As the dirt races came and went on Saturday’s Travers Day card at Saratoga, the track variant was taking shape nicely. Then they ran the Personal Ensign, an epic race between Abel Tasman and Elate that was aesthetically pleasing but a dilemma for makers of speed figures. The variant was -24, which means the horses in the three early sprints between six and seven furlongs went between 1.6 and 2.0 seconds faster than they would have gone if the track surface had been neither fast nor slow. It was fast, so those 24 points were subtracted from the raw speed figure to make the Beyer Speed Figure for each race. Mark Hopkins makes the Beyers for Saratoga. The final time of the Personal Ensign, run at 1 1/8 miles, was 1:47.19, not far off the track record of 1:46.64, set by Lawyer Ron in 2007. The Personal Ensign’s time equated to a raw figure of 137. Subtract those 24 Beyer points and the Personal Ensign’s figure would become a 113. Is that possible? Yes. Is it likely? Maybe not. Hopkins and Andrew Beyer consulted on the race and decided a 113 was not going to reflect accurately what had happened, so they projected the race as a 105. Was everybody thrilled with that decision? No. Abel Tasman’s trainer Bob Baffert was among those who were not pleased. “If we took the race at face value, it would have been a figure of 113,” Beyer said. “Here’s my explanation. I will grant you both Abel Tasman and Elate are very good fillies, and I could see one of them exploding and running a monster race. But if you give the race a 113, you are saying the following: Abel Tasman improved on her lifetime best by 13 points. Maybe, it could happen. Elate improved on her lifetime best by 15 points. Wow Cat [third in the race, 9 3/4 lengths behind Elate] improved on her one U.S. start by nine points. Any of those things individually I could accept, but now we throw in Furiously Kissed [fourth, 2 1/4 lengths behind Wow Cat] in her 20th career start improved sharply on her lifetime best. The last two horses just got fried in the hot pace. They just don’t matter. “I could buy one, maybe two of those things happening, but for all these horses to do this at the same time is highly implausible and I think is just due to some change in the racetrack that produced this freakish fast time. “To put this into historical context, in the last four years, there has been one filly who ran better than a 113 and that was Beholder when she got a 114 beating males by 8 1/4 lengths in the [2015] Pacific Classic.” Beyer went through a similar exercise last Sept. 30 with Bolt d’Oro when he blew away the field in the FrontRunner at Santa Anita. The variant that day was -2. If the variant had been applied to the FrontRunner, Bolt d’Oro, a 2-year-old, would have gotten a 113 and the horses behind him all would have gotten Beyers well above their career tops. Again, possible, but perhaps not likely. The FrontRunner and Bolt d’Oro were assigned a “projected” Beyer of 103. Bolt d’Oro tailed off to a 91 in the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile and got a 102 and 101 in his first two 2018 starts before falling off a Beyer cliff. “It would have been the equal of the fastest 2-year-old race of the last 25 years,” Beyer said of that potential 113. When Abel Tasman and Elate run next, Beyer will be paying very close attention. “We’re not going to publish a figure that we don’t believe is true, but if we’re wrong, we’ll change it,” Beyer said. “If Abel Tasman comes back and a runs a 113, I will prostrate myself before Bob Baffert and the readership of the DRF and say ‘Okay, we were wrong, she really did it.’ But this is not going to go into the record books without some confirmation.” Catholic Boy got a 104 in the Travers. It had been months since he had been on dirt, a surface he had shown affinity for last year and early this year. His grass figures were high caliber for a 3-year-old, so an improving 3-year-old perhaps getting to his best surface certainly could have earned a career top in his four-length win. Most of us at Beyer Central thought Justify, with five triple-digit Beyers in six career races, had giant figures in his future. Now, of course, we will never know, so we are left with a division where nobody is particularly fast – unless Catholic Boy’s 104 was the precursor to even bigger numbers in the future.