Jerardi: Why assigning a Beyer figure for Preakness was so difficult

The Preakness monsoon cleared out the Pimlico infield, spread out the field by 48 lengths from front to back, and played mind games with figure makers, including those of us at Beyer Central.

“Making figures is sometimes a science and sometimes an art,” Andrew Beyer said. “This time, it was intelligent guesswork at best.”

The Beyer figures are determined by comparing times from all the races on a card.

“Everything that happened before the Preakness was irrelevant,” Beyer said.

Those dirt races on a uniformly fast surface fit together nicely, mathematics soundly trumping art as there was not much ambiguity in the performances.

“The only thing you could compare the Preakness to was the 14th race,” said Beyer, who makes the Pimlico figures. “It wasn’t raining, but the track was still waterlogged for the 14th. If you made a variant on those two races, the Preakness would get a figure of 100. I have no confidence that the track was the same for those two races.”

The Preakness, run in a driving rainstorm where jockeys were adding a pound per furlong in water weight and the horses were running into whipping winds, could be described as a one-race card, having nothing to do with anything, including the 14th race. Context, however, is critical for making figures, and the only context was the 14th, a first-level allowance for horses going 1 1/16 miles.

Beyer ended up assigning the Preakness a figure of 102.

“When we look at whether a figure looks right, we’re not just looking at the winner,” Beyer said. “But we want the figure to look plausible for horses behind him. Just looking at American Pharoah, who was so visually impressive, there’s no reason he couldn’t have been running as fast as Smarty Jones, who got a 118.

“That’s why you have to look at the horses behind him. That was tricky because at least half the field didn’t handle the track. Dortmund didn’t run. Firing Line didn’t run. They were to be the two barometers. The evidence was coming from unlikely sources. Tale of Verve looked like a joke coming into the race. He had a lifetime figure of 72.”

Unless you bet all Dallas Stewart horses blindly to be second in the Kentucky Derby and Preakness, which has turned out to be a brilliant strategy, there is no rational way to use Tale of Verve second or anywhere.

“Tale of Verve’s figure with a seven-length margin is going to be 11 points lower than American Pharoah,” Beyer said. “The question is: How high could you possibly make him? To me, his presence in second place really argued for a low figure because it suggested to me that if he ran second, nobody behind him ran. Clearly, he improved, but just how much?”

The 72 Beyer in the maiden win became a 91 in the Preakness, an amazing improvement. The other seven horses went backward, some absurdly. American Pharoah dropped three points; Dortmund, 23; Danzig Moon, 21; and Firing Line, 70.

Fellow figure maker Randy Moss and I made the argument to Beyer that the Preakness should be a treated as a standalone race, with Tale of Verve as the unexplainable outlier and Divining Rod and American Pharoah as the barometers.

Admittedly, I may have some confirmation bias since I was on record as saying American Pharoah was going to win by a big margin and perhaps get a 110 Beyer or more.

If Divining Rod, who finished third and certainly made a strong move in the Preakness, ran back to his Lexington Stakes win, where he got a 98, then American Pharoah’s eight-length margin over him would have given him and the Preakness a 110. That was the argument Moss and I made to Beyer when he asked our opinions.

Beyer makes a good counterargument.

“My contention is that if you look at the Lexington, Divining Rod gets a perfect trip sitting on the rail behind two other speeds and goes around them,” Beyer said. “In the Preakness, he broke poorly, and he made a midrace run into the hot part of the pace to chase American Pharoah under very difficult circumstances, and then he faltered. Plus, he’s running on a track where 50 percent of the field couldn’t pick up their feet. Under those circumstances, can you really think that Divining Rod was going to equal the best figure of his life? No way. He had run an 85 and a 93 prior. He got a 90 in the Preakness.”

The 14th race came up 12 Beyer points slower than anticipated, with a raw figure of 76 and an actual figure of 88. The Preakness and its time of 1:58.46, so slow as to be almost impossible, had a raw figure of just 88. If Beyer had added just 12 points, the Preakness would have been a 100. He chose to add 14 to make it 102.

“The horses collapsed after that hot pace,” Beyer said. “This was the equivalent of a 27.5-[second] final quarter. I don’t see horses collapsing and running a giant figure. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.”

We wish all the races at Pimlico on Saturday had been run on the consistently fast surface. They were not. So, as Beyer said, sometimes science becomes art. And sometimes you simply try to arrive at the best version of the truth with much of the evidence either obscured or nonexistent.