2nd-year sires: See the best and worst by surface and distance

As so many young horses these days are by young sires, it's helpful to better understand which new sires are overperforming and underperforming, and on which surfaces and distances. 

With 2023 recently concluded, let's start by taking a look at second-year sires. These are the sires whose offspring first hit the track in 2022 as 2-year-olds. Last year was their first full year of racing with their first crop being 3-year-olds in 2023. 

We'll do this analysis based on our HRN data analytics, which we believe creates a helpful focus. First, we break out sprints and routes separately. Sires may get a 'turf' rating, but in our book that is worthless if you don't break out sprints from routes.

Second, in addition to win percentage, we have the HRN Impact, which measures wins over expectation.  What this means is we take the odds of all the starters to determine how many races should they have won based on their odds. This helps us determine which win percentage numbers are likely to go up or down from here. That is especially important in dealing with small sample sizes. For example, horses by Good Magic are winning 19 percent of dirt routes which is great, but the +34 percent impact says they are overperforming expectations. That is a good indicator that the 19 percent win rate may hold or even go up.

Conversely, Good Magic progeny are only winning five percent of turf sprints, although this is only based on 44 starts.  That being said, in addition to the low win percentage, the impact is highly negative at -55 percent. That means that good-looking Good Magic runners are consistently disappointing in turf sprints, and while the win percentage may drift up a little bit from five percent, we are getting a clear indication that turf sprinting is not what Good Magics want to do. 

Now let's get to the good stuff.  Also, the table below is ranked by number of starts as the sires with the most starts are the ones we see the most at the races.

Dirt sprints - Bee Jersey, Girvin, Army Mule, Justify

We wanted to include smaller sires for illustration, so the full list includes sires with 20 or more starters. But the real winners in this category among more common sires are Bee Jersey at 24 percent, Girvin at 22 percent, Army Mule at 21 percent and Justify at 21 percent. Awesome Slew is not far behind at 20 percent. For the full list, click on the dirt sprint tab of the spreadsheet at the end of this article. 

Dirt routes - Army Mule, Girvin, Sharp Azteca, Good Magic

We see Army Mule again among the top dirt-route sires in his class, this time at an eye-popping 29 percent. Girvin is on this list too, again at 22 percent. They are followed by Sharp Azteca at 21 percent and Good Magic at 19 percent along with Cloud Computing and Tapwrit. 

Turf sprints - Army Mule, City of Light, Good Samaritan, Justify

There are fewer turf sprints overall, but now a third time we see Army Mule again, this time at 22 percent. He is followed by City of Light at 19 percent and then Good Samaritan, Justify and Mrazek at 17 percent. Girvin, who we saw near the top of the dirt sprint list, is here too at 16 percent. 

Turf routes - Oscar Performance, Army Mule, others

Turf racing features fuller fields, so we see slightly lower win percentages at the top in turf routes. With sires who have 40 starters or more, we see Oscar Performance is at the top at 16 percent and then once again we see Army Mule, this time coming in second at 15 percent. They are followed by Always Dreaming, Collected and Justify all at 14 percent.

Synthetic sprints - Bee Jersey, Bolt d'Oro, Ransom the Moon

Since there is much less synthetic racing, we dropped down to 15 starts here and Bee Jersey leads this list with a sensational 47 percent win rate. That's only based on 15 starts however. Bolt d'Oro is also doing exceptionally well at 27 percent, along with Ransom the Moon at 26 percent, Long on Value at 24 percent and Bucchero at 23 percent.

Synthetic routes - Funtastic, Oscar Performance, others 

There is even less synthetic routing than sprints, but it is still fun to see who is doing well in this category. Funtastic and Oscar Performance lead the way at 21 percent followed by Justify, Collected and Mendelssohn at 17 percent. 

Here is the complete list of second-year sires with at least 10 starters to date. 

The Horse Racing Nation Data & Analytics team builds insights for handicapping, owners, trainers, jockeys and industry groups and tracks using data analysis and machine learning. HRN does analysis for several tracks and horsemens groups and provides AI morning lines for tracks and bet takers. Click here to learn more about horse racing data files or email us at mail@horseracingnation.com with specific requests.