Handicapping pioneer Ragozin 'on Mount Rushmore' of racing

Len Ragozin, founder of the influential The Sheets handicapping tool, died last week at age 92, at an assisted-living facility in Vermont.

As a racing fan, you probably are familiar with him for creating the Bounce Theory and being the author of "The Odds Must Be Crazy," in which he explains how to use The Sheets.

Jon Hardoon, a handicapper who has worked for Ragozin Thoroughbred Media for more than 40 years, told Horse Racing Nation Tuesday that Ragozin "was a pioneer of the figures. Actually, his father had a system, and then he refined it – he made it what it is today. He was a conscientious worker, he was a perfectionist. The numbers were his life, they really were. …

"He's on the Mount Rushmore of people with influence on the game, like Andy Beyer," Hardoon said. "There's a handful of guys that are responsible for making the game, getting figures involved in the game, and he was one of the original people."

Len Friedman, who worked with Ragozin since the 1960s, said he was a "genius, with all that goes along with that. He was extremely disciplined, hard working. He loved puzzles, and he loved solving puzzles. And he wanted to know that the solutions were the right solutions – that they made sense, not just that they fit in.

"And there were times when he was abrasive, particularly in the early days, when a lot of the work that he did, he had to keep in his mind because there were no computers, there weren't even calculators that were of any use to us," Friedman continued. "You had to do all the work in your head to be able to get it done. And he required intense concentration, he hated to be interrupted. He couldn't stand any kind of noises at all, because it would just derail his train of thought.

"But he was always very generous and supportive."

Hardoon explained how The Sheets work.

"It's a number that they assign to every race in the horse's life," he said. "So the lower the number, the better the race, unlike the Beyer figures – the Beyer figures, the higher the number, the faster the race. And what goes into this number is, they have their own recipe. They take wind, they take ground loss, they take weight carried, and they take the depth, how slow or fast the track is that day. And they put it all into a blender and they come up with a number. And that's what he did. This was all him."

Hardoon, who teaches people to use The Sheets through seminars and makes radio appearances on behalf of the company, explained that The Sheets is more than a handicapping tool for bettors.

"There's all different aspects of the game that Sheets are used for," he said. "People use sheets to buy and sell horses. Trainers use Sheets to see where to enter their horses. Gamblers use Sheets to bet off of the figures. And then you have guys like Ron Anderson, who is a super jock agent that uses The Sheets to decide what horses to ride."

Ragozin sold his company in 2012 to Steve Davison, owner of Twin Creeks Stables, and Jake Haddad, a longtime employee.

Davison said he had been a "fascinated and satisfied customer" of The Sheets, but that he didn't know Ragozin well.

"He developed quite a brand and had such an influence on our industry," Davison said. "So I'm real proud of the name and proud of the association."

Hardoon offered an interesting fact about Ragozin: He wasn't a gambler.

"He didn't like to gamble, he left the gambling to other people, because he felt that if he gambled the numbers he would make, there'd be a bias to them because like most gamblers, he had an ego, I guess. And if a horse he liked didn't run well then he would adjust the figure, and that he thought wasn't fair. So he stayed out of the gambling end of the business."

But Friedman said there was also a different reason that Ragozin didn't bet the races.

"He couldn't stand losing. Every (losing) bet he made was like a knife going into him that he did something wrong," Friedman said. "Either he didn't make the numbers right or he didn't interpret them right, whatever. He just couldn't stand it, and I remember in the early days of everything, the time in the afternoon between the time that he put the bets in in the morning and got the results in the late afternoon. You couldn't really talk to him. He was just a bundle of nerves."