Is Constitution Sitting on Another Upgrade? Or Is Honor Code Pegged Too High?
Or Both? And Will Constitution Wind Up a Better Sire than American Pharoah?
Currently in the Sim rating system in the sire search function, Constitution sits 35th on the list (Kentucky based, excluding (probably accurately) deceased/retired sires) and Honor Code clocks in 13th, just between Street Sense and Quality Road. A look at the real life results of these sires might lead one to believe that the expected results should be the opposite of what has happened in the Sim, and signs point to a continued improvement for Constitution in the land of actual flesh and blood horses.
Currently in the Sim rating system in the sire search function, Constitution sits 35th on the list (Kentucky based, excluding (probably accurately) deceased/retired sires) and Honor Code clocks in 13th, just between Street Sense and Quality Road. A look at the real life results of these sires might lead one to believe that the expected results should be the opposite of what has happened in the Sim, and signs point to a continued improvement for Constitution in the land of actual flesh and blood horses.
Currently, Honor Code has 146 winners from 282 starters while Constitution has notched 202 winners from 272 starters. As far as black-type winners go, Honor Code has 11 (five graded) and Constitution has 29 (15 graded). The latter helping to explain a $13.5 million gap in cumulative lifetime earnings between the pair, with Constitution nearly doubling Honor Code in short order.
The Sim is another matter. Honor Code has an 81% winner’s rate (from 878 runners), with 9.2% of his foals winning a stakes race and 2.9% passing the graded stakes test. Constitution, meanwhile, hold on let me scroll down the page that’s ranked in descending order, scrolling, scrolling, has a similar 80% strike rate from 833 runners, but just a 6.1% stakes winner percentage and 1.4% graded stakes winners.
Now Constitution did get an upgrade for 2020 and his percentages all popped for that crop year, 11.9% stakes winners from that crop, 3.3% graded, which seems nice, but is only in line with what Honor Code has achieved in 2019 and 2020 (12%/5.3% and 10%/3.6%).
Also these stallions’ stud fees have not remained static through the years, nor since Constitution’s Sim upgrade in 2020. Honor Code was down to $30k in 2020 and was dropped to $20k the following year where he remains. Constitution, was cut to $15k in 2019, was then raised to $40k in 2020 before a big jump to $85k in 2021. Recently WinStar announced a further increase for the 2023 breeding season with the Florida Derby (gr. 1) and Donn Handicap (gr. I) winner going to $110k, the highest at the farm.
Again, all this is not happening in a bubble and the past does not mean Constitution will sustain or increase his advantage over Honor Code and his fellow fourth-crop sires. However, there are signs pointing to just that happening.
I refer you back to the upward arc of Constitution’s stud fees as exhibit A. Exhibit B: Constitution has a Comparable Index (CI) of 1.59 and Honor Code 2.06, but Constitution has been able to improve his mares as judged by his average earnings index (AEI) of 2.00 (Honor Code’s AEI sits at just 1.19. Pharoah’s CI is a high 2.55 but his AEI is just 1.42. Exhibit C: Better mares are being sent Constitution’s way.
“He didn’t start out with the highest quality mares and he threw some average-looking horses, but they were athletes that ran great. Now he is getting better mares and his physicals are getting better and better,” Frank Taylor of Taylor Made Sales Agency recently told The Blood-Horse. “We’ve seen this happen with a number of top sires like Saint Ballado, Distorted Humor, and with Into Mischief, who started out with no opportunity and became a top sire. Constitution fits that mold and now his pipeline is fully loaded with great horses.”
Exhibit D: WinStar’s Elliot Walden thinks so (of course he might have a bit of a bias for his stallion), telling The Blood-Horse: “The elite stallions keep the quality and level of performance up no matter what. It takes that second cycle after they’ve proven themselves and you see the mare quality climb to a point where they are attractive in the sales ring as well. That is what we are seeing with Constitution now. This is hopefully a break out year for him that will just continue and continue.”
