"I’ll Have Another got a 101 in his Derby win.... At the rate we are going, 99 is going to become the new 109 in another year or two. What exactly is going on here?"

"What I found out was the Beyer Figures by the top stakes horses were relatively similar from 1992 to 2005. And then it all started to slow down. With a few exceptions that don't last long (Uncle Mo), the best horses just keep getting slower on the Beyer scale."

"... things have changed in racing, just as they have changed in other sports. The sabermetrics movement, defined by objective analysis, especially statistics, shunned the insider perspective in baseball and has altered the way the sport is run. In professional basketball, 'stat geeks' use mathematical formulas in an attempt to assess a player’s contribution in more meaningful ways than a scoring average or a scout’s eye-test. Many teams have bought in, and most have advanced stats experts on payroll. Over the years, a similar shift has occurred in racing. Class still counts, and horsemen still train horses, but speed figures have wormed their way into every nook of the racing world."

"Uncle Mo is the extreme example, but none of the horses with 2-year-old promise has gotten any better. To Honor and Serve never got close to his 102 in the Remsen before being sidelined with an injury. Not sure where Boys At Tosconova, with his two triple-digit Beyers, might have gone this year, if he had not been hurt."

"Maclean's Music's sire, Distorted Humor, only got an 86 in his debut, but he had 15 triple-digit Beyers in a 23-race career, including four 110s, a 112, a 116, a 117, and a 118. So the Beyer history is there. You start mixing debuts of 114 and 105 with all those giant Beyers from the sire, and you might really have something. What you already have is the fastest debut in Beyer Figure/DRF history."

"Yet if the criteria for a Horse of the Year award was based solely on speed, then there would be a much different path to racing’s ultimate prize -- one that mirrors last year’s scenario. In choosing the fastest horse of 2010, Len Friedman, a partner with Ragozin Thoroughbred Data, tossed out both Zenyatta and Blame and crowned the three-year-old filly Blind Luck as the “Sheets” Horse of the Year."

"At each stage of his career, Secretariat's winning times and speed figures provided objective evidence that he was an extraordinary runner. His greatest performance, of course, was the Belmont Stakes, where he dueled with Sham at a seemingly suicidal pace for three-quarters of a mile and proceeded to draw away to a 31-length victory. The prevailing track record, Gallant Man's 2:26 3/5, was considered almost unassailable; only one other winner in the Belmont's history had run faster than 2:28. When Secretariat crossed the finish line in 2:24 flat, he had raced into a new dimension."

"One of the most fascinating developments of the postmodern handicapping art has been the use of figure patterns to predict improving and declining form. While speed figures are well known to correlate positively with ability, or class, certain patterns of speed figures can serve as reliable instruments of form analysis. Perhaps the most reliable and useful of these are the paired-figure patterns. That is, a horse has delivered essentially the same performance twice in a row. What should happen next?" (6/30/08)

"The fact is a speed figure — whether it’s produced by Beyer, Len Ragozin (The Sheets), Jerry Brown (Thoro-Graph), TrackMaster/Equibase or the Racing Post — provides handicappers about as much information as the current price of a stock provides investors. It is merely a snapshot in time, a reflection of a particular race run at a particular track on a particular day. And while it may certainly serve as a guide to future performances, it does not in any way determine those performances." (Via @superterrific)