Credit Where Credit is Due

As readers of this space may remember, I have taken several media outlets to task in the past. I hold the media to very high standards and expect writers and editors to have very thick skins. I also expect them to always get the facts straight. It was in this context that I wrote to the Boston Globe’s Managing Editor for News Christine Chinlund last week.

Ms. Chinlund,

As I read the very disturbing Page 1 story by Matt Viser today,

http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2013/04/03/conservative-kansas-district-cheers-its-congressman-for-being-thorn-side/CFIcoTVhIzzPMUAYoSVh1J/story.html

I was taken up short by the statement that "The First Congressional District (of Kansas) covers more area than any other House district in the country. It is nearly 60,000 square miles, about the size of the entire state of Illinois."

I think this assertion would come as a big surprise to the citizens of Alaska, Montana, and Wyoming. Each of those states has but a single member of Congress, and each state is larger than the state of Illinois.

As a side note, I hope that members of the Secret Service also read Viser's piece. The quotes at the end, which threaten the life of the President, may be protected by the First Amendment, but should also cause all levels of law enforcement to be vigilant.

--

Ned  Daly

Well, a few days passed and I hadn’t heard from The Globe, so I wrote again.

Ms. Chinlund,

I wrote last week to bring to your attention what I believe to be an error in Mat Viser's story on politics in Kansas. I have not heard or seen any correction.

Does The Globe expect its readers to believe that there are more Members of Congress than there are Congressional Districts?

In short order I received the following email from Ms. Chinlund.

Dear Ned --

The lapse is entirely my fault, and I am on the case now. Sorry about that.

Best,

Chris

I was quite pleased by this and even more pleased to see the correction in the April 9 edition of The Globe.

For the record

“* Correction: Because of an editing error, a Page One story in Thursday’s paper about a conservative Kansas congressional district incorrectly stated its relative geographic size. The First Congressional District in Kansas is among the largest by territory in the country.”

Now that is a little more like it. Not the abject boot licking I was dreaming about, or a mention of which gimlet-eyed reader raised the issue, but a straightforward acknowledgement that they got the facts wrong. Over the past few years the Globe has issued printed corrections a number of times when I have pointed out errors. This is only one of the things I love about that paper. So I wrote-

Chris

Thanks for the correction. One of the reasons I read the story so closely is that I have been to that part of Kansas and hold great affection for the people there who saved my life after a heart attack suffered on a business trip 15 years ago.

Best always,

Ned

This letter got the following response almost immediately

Never be afraid to nudge me. In this case, I simply lost track of the correction in the flurry of other stuff. Not a good excuse, but the truth.

Chris

The Boston Globe should win awards for customer service. No one at an equivalent level of any other company I know would take the time to correspond with someone who buys less than $1,000 worth of product a year.

Nice to be on a first name basis with these folks too.

Believe half of what you see, son, and none of what you hear

Ordinarily, I try to be a skeptic without becoming a cynic. The folks I live with like me better that way. Maintaining this stance with regard to the New York Racing Association (NYRA) and The Daily Racing Form (DRF) is getting harder and harder.

A couple of weeks ago, while reading The Paulick Report (http://www.paulickreport.com/) I came across a press release written by Dan Silver of NYRA which announced that the attendance at Aqueduct was up on April 7, the day of the Wood Memorial. I was skeptical about this because I was at Aqueduct that day. I did not have to buy a ticket, there was no paid admission, and I did not pass through any kind of turnstile. I wondered how NYRA came up with the statement, "This year’s attendance of 12,514 was a 3 percent increase from last year’s attendance of 12,144.”

I wrote to Silver and asked about the number. He replied a couple of days later (after some prompting) and said,  “Per our Director of Admissions, ‘Yes, we can estimate the attendance within 3 percent for live racing days. We use the daily percent of Post Parade programs sold to calculate Aqueduct’s attendance.’"

This struck me as a little thin and I wrote to Jerry Davis of NYRA with some follow-up questions about his methodology.

