If you've ever watched the monitors at a racetrack or racing on TV, youve seen the talking racing heads.  They fill the time between races by analyzing the next race and making predictions as to which horse or horses are most likely to win.

They sound so very intelligent, speaking in solemn tones about dosage, Beyer numbers and breeding.  They have at the ready statistics on the win percentage of each horse, and the win percentages of the jockey and trainer.  Those things are not their most common and distinctive traits, however.  What most stands out about all of them is their utter inability to pick a winner.

They always come in pairs, which gives them twice the change to be correct and makes their failure to select winners even more remarkable.

Where, I wonder, do they find these guys?  They are not great entertainers.  Thats why there are always two of them.  An intelligent, flowing monologue would take talent, but conversation is easy.

How did they get the job?  They are not former racing secretaries, or retired trainers.  They dont hold Masters Degrees in race handicapping from UNLV.

I always imagine that the one on the left is somebodys deadbeat brother-in-law who always hung out at the racetrack anyway. The one on the right is often a former newspaper tout from somewhere.  Newspaper touts become well known, but they never win either.

The poor performance of newspaper touts is explainable.  They were not hired for their race picking ability.  They were hired for their journalism skills.  They have college degrees in journalism, and upon graduation the only job open in the area they wanted to live was race reporting.  The first day on the job, Johnny Journalist was told by his editor, Welcome aboard kid.  Youre our new racing tout and columnist.

That night, Johnny went to the local library and took out the first book he could find on horse racing.  The odds that he would find a good book written by a knowledgeable author were even smaller than the odds he  would pick a winning horse by luck.  He skimmed the book that night, and thus armed, Johnny became a newspaper race tout, hoping all the time that a better position would open soon at the paper.  The most competent of the Johnny Journalists did graduate to new jobs.  Some, however, due perhaps to incompetence or laziness, remained at the tout desk for their entire careers.  Then, one day, after 15-20 years at the local newspaper, the track TV producer decides he wants a name the locals will recognize for the track TV program.  The producer contacts no-success Johnny and offers to make him a TV star.  Johnny is the guy you see on the right when you watch the race program on the monitors at your local track.

Still, that doesnt explain why the TV touts cant pick at least as well as the public's 33% average win rate.   In my experience, the two TV touts combined will be correct about once in eight races.  Thats equal to the random probability of win by playing Pin-the-Pick-on-Program-Page while blindfolded.  Since the usually two TV touts and thus two chances to win, however, their combined results are much worse than random.  With an average of eight horses in a race, and the ability to pick two horses in each race, if you dont win at least 25% of the time you must be doing something actively wrong.

Indeed, the TV race touts are doing something actively wrong.  The problem lies in all those numbers and statistics they are spouting.  The TV selectors have all those statistics so they can not only sounds smart, but also fill up the necessary time.  The statistics they use, however, are not statistics that are meaningful to predicting performance.  In some cases, those statistics are worse than meaningless, and are actually more likely to hide winners or result in picks on probable poor performers.

The TV touts normally use what I call pop statistics.  How many times have you heard them mention dosage, or Beyer numbers?  If you go back 30 years, no one had heard of or used a dosage index or Beyer numbers, and yet there were very successful race handicappers.  The TV touts depend so heavily on these new theories and techniques it makes me wonder how they think anyone managed to handicap before the books espousing those theories were written.

Dosage was a theory invented for the first time in France around 1929.  Few, if any people were aware of it in the United States until Leon Rasmussen, a racing columnist, wrote a book on the subject based on work by horse owner Steve Roman.  Roman wrote an updated book in 2001.  Mostly due to the influence of Dr. Steve Roman, the dosage books contained a huge array of statistics to support the theories.  For example, when Rasmussens first book was published in 1981, no horse with a dosage index above 4.00 had won the Kentucky Derby since 1929.

In the end, however, despite the liberal use of statistics the basis of dosage theory is anecdotal and not scientific.  The evidence used was all based only in race results at various distances.  Those results were not adjusted for such things as weight, competition that year, training and conditioning, prior racing experience, and a myriad of other factors that might have an influence on a horses performance.

