New Datasets: 2015 Brisnet Speed & Class Ratings and Pinhooker

By Dana Byerly

Happy belated New Year! Just like the new year, we’re slowly getting underway. We’ve done a little clean-up at The Wire, adding new sources to make it easy for you quickly find Thoroughbred, and some Standardbred, commentary. We’ll go into more detail on this and other upcoming changes in a later post. Until then, we have some new datasets you might be interested in at Horse Racing Datasets.

You may remember last year when Ed DeRosa of Brisnet.com generously shared a massive dataset of winning Brisnet Speed and Class ratings from 1990-2014. He’s followed that up with the 2015 Winning Brisnet Speed and Class figures.

Just like the previous set, this set includes all stakes races, both graded and listed, and includes the following data points:

Winner’s Name
Winner’s Sire
Race Date
Track
Purse
Race Name
Grade
Brisnet Speed Rating
Brisnet Class Rating

We’ve added tabs for graded and non-graded stakes and sorting is done by year. We’ve also done clean-up and normalization, which primarily involved removing sponsor names from races (e.g., changing Horseshoe Casino Cincinnati Spiral Stakes to Spiral Stakes). We offer more detail in our original post, please check that out if you’re interested in knowing more. Thanks again to DeRosa and Brisnet for sharing their data in usable forms!

Update: A cvs and xlsx version are now available for download (at the bottom of the page).

Our other new dataset includes international sales data from 2009-2015 and was contributed as a complete R package (learn more about R here) entitled Pinhooker. From Pinhooker’s GitHub page:

Pinhooker is an R package with two main aspects. The first is a pre-compiled Rds file comprising historic thoroughbred bloodstock sales data. The second aspect is a set of functions to compile bespoke thoroughbred sale results datasets and extend the included Rds file.

The package includes sales data from:
Goffs
Goffs DBS
Arqana (France)
Baden-Badener Auktionsgesellschaft e.V. (Germany)
Tattersalls
Tattersalls Ireland

Phill Clark, the author, also told me that he intends to add more data, so keep an eye on the project.

Datasets are listed alphabetically at Horse Racing Datasets. Like last year, we’re hoping to add the early Triple Crown nominations after they’re announced. If you have a dataset you’d like to share, please get in touch!