“It seems from what Dan says that you believe there is a linear relationship between the number of programs sold and the number of people at the track. That is, for every X (number of programs sold) there is a corresponding Y (number of people at the track.)

Is the relationship really linear (not geometric or something else)?  Have you tested it?

Is it the same relationship on weekends and weekdays?

Is it the same relationship on big stakes days as on ordinary days?

Do you ever run out of programs? NYRA ran out of food in the deli and reportedly out of beer cups by the time of the Wood last Saturday.

Did you always estimate attendance that way or did you change when the casino opened?

Does the casino action affect track attendance? In a way you have measured?

Do you also estimate at Belmont and Saratoga where NYRA charges admission?

I just want to make sure I understand as much as I can before I go forward.

Thanks in advance.”

Davis did not choose to get back to me, so I was left thinking that at best NYRA uses a pretty poor estimating procedure, and at worst, they just make it up. Reporting an exact number to the public is not the same as calculating an estimate.

I looked around to see where else this “number” appeared. These things always used to appear at the end of the Equibase official charts of the races at each track, but do not any longer. I asked Equibase about this and they did not reply. I wrote to Brisnet, another supplier of data and analysis for horse races and asked where they got the number they printed in their results charts for Aqueduct that day. They got back to me and told me they got it from NYRA. I wrote to DRF and they told me they were forwarding my question to “editorial” for review.

So far, no answer from them.

Well, so what. Who really cares how many people went to the track that day? Maybe the NYRA marketing department does, or the folks who needed to order enough plastic cups for beer, but what’s the difference to the rest of us? Something in me did not want to let this rest. My feeling was that if I could not trust NYRA on something like this, maybe I could not trust them on things that really count. I was dissuaded from blogging about this by the feeling I would just come across as a sorehead (something I have been accused of before). After all, I only go to the NYRA tracks a half dozen times per year, my wagering is simple and very modest, and I lose more than I win. No skin off my nose.

Then came the revelations of the last few days.

At the Paulick Report I saw an article about a recent report titled,

STATE OF NEW YORK RACING AND WAGERING BOARD

INTERIM REPORT INTO THE MATTER OF INCORRECT TAKEOUT RATES AT THE NEW YORK RACING ASSOCIATION, INC.

Audits and Investigations Unit April 26, 2012

The report details the State’s inquiry into a situation already known to careful followers of thoroughbred racing. I first became aware of this some months ago. The specifics are pretty arcane, but to simplify, the “takeout” is the overhead each racetrack takes out of the money wagered on the races. This goes to pay for track operations, purses to the winners, payments to the state and the like. The percentage of each betting pool that the track “takes out” of what it pays the winning bettors is set by regulation in each jurisdiction, and typically varies by type of wager. The rest gets paid to the winners. The size and variability of the takeout from place to place and from wager to wager is a matter of fierce debate among some who wager on horse races. Bettors REALLY care how much return they are getting on their speculative investment.

The regulation in New York had a sunset provision affecting “exotic” wagers like trifectas and Pick Fours. After the middle of September 2010, without a change in the sunset provision, NYRA would take less and the winning bettors would get more. Given the size of NYRA’s operation and the fierce loyalty bettors have to their own money, any swing is important. In this case, the total amount that went to NYRA and not to the bettors was almost $8.5 million.

The report, which can be found in full at

http://www.scribd.com/doc/91824424/NYRA-Interim-Report-Takeout

says in part

“The Board’s review thus far has found the following:

Based on a review of NYRA’s emails, several NYRA personnel, including CEO Charles Hayward, were notified and/or were aware that the exotic takeout rate had expired. NYRA may not have lowered the rates due to perceived political and financial reasons. In an email dated September 1, 2010 NYRA Vice-President Liz Bracken informed a NYRA Manager that, “takeout legislation sunsets middle of September, but I have not heard that we intend to lower takeouts.”

The email was subsequently forwarded to two other NYRA employees.

Mr. Hayward was notified via email by a concerned bettor on September 28, 2010 that the law had sunset and the rates had expired. Mr. Hayward notified the bettor that he was

referring the issue to NYRA’s General Counsel Patrick Kehoe.”