As the sample of races became larger, horses with a dosage index above 4.00 began to win long races such as the Kentucky Derby and the Belmont Stakes.  The authors of the popular dosage books began to alter the theory to explain the aberrations.  That was the beginning of the end.  Finally, some genius noticed that the vast majority of horses in the Kentucky Derby had dosages below 4.00, which very likely explained the lack of winners with dosages above 4.00.  This year, 16 horses out of 20 running in the derby had a dosage index less than 4.00.  In a random lottery in which I have 16 entries and you only have 4, it should not surprise you if I win repeatedly.  It probably has nothing to do with the fact that my sexiness index is much higher than yours.  Such is the danger of statistics and non-scientific evidence.

If the TV selectors used dosage as a main factor in their handicapping, and most did, they threw winner Giacomo into the scrap heap despite any of the other factors that indicated Giacomo would win.  Thats doing something actively wrong.

As an indication of the absurdity of the dosage index, an average dosage cannot be calculated because some horses have a dosage of infinity.  How does one compare three horses, one with a dosage of 1.67, one with a dosage of 4.33, and a third with a dosage of infinity?  I always picture the infinite horse accelerating like the Road Runner.  Perhaps there is a use for those Million Star plays that Jeff Allen, Jack Price, and Stu Feiner made famous.

Beyer numbers were invented by a Washington Post racing journalist named Andrew Beyer, and were much better at selling books than predicting winners.  Beyer numbers became popular when Andy Beyer managed to convince the Daily Racing Form to buy his numbers and put them in their Past Performances.

The idea behind Beyer numbers is good.  It is often difficult to compare horses that have been running at different tracks or under varying track conditions.  Think about running at the beach.  You can go munch faster on the hard-packed wet sand than on the dry sand in the middle of the beach.   The same is true of horses at racetracks.  What might appear to be a slow time at one track might actually be a very fast time at another with a different track surface.  The Beyer numbers were supposed to be an objective number that adjusted for track differences.

Beyer numbers were meant to be comparisons and not absolute numbers from which one can pick winners.  That doesnt stop most of the talking heads from using them to pick winners, another mistake.  The biggest problem with Beyer numbers, however, is that they are not what they are advertised to be.  The numbers are arrived at by having an employee at each track who looks at every race, assesses the track condition, and gives the horse a subjective rating.  The track condition is based on eyeball assessment.  There is no jockey input to tell the Beyer man the quality of the surface that day.  A subjective assessment of a speed figure can never become an objective comparison between tracks.  Some employees are better and more accurate than others.

If picking winners were as simple as choosing the horse with the best Beyer number in his past three races, or the best average Beyer figure, everyone would be winning every race.  Beyer numbers were never intended for that use, and they fail miserably in that regard.

Nevertheless, touts and handicappers will continue to defend their use of Beyer numbers and dosage through the misuse of statistics.  We will be told that Big Brown won the Kentucky Derby because he had the second best Beyer figure in the race and a dosage of 1.67 which indicated that the horse would excel at a distance.  Of course it possible that Big Brown is simply an excellent horse whether or not at a distance.  The numbers for Big Brown are less convincing if we notice that the horse with the best dosage number Big Truck who finished nowhere, and the horse with the best Beyer number was Bob Black Jack, another loser.  If we look at the combination of both numbers, the second place finisher in the race should have been Z. Fortune, with a dosage the same as Big Brown, and a Beyer number of 102 which is very close to Big Browns number of 106.  Z. Fortune ran out of the money.

Win percentages are often used not only by the TV touts but also by the public.  Win percentage, however, depends completely upon the average number of horses in the past races, the level of competition in the past races, the distance of the past races, the post position in those races, the length of the races, the track condition in the races, and the weight carried in each race.  It can also depend on the shoes being worn by the horse, the legal drugs being given to the horse, and even whether a horse was wearing blinkers.  With all those factors affecting the number of past wins, it is obvious that win percentage is totally meaningless as an unadjusted statistic.

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