JC / Railbird

Equibase

Unabashed Praise

… for the Racing Post website. This morning, on noticing that Man of God, eighth to stablemate Frankel in his winning August 13 debut at Newmarket, had won at Yarmouth yesterday, I clicked over to that one’s Racing Post profile, with one question: Had any other horse in that race come back to win? There, I clicked on the race date, then on each finisher’s name, getting a pop-up window with each of their complete career records, and in five minutes — without logging in, entering credit card information, or downloading any PDFs — I had the answer. It was a breeze, as it is every time I visit. The site is data-rich and user-friendly. More advanced features require registration and/or payment, but elementary research can be accomplished with ease.

“We’ve embraced the internet as openly as any sport that I’m aware of,” said NTRA president Alex Waldop in a recent TDN interview. “When it comes to the horse stuff, I think we’ve done a good job,” Equibase president Hank Zeitlin told the Paulick Report. Never mind the DRF, which has invested considerable resources in developing Formulator, a powerful handicapping tool hobbled by an outmoded card-based navigation and subscription model, while letting products such as Simulcast Daily stagnate. All it takes is a few minutes with the Racing Post to realize how far the American racing industry has to go to bring American racing fans an online tool as simple and useful.

Posted in Industry on September 17, 2010 / Tagged Daily Racing Equibase, Data, Equibase, Media, NTRA, Online Tools, Racing Post, Web Design

Locked Up

Ray Paulick has posted a piece this morning on the possible expansion of the Jockey Club into the tote business that includes a bit on Equibase and its practice of locking all data up behind a paywall, unlike most major sports. “It’s short-term thinking,” says an executive quoted by Paulick. “If our objective in racing is for the horseplayers to win, we should do everything we can to help him, and increase the churn. That’s where the revenue for our business should come from, not from the statistics the horseplayer needs.” Heck, yes.

On the topic, here’s a bit from a post on June 5, 2008:

The Supreme Court squashed Major League Baseball’s attempt to maintain exclusive control of player statistics, turning down its appeal of an Eighth Circuit Court ruling that allowed fantasy baseball leagues to use the data without paying a licensing fee. “The information used in … fantasy baseball games is all readily available in the public domain,” said the appeals court, “and it would be strange law that a person would not have a First Amendment right to use information that is available to everyone.” Well, this is interesting … and most definitely relevant to the industry. Applied to racing, this ruling could be interpreted to mean that almost all data and statistics in the past performances and results charts are in the public domain (which makes it ridiculous that Equibase buries historical charts behind a paywall), but not presentation of the data or statistics [so no straight re-posting of PDF charts], or analysis derived using proprietary methods (such as speed figures).

CBSSports.com responded to the Supreme Court’s decision by launching a new site that makes available data for baseball, as well as football, basketball, hockey, and auto racing. I’d love to see a similar initiative in racing. As baseball stats wizard Bill James said,

People take information and build knowledge. When you give them new information they will create new knowledge, absolutely and without question.

Free data and historical stats, that’s the way to build the fan base.

“If you look back to 1990 and see what information was available and how it was made available, we’ve accomplished a lot,” Equibase president Hank Zeitlen tells Paulick, and that might be true — but it’s not enough.

Posted in Racing on March 24, 2009 / Tagged Data, Equibase, Industry, Statistics