Nothing about Franklin

"Unquestionably there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages."
-H. L. Mencken

This sport of ours is an odd egg. A more speculative venture in the world of athletics, I cannot bring to mind.

In theory, the game is a simple one and the measure of success is derived from the ability to finish first at the post. It used to be, the competitors would "stake" their own money to run their horses against each other, with the winner taking down the purse. Close finishes inevitably led to the need to accurately determine who won. (The invention of the Daguerreotype is curiously concomitant with the foundation of the Jockey-Club de Paris)

While winning the purse was gratifying, the real satisfaction came from proving to that inbred bastard across the swamp, your horse could trounce his mule any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

With the possible exception of the Cubs (whose fans are demented anyway), no team in professional sports can hope to keep a following just by promoting the amount of revenue they generate. Nobody makes it into the hall of fame by having the largest contract...cough, Ryan Leaf, Rick Mirer...cough.

I did some back of the envelope calculations with Spectacular Bid and Kelso. I looked on Pedigree Query at their career totals: The Bid 30 26-2-1, Kelso 63 39-12-2.

• I only factored the wins of races shown on their respective pages and that were still around today and not even all of those. For Kelso I used 17 wins out of his career 39. The Bid 11 out of 26.
• I used current purse structure in awarding money.
• I didn't really put much effort into this.

According to my rudimentary study Kelso would come out with $8.34 million dollars and Bid with $4.62 million. This is with less than half of only their wins, used.

How hard would it be to come up with a base year, say 1990, and calculate an adjusted purse index?

Maybe then, if they announce that Pyro has retired having earned in excess of $1.4 million dollars, it really won't mean that much.