Breaking from the Gate

I woke up this morning to my normal routine. A little breakfast coupled with ‘Mike and Mike in the Morning’ on ESPN2. As would be expected now that baseball is in full swing, there was quite a bit of discussion going on about the games. I admit that I am not much of a baseball fan despite having a huge collection of baseball cards as a kid, so normally I don’t pay much attention until playoff time. This morning however was different.

The main story of the day was the death of storied Philadelphia Phillies announcer Harry Kalas. Personally, I had never heard of him before yesterday. I certainly never equated him with the Philadelphia Phillies. Interestingly enough, I knew him better than I thought, because in addition to his work with the Phillies, he also was the voice of NFL Films. There have been many famous baseball announcers that I did know (Harry Carey, Vin Scully, Jack and Joe Buck to name a few), and to a certain extent I see similarities to our track announcers in horse racing. There have been many announcers that have spent years primarily at one spot, or on one circuit and have earned the same kind of reverence that Mr. Kalas had in Philadelphia from the local fans. I think that’s great, and should be celebrated.

I could list countless names, and I’m sure I would fail miserably at remembering them all, so I’ll just give you one. Terry Wallace. At Oaklawn he has called nearly 20,000 consecutive races. I’ve known Terry for a long time and consider him to be a friend in the business, and an all-around great ambassador to the sport. I first met him when he also called races at Ak-Sar-Ben, where he took over for another announcing institution in Bill Murphy. This is a remarkable streak which I am certain will go unnoticed outside Hot Springs, should it come to an end.

But, that’s not the reason for this post.

As anyone who follows baseball knows (and even those of us that don’t), baseball is a sport that probably has more statistical information available for fans than any other sport in the world. Every time I watch a sports show you hear of an event taking place in baseball which is followed by its statistical significance. For example, the next no-hitter to be pitched will be number 258 in Major League Baseball history. Oh, and by the way, in case you were interested, number 257 was also the first no hitter in history to be pitched at a neutral field, and numbers 255 and 256 were both thrown by Boston Red Sox pitchers, which was the first time since 1974-1975 that two consecutive no-hitters were thrown by the same team (California Angels if you care). I swear someone is out there keeping track of what each and every player had for breakfast.

So what does that have to do with horse racing?

Our sport is also driven by statistics. Only for some reason horse racing makes it very difficult to find and use statistics … and very expensive.

Baseball statistics are easy to find and work with. For example, let’s take a look at Hank Aaron. One quick Google Search and you can find this:

http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/a/aaronha01.shtml

Now you might be thinking ‘OK, he’s one of the greats, and if I wanted statistics on Secretariat I could find that too’. Well, here’s the same statistics for Ben Hayes, who I happen to know. He played two seasons for Cincinnati before getting hurt.

http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/h/hayesbe01.shtml

Contrast that with the horse racing industry, where having this information is paramount to being successful wagering on the sport.

As with baseball, there is a central authority currently keeping the historical data, Equibase. Thankfully Equibase also distributes the data to other vendors like Bloodstock Research, the DRF and others … for a fee. Those companies also slice and dice the data, add some of their own, and resell it. The data business in horse racing generates a lot of money for the companies that buy it, and those companies that sell it make it difficult to use once you buy it or make easy to use data so expensive that the average gambler can’t afford it.

Yet in baseball, it’s free … and in baseball, the data is accurate.

Despite there now being technology available to track every horse in every race at every track, the industry has not implemented the technology. I think most fans know about Trackus, which is currently deployed at Keeneland, Del Mar and Woodbine. Is the Trackus data part of the official record? No. In fact the tracks that are paying for the Trackus service can’t even get the data from the vendor in some cases!

There are also other systems that can do similar things, for example legendary timekeeper Tag Heuer has a system specifically designed for horse racing. There is no rational explanation as to why horse racing is not providing accurate split times for each horse, as opposed to just the horse that crosses the beam first. A customer should not have to estimate these by calculating them manually. Can you imagine how long it would take to just do one race with a 12 horse field and 10 PP lines for each horse? Now extrapolate that to nine or ten races for a single card and maybe five tracks for a single day. It’s insane to expect a customer to have to do this.

Enjoyment of horse racing is IMO more dependent on statistics than baseball, yet the industry does a poor job of providing data to its fans. At a time where the industry is struggling, this needs to change soon. We need to start giving customers all the tools they can possibly use to make it easier to play. Accurate data in a format that is easily used is but one step.

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