Anyone who knows me knows that I love talking jockeys. I’ve waxed philosophical about the brilliance of Bailey, the rail skimming trips of Borel and how underrated Johnny V and Mike Smith are on the turf. The negative to all of this is that it gives readers the false
impression that I handicap jockeys more than trainers when the truth is quite the opposite.

If there are any football fans out there, I would equate the jockey to the best cornerback, the trainer to the quarterback and the horse to everyone else. This means that the horse is the most important, but the trainer is a close second and the jockey is just the icing on the cake.  In fact, I believe that horses that get a true trainer upgrade off a claim are some of the best horses to play next time out.

Of course, all of this is just a bunch of talk without some data to back it up right? So, I decided that the best way to illustrate this point would be with some stats. I took all jockeys and trainers with a rating of 80 or higher and called them “good”. I took all
jockeys and trainers with a rating below 80 and called them “bad”. I then compiled the results from several of the tracks that I play over a six-month span and came up with the following:

Now, I didn’t segment the data based on turf, dirt, sprint and route and I know these things will affect the results. However, the point that I am trying to make is that you should always be more of a student of trainers than jockeys. You should use the trainer’s
data on Thoroughbred Analytics to glean insights on which surfaces, distances and tracks each trainer prefers. I am a big proponent of beefing up our trainer analytics because I believe that much in handicapping trainers.

When preparing a horse for a race, there is so much to do and so much to get wrong or right. When riding a horse, you basically need to know how to save ground and what position to put your horse in. Are there jockeys who struggle to figure this all out? absolutely, but the percentage in most jockey colonies is probably around 5%. The amount of trainers who don’t know how to get a horse ready to run is probably around 20%.
A good experiment is to look at horses that have gone through jockey changes and horses that have gone through trainer changes and observe which horses changed more. I have seen horses get claimed by a top trainer and move up two or three classes. I have never seen horses move up two or three classes off of a jockey change-even if it was to Jerry Bailey!

So, does all of this mean that you stop handicapping jockeys? No. It just means that you if you spend two hours in the jockey analytics section of the site, you should have spent 4 hours in the trainer section. You should look at how trainers do off of three-month layoffs,
sixth month layoffs, twelve-month layoffs. You should see what their preferred distances are, their record when moving from a Lasix state to a non-Lasix state.  I remember when Drosselmeyer was entered in the Belmont Stakes. I knew that Bill Mott had a huge respect for the classics and didn’t enter a horse just for the hell of it. I didn’t like Drosselmeyer, but decided to put him in a few exactas in the hopes that he would come running late and pick up a paycheck. Of course, he wound up winning which leads to my biggest reason to study trainers- they know their horses. Jockeys may be notoriously bad handicappers, but trainers are impeccably good handicappers. If you see a trainer showing confidence, give the horse a second look.

In the next few weeks, I will talk about some more angles and try to point out examples of how studying trainers has paid off in the past. If you have any comments or care to disagree that handicapping trainers is worth the effort, by all means send a comment through TA Support. Last week we received a great comment about Boom Towner and how Diane Nelson may be underrated if anything.