions,” Equibase said in a document released on Thursday. “It is designed to be transparent, unbiased, and easy to compare across distances, surfaces, and tracks.”
The rating harkens back to a figure created in the 1990s at The Thoroughbred Times, a now-defunct news publication. The figure derived at the Times also relied heavily on measuring the attributes of a horse’s competitors. Going into the 1995 Kentucky Derby, the highest-rated 3-year-old on the list was Thunder Gulch, who won the Derby at odds of 24.50-1.
On Thursday, Equibase began publishing the rating figures for all of the eligible horses in its database in a small box next to the horse’s name. Chance Moquett, Equibase’s head of strategic projects and business development, who spearheaded the project to develop the racing, said on Thursday that he has been inundated with feedback since the Santa Anita overnight was released.
“I’ve gotten healthy skepticism from horsemen, kind of the normal questions you’d expect, plus some talk about loopholes, what someone might do to game the system, so to speak,” Moquett said. “Plus I’ve had a lot of interest from data people and handicappers on the specifics of the algorithm. Honestly, a lot of it has been kudos, regardless of how it goes, on just getting something out there. I haven’t seen anyone redfaced yet. It’s all been pretty healthy so far.”
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