And later,

“In August 2011 (almost a year after the rates had expired) the Daily Racing Form (DRF) publisher and columnist Steve Crist passed along an email from a DRF reader indicating the rates had expired and were outside the parameters of the Racing Law. Mr. Hayward emailed Mr. Crist on August 1, 2011 confirming that the reader was correct and requested that Mr. Crist keep the information confidential. Mr. Crist agreed.”

Read that last sentence again.

The publisher of the biggest American newspaper devoted to horse racing agreed not only to keep silent about NYRA’s defrauding of the public at large, but also to abet that fraud being perpetrated against one of his own subscribers.

The Paulick Report (May 1, 2012) has an item in which it reports,

“Crist and Hayward are former business partners who in 1998 put together an investment group to buy Daily Racing Form. They sold it six years later for a tidy profit. Crist remained with the newspaper as publisher and columnist, and shortly after the Form was sold Hayward was named CEO of NYRA, where Crist was employed as an executive in the mid-1990s. The friendship between the two men has spawned a cozy relationship between the newspaper and the racing association it covers.”

“Cozy”? That does not begin to describe the way I feel about the relationship between Crist/DRF, and NYRA.

As of today things stand this way -

NYRA has sanctioned Hayward and Kehoe by placing them on unpaid administrative leave.

Crist says “With hindsight, I regret that I didn’t follow up on the issue. But I personally do not believe Hayward knowingly overcharged his customers….”

The big bettors who use internet betting sites have mostly gotten their money back because they had an electronic trail of the bets and the payouts.

The ordinary guy, pushing his $10 bill through the mutuel window?

Nothing.

And no way to ever recoup.

Occupy Wall Street? How about Occupy Saratoga? Years ago, the late Tom Ainslie wrote “This is a game that punishes innocence.” It was not the only thing he had right, but it is the thing that is on my mind today.

Do the L Street Brownies have a new patron?

The renowned L Street Brownies are preparing for another New Year’s Day dip in the gelid waters of Boston Harbor. With a weather forecast for air temperatures in the 40’s and water temperatures about the same, I am thinking about joining them.

This prompted me to get some details about what used to be called the L Street Bathhouse and is now known as the Curley Community Center.

This prompted the following email exchange.

From: "Ned Daly"

To: "admin curley" <admin_curley@comcast.net>
Sent: Tuesday, December 28, 2010 5:55:17 PM
Subject: Your home page

Hasn't any one noticed that you have the Mayor's name wrong.

Your website says he was "Michael J. Curley."


No one by that name was ever the mayor of the City of Boston.

You could look it up.
--
Ned  Daly

Walking around, paying attention.

From: Curley Community Center Updates

To: "ned daly"
Sent: Tuesday, December 28, 2010 7:53 PM
Subject: Re: Your home page

To answer your question: apparently not.  It was a simple typo mistake.  No need to look it up.  Rest assured that we do know what his name is and the mistake has been corrected.  Please note it can be found on the About Us <http://lstreetcurley.com/about_Us.html>  page.

Best wishes for a safe and healthy New Year.

http://www.lstreetcurley.com
Boston Centers for Youth & Families/Curley Community Center

2002-2010 Graphic Traffic

Now, now, boys. No need to get huffy, even though I would gauge it to be something far different from a “simple typo mistake”.  Getting the name James Michael Curley wrong on the website of the Curley Center is a pretty major lapse in this town.

What fascinates me is the fact that the site seems to have been up for eight years now. Have they had thousands of visitors who really did not notice, or don’t they get any traffic?

Media Criticism #4

The following is a copy of an email to Susanne Althoff, Editor of the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine

Susanne,

Just a quick comment on the photo that accompanied Tom Keane's piece in the Magazine last Sunday (5-23-10).

The photo caption says it is a view of Nantucket Sound "from Hyannis Port." I have spent a lot of time looking at Nantucket Sound; from West Yarmouth, Chatham, and Nantucket Harbor. The use of what is clearly an aerial shot markedly distorts the effect of any sea-level viewing.

