French Open Picks: Follow Up

A few weeks ago, I made my picks for the 2012 French Open champions (Part 1 and Part 2).  Using my statistical wizardry (ok, more like logic and process of elimination), I correctly picked Rafael Nadal as the men's champion and Maria Sharapova as the women's.

Compare this to the ESPN expert picks: 11 of the 12 correctly picked Nadal, but only Chris Evert picked Sharapova.  Maybe if I keep this up for Wimbledon and the US Open, ESPN will start knocking on my door.

Plot of the Week 6

Yesterday, Union Rags won the 2012 Belmont Stakes.  For this week's edition of Plot of the Week, I wanted to look at the winning times at the Belmont Stakes (since 1926, when the current distance of 1.5 miles was established).

 The red circles designate that the betting favorite won, and the blue +'s show the horses that won the Triple Crown in that year.  The green and magenta lines show the average and median winning time, respectively.

Some interesting takeaways:

1. The record time is 144 seconds, run by Secretariat in 1973.  No horse has gotten within 2 seconds of this winning time.
2. There is an overall downward trend in time, although winning times seem to have leveled off in the past few decades.
3. There were 2 horses that won the Triple Crown but were not favorites at the Belmont Stakes.
4. The past 3 Belmont Stakes winners have had slower than average times.
5. The betting favorite has not fared well lately - only 7 of the favorites have won since 1980.

Now let's look at the betting odds of the winning horse.

1. Obviously, all of the favorites that won had low betting odds. 
2. The 2 horses that won the Triple Crown but were not the betting favorites still had very low betting odds.
3. There have been many more long-shot winners (> 20:1 odds) in the past 15 years (5) than all previous years (3).  I don't know if this has to do with the format of the race (more horses allowed to run) or there is greater disparity in horse racing today.

Did I miss anything?

Check My Stats

Anthony Davis rocking a "Check My Stats" t-shirt.  Image borrowed from following link.

Robinson not buying Davis hype

1. Where can I get this shirt?

2. I'm thinking that if Robinson wears a shirt reading "Numbers Don't Lie", another NBA prospect should wear one saying "Torture Numbers and They'll Confess to Anything", a quote from Gregg Easterbrook.  Maybe someone who had an underwhelming college season -  Harrison Barnes?