The P.B.P. Voices of Baseball is a podcast about the art and craft of play by play and we're in the middle of an amazing season.

Catch up on episodes with Joe Buck, Joe Davis, Pat Hughes, and more, and learn along with me Matt Spiegel how the job is done.

It's not just home run Bryce Harper and the Philly's League to really do it justice.

You got to widen the lens. What does this home run mean?

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So let me start with this before we go Derby's specific and on the episode, I just want to do a minute on how you even begin the process of handicapping.

How do you learn? I'll explain a little bit about how I approach handicapping. Doesn't mean it's right.

I'm just giving you what I do. I want to break down the Derby and show you the way to approach a massive 20 horse field.

We'll do a little all stakes preview. I'm going to give you a late double that I'm going to play and then the Derby and how I'll

bet it how I approach it. So without further ado, let's get into it. So for people just starting and I have friends who have gone to the big races with me, they enjoy the track, they enjoy the trips, but they don't necessarily handicapped.

They don't study. They just enjoy the event and the party and you get the question, well, how do I even begin this?

So the way I've described it is a past performance. So you go to daily racing form. That's where I would go. And you use a classic past performance.

They have a formulator one, which is more computer heavy. You can punch in parameters. It will spit out different numbers. Just work with me. There are multiple companies who provide past performances.

View it like when you're looking at a football team and you pull up the schedule, who they've played the scores, the stats, where there are offense ranks, where they're defense ranks, etc. That's past performances.

You can use time form, you could use brisnet, you could use if you're really into the game, like I am, you could use something called the thorough graphs, the ragasins, guys, you can go to a different dimension with this for our purposes.

You want to start, you're going to get yourself a daily racing form past performance. You go to drf.com. So the way I do it.

Again, if you like a craps table, stay away from the middle of the board. The middle of the board is a lot of sexy and sultry stuff. But for learning purposes, you stay away from it. Well, it's the same with the horse racing program.

So the data you're going to be presented with is so copious. It's so immense that you want to simplify this and go, OK, what is a baseline for how I'm going to do this.

The best way is this. You can't even begin handicapping until or unless you look at what type of fucking race are we even running here.

I'm serious about this. It'd be like betting a football game and you don't pay attention to where the games being played. It's crazy.

There's some of you want to be smart as you go, but there's no home field advantage in racing bullshit horse for the course. Certain horses love racing on certain surfaces at certain tracks.

And that data is in the past performances. So one of the things I like to do is this. I'm a big believer in.

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