The context (the jetty and the spit of land at the left for instance), and the distance to the apparent horizon available in an aerial shot are orders of magnitude greater than those available to any boater, a viewer standing on shore, or someone looking out an upstairs window.

The result is that the photo is at odds with the argument Keane is trying to make. From the vantage point of that photographer, wind turbines might mar the view. It is simply less possible for anything to similarly affect the view from on shore at sea level.

Media Criticism #3

I read James Surowiecki’s article “The Age of Political Risk” on The Financial Page in the May 24th edition of The New Yorker. As usual I found the piece timely, informative, and accessible. I was taken aback, however, by a statement made in the fourth paragraph. Surowiecki says, “Markets work best when there’s lots of information available and a historical track record to go on; they excel at predicting things like horse races….”

If only this were true. After spending some years of my professional life teasing stories out of data, I took an interest in horse racing under just that assumption. I thought that with the proper analytical framework, the rich mine of data available in The Daily Racing Form and other sources would yield at least a modest return on investment (ROI).

As I learned more about horse racing, I came to find that even the best handicappers (those who study past performances, pedigree, track biases, etc.) correctly predict the outcome only about forty percent of the time. If by “markets” Surowiecki means the run of horseplayers generally, the answer is even more dismal. The preference of the “market” of parimutuel bettors is displayed by the final odds on the various horses in a race, with the lowest odds attached to the “favorite.” Historically “favorites” have won only about one-third of the time. More disheartening, flat bets on all favorites will inevitably produce a negative ROI over time.

In his blog entry of February 25, 2010, Steven Crist, Publisher of The Daily Racing Form wrote “…it turns out that the ancient rule of thumb that favorites win one-third of all races may need a longer thumb: In 2009, favorites in fact won 36.66 percent of the 55,984 thoroughbred races run in the United States and Canada.” Crist looked at 71 racetracks where the percentage of winning favorites ranged from a high of 42.73% to a low of 25.91%. While he did not report on ROI, I strongly suspect that it was negative in all cases of flat bets on favorites.

I would love to be found wrong, as would many who share my enthusiasm and frustration with handicapping. I invite Mr.Surowiecki to join me (my treat) to an afternoon at the racetrack of his choice. Saratoga is nice, and I have heard many good things about Del Mar, as well.

Media Criticism #2

Followers of this blog may remember that I criticized the Boston Globe story on Michael Gill some weeks ago. My major critique then was that facts were very hard to find. I read the two horse racing stories in the May 1, 2010 Globe, and have a different and more troubling concern. Instead of errors of omission, there are significant errors of commission.

In the story captioned "Rain Could Rule..." The Globe in graph 14 says that the last horse to win the Kentucky Derby from an outside post was Ferdinand in 1986. It goes on to say that the last horse to win from the #20 position was War Admiral in 1937. This is wrong on both counts. The last horse to win from #20, which in that case was the outside post, was Big Brown. This happened only two years ago.

In the piece captioned "Derby Notebook", The Globe makes another mistake that could have been avoided. The rival to Rachel Alexandra in graph 2 was Zardana, not "Zardania." I was about to give this a pass as a typo until I got to graph 3, where the mistake is repeated.

I wrote to Joe Sullivan, the Globe Sports Editor, on the day the stories appeared. I have not gotten any response, but in fairness, they did get the facts straight in a story the next day.

Media Criticism

Stan Grossfeld wrote two pieces about thoroughbred owner Michael Gill in The Boston Globe on March 2.

http://www.boston.com/sports/other_sports/horse_racing/articles/2010/03/02/a_run_for_his_money/

I read the story and sidebar and thought that others, who don’t see The Globe, might be interested. I shared the on-line version with a group of racing fans and handicappers at a blog I contribute to. The reaction was an almost deafening silence.

