First-year sires: Who are the best by surface and distance?

Following up on our look at Second-year sires: Best and Worst by surface, let's dive into looking at the first-year sires.

As so many young horses these days are by young sires, whether as a bettor, owner, breeder or trainer, it is helpful to better understand which new sires are overperforming and underperforming, and on which surfaces and distances.

These are the sires whose offspring first hit the track last summer as 2-year-olds and just turned 3 on Jan. 1. Keep in mind that data trends are still developing in many cases for these young sires. That being said, the top 15 sires already have recorded 100 or more starts by their offspring, so trends are clearly emerging.

We'll do this analysis based on our HRN data analytics, which we believe create a helpful focus. First, we break out sprints and routes separately. Sires might 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 they should 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 (second-year sire) are winning 19% of dirt routes, which is great, but the +34% impact says they are overperforming expectations. That is a good indicator that the 19% win rate may hold or even go up.

Conversely, Good Magic progeny are winning only 5% of turf sprints, although this is based on only 44 starts. That being said, in addition to the low win percentage, the impact is highly negative at -55%. That means that good-looking Good Magic runners are consistently disappointing in turf sprints, and although the win percentage may drift up a little bit from 5%, we are getting a clear indication that turf sprinting is not what Good Magics want to do. 

Overall stats

I'll let the numbers speak for themselves, and the overall stats are sorted by starts. But one thing that quickly stands out is the large footprint of the most popular sires. For this analysis, we've limited it to sires with 20 or more starters, and that limited this list to 30 sires. 

Dirt sprints - Omaha Beach, Maximus Mischief on top

Since our entire list contained only 30 sires, we decided to run the surface- and distance-specific stats with the full list. But for this discussion, we'll limit it to sires with more data. Leading the way in dirt sprints are Omaha Beach (22%) and Maximus Mischief (20%), who clearly have been successful sprinting on the dirt. 

For the full list, click on the dirt sprint tab of the spreadsheet at the end of this article. 

Dirt routes - Catalina Cruiser, Mitole, Preservationist

We're limiting the look below to sires with a win or five or more starts on dirt routes. With only 15 to 30 starts for most sires, trends are very early. But we can see several sires doing well early, including Catalina Cruiser (29%), Mitole (24%), Preservationist (23%), Omaha Beach (21%) and Solomini (20%).

It is worth noting that in these cases with so little data, I would favor sires with higher impact numbers. For example, Mitole is winning at 24%, but the impact is only +3% which means his runners are winning at about the rate they should. Solomini, on the other hand, is right below at 20%, but the +95% impact means his runners are greatly overperforming their odds. So I would bet with more data that Solomini has a greater chance of getting dirt routers than Mitole. 

It is also worth noting the slow start by Audible (8%) over 50 starts and that Catholic Boy is still winless, although with only 15 starters. 

Turf sprints - Mitole, Flameaway, World of Trouble

Now we are really getting into limited data samples, but Mitole (23%), Flameaway (23%) and World of Trouble (21%) are off to a good start with more than 20 starters. 

Turf routes - Divisidero, Flameaway, Copper Bullet

Divisidero (33%) is leading the way here, and although his offspring are only 4-for-12 so far, the +257% impact is catching my eye. That means his runners have jumped up way beyond their odds, as they should have won only one or two of those starts based on the tote board. 

Flameaway (19%), Demarchelier (18%) and Catholic Boy (18%) all are off to a good start with more than 40 starters.  Note there is a fairly big dropoff at that point. Also something to watch is that Omaha Beach (4%) and Mitole (0% on 17 starts) are off to slow starts turf routing. 

Synthetic sprints - Not a lot of data at this point

Since there is much less synthetic racing, there isn't a lot of data to go on at this point, but below is the list to review.  

Synthetic routes - Trends still developing 

The same as synthetic sprinting, there just isn't much data yet for synthetic routing, but here is the early data to review. 

Here is the complete list of first year sires with at least 20 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 horsemen's 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.