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Originally Posted by bellsbendboy
B spencer Sorry for the foray into Thorograph and muddying the waters. Lets use Beyers:
Beyerwise Direct Splash is at best a 70 horse, with lousy form (your assessment that he improved dramatically in his last is mostly meritless, his time would not have beat $4000 claimers on the same card) and could not be expected to run his lifetime best given that form.
Three winners on the same card also won their last. High adventure (last race Beyer 88), Teuflesberg (86) and Nowand forever (97). All won impressively. Lets foolishly assume Beyerwise all regressed.
Direct Splash was faster than all of these. If he Beyered as low as 80 he improved roughly fifteen lengths. His win price dictates the owners, the exercise boy and the jock were all that were in on it. The win price caught my attention, the horses pp's and subsequent final time confirmed the fix.
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I actually enjoyed it more when the waters were muddied with TG figures -- I think that they hold a lot more weight than Beyer figures, if we are looking at just the raw figures to try to talk about it, I would rather use TG than Beyer.
I still take issue with your contention that he improved 15 lengths, as that would make his TG figure a negative number, which is impossible. I haven't pulled up the TG sheets again for this post, but I also believe that he had some 3-5w trips in the recent past and hugged the rail with a mostly uncontested lead in this one.
I DO know that Teuflesburg's par number is about an 8 or a 9 from looking at the sheets yesterday. That makes his par about the same as Direct Splash's best race. So if Teuflesburg runs his par (which is all he needed to do to win that race), and Direct Splash runs his top, then by all means Direct Splash could have been faster by fractions of a second.
Perhaps in the DRF there was no way, using Beyers, that you could have had this horse even coming close -- but that would prove the folly of relying on Beyer numbers. There were certainly hints in the TG numbers that the horse could run a big one and contend, while there were not only hints, but glaring items tarnishing the race's favorites' form.
I just don't think that any of it points to as you say, "confirm[ing] the fix." That's pure conjecture on your part, and the more we dig into the
numbers of the whole thing, the more it looks like wild and false conjecture.
Do you get this way everytime a $100 horse wins? They normally don't look the winner on paper --- or they wouldn't be $100 horses in the first place -- they're animals, not machines and therefore anything can happen. So when a race unfolds like Sunday's race and there are some signs on paper (as I've laid out quite brilliantly more than once, may i add) that it was not an impossibility -- you have to just let it be what it is...an upset.