This got me thinking. Was the information so “old hat” to these people they did not bother to read or react? Were the charges and countercharges so commonplace in racing that no-one cared any more? It caused me to go back and re-read the piece. I think I know why some at least did not seem to care. It is just not very good journalism.

The article and the sidebar take up a very large chunk of real estate in The Globe, roughly 1 ½ pages out of a total of 7 in the Sports section that day or about 20 % of the entire news hole for the section. I calculated about 176 column inches devoted to the text and accompanying photos. And yet the article really came to no useful conclusion, nor did it allow the reader to draw a conclusion. What was the reader to take away? I think the evidence is clear that the majority of The Globe’s sports readers care very little about thoroughbred racing. If more cared, and they cared more passionately, The Globe would provide better coverage. This makes the sheer size of this particular piece more striking and leads to higher expectations.

What the reader gets is a very long list of accusations and counter accusations, with very little in the way of facts, and almost no sense of real pursuit of the story by The Globe. The story seems to be limited to a series of statements about “controversies.” Does The Globe routinely devote so much space to people’s interest in controversy? Would the science editors devote so much attention to “teaching the controversy” about Darwinism? Is it newsworthy in itself that not everyone at the racetrack is a choirboy? Dog bites man.

This problem begins to be illustrated by the two photo captions on the first page – an assertion by an owner at Penn National and a counter-assertion by Gill. Gill says he has been accused of a “crime” but The Globe does very little to clarify.

The lead paragraph attempts to set a context of threat and mystery, but does not follow up. Did Gill show the Globe the “multiple death threats?” Did Gill share these with law enforcement? The reader is in the dark.

The events surrounding the death of Casual Comfort and the jockeys’ action at Penn National are described, but again, the story is more concerned with “controversy” than fact-finding. And so we begin with the back and forth.

Penn National says 10 horses down.
Gill says six. Well, which is it?

Gill says Penn National has a bad surface.
Penn National says they routinely maintain it. Well, which is it?

Gill says he will sell out.
The Globe says he has said this before. Conclusion?

Jockey Sosa says Gill doesn’t care.
Gill “scoffs .” Conclusion?

Gill says his breakdown percentage is low.
Penn National says it is high. Well, which is it?

Ex-trainer Ferris asserts bad “horsemanship.”
Gill says he doesn’t remember her. What should the reader think? This is literally she said/he said.

Maggi Moss challenges Gill to document his actions with retired racehorses.
Gill “slaps a thick pile of 2009 receipts… .”
Did The Globe even look at the “receipts,” let alone follow up? The reader has no idea.

Mike Catalano “believes” Gill is honest.
Does The Globe know or tell the reader that Mike Catalano (Jr.) once worked for Gill?
Readers might want to know that Catalano (Jr.) was called to account by the Delaware Thoroughbred Racing Commission (October 21, 2008) for having two of his horses break down on the same day.

Gill says he sued Delaware for antitrust, and that Delaware settled.
Did this happen? Did The Globe follow up? Guess we will never know.

PA humane police say Gill’s farm operation is “perfect.”
The Globe introduces his pending divorce.
Is this balance for balance’s sake?

Massachusetts has “findings of fact” against his mortgage business.
Gill says “not….fraud.”
Is this the same thing?

The Globe reports a 2001 drug violation at Suffolk Downs.
Gill claims trainer’s responsibility.
How was this resolved? Globe readers are still looking to find out.

In the sidebar on Casual Comfort, we read,
“Gill …. declared persona non grata at six racetracks”
Which ones? When? On what grounds? We are still in the dark.

“He claims…. , critics claim.” No attempt to resolve competing claims.

While I am sure that The Globe considers its readers to be sophisticated and analytical enough to draw conclusions from facts, there are precious few facts in the 176 column inches devoted to horse racing and Michael Gill. Many more are to be found at the website below.
http://www.paulickreport.com/blog/gills-gang-of-misfits/

Ultimately, I think The Globe fails its readers by failing to provide a point of view. Is this an article about a businessman who is afraid for his family because of multiple death threats, or merely a story about “horseplay” at the racetrack?