Though I say they should upgrade Constitution, well, you know, all speculations on how the Sim rates sires need to be accompanied by the reminder that the Sim may have these stallions ranked just right but users may be using them all wrong, or not enough, or too much, or that element of luck just hasn’t hit right. But if I’m to use one of these real life fourth-crop sires I’d be leaning to Constitution (though I like Liam’s Map too). If the upgrade doesn’t come for 2023, I’d still feel happy feeling fairly certain the sire would be upgraded again before the foals I breed next year retire to the breeding shed, and their performance there should be enhanced.
Love this article, lots of great research here.
Great article. I do wonder, Honor Code had some difficulty for sure with at least one and I think two very small crops. I wonder if his fee dropped not due to lack of quality but because they need to re-interest breeders after a likely fertility issue. It can’t be easy to get people to send mares again when they previously may have had to scramble late to find a spot in another quality sire’s book or leave a nice mare open. If they got the issues (whatever they were) sorted, I would expect Honor Code’s mare quality to increase and bring him inline with what we are seeing in sim (his early foals seemed very nice but who knows).
Honor Code raced as a ridgling in his juvenile year then had his undescended testicle removed.
I don’t know how exactly is this rank calculated but almost sure it reflects the sim results and not the Mike’s “inner” rating. We just know that Mike’s rating is based on the sire’s real life results, stud fee and may be other things. We should also remember that there is some kind of inertia. Honor Code started with higher stud fee than Constitution and very probably with much bigger interest of sim players and I think it still affects the sim rank till today. It’s very probable that Constitution got the upgrade(s) during the time as well as Honor Code got the downgrade already and may be both will be changed again in the year’s end. But may be we won’t see it in Mike’s post because he shows just small fragments of his rating changes.
All I can say is I am 100% sure that Constitution is already rated much higher than Honor Code. My advice would be don’t pay much attention to sim rank and pay it to real stats and stud fees because Mike for sure does.
I don’t pay much attention to the Sim ranks either, but the stakes race win percentages have better value in guessing how sires are ranked and that’s showing the possibility that the two are about evenly matched. Yes on the inertia factor, but the pure number of runners per crop year in the Sim as a gauge of players’ inherent interest in the two sires implies that since the 2020 upgrade Constitution is held in higher regard especially as, at least from my experience, Honor Code has been available at a lower price point at most times. Further, Constitution has had two big stud fee since his 2020 boost in the Sim (tripling in that time) and his get are selling quite well in the sales and performing on the track.
Hard to say. It’s not only the sire who affects how good the offsprings are. If Honor Code gets good sim mares (the biggest deal in sim I believe) it can explain why he is not losing that much since 2020. And there is always a certain portion of (bad) luck. But of course I don’t know exactly how they compare to each other in sim now. However 2021 year looks quite comparable to real 2021. Let’s see how it goes in future years.
Corrections and Updates: Constitution did get a second upgrade in 2021 (it was the one year I didn’t have written down previously and I couldn’t find the eHorseracing blog that has these things in it on the site when I wrote the article). That still leaves the new stud fee rise and his excellent auction performance and his just about equal performance to American Pharoah to account for. In the 2021 update, Mike wrote, “Nyquist and Constitution – similar paths from well above average to the cusp of stardom.” And if you look at their performances Constitution is clearly doing much better in real life than Nyquist too. Here’s a link to compare the three:
https://www.bloodhorse.com/stallion-register/Compare/CompareStallions?horseIdOne=169027&horseIdTwo=169543&horseIdThree=168986
Also, since I wrote the article earlier this week, Ashford Stud announced Pharoah’s stud fee is dropping to $60,000, nearly half of Constitution’s new fee. When Pharoah entered the Sim sire ranks Mike noted, “Hard not to start him right up with my first year Frankel rating. I can’t start him rated up with the game’s elite — he has to earn that.” He was then upgraded the next year to just below “uber-elite” status.
I don’t appreciate the hit piece on Honor Code nor the lobbying for one horse against another. For one thing this is a Simulation based on decades of bloodlines. The stallions in Honor Code, among the best you can find, have established value in his genes. These have been built up for, again, decades in the SIM and are driving his success which may end being greater in the SIM than in real life, but so what? The SIM is an approximation of the real world and will have different results because the foundational stallions in a horses pedigree performed different in the SIM than in real life. You can see this play out in a more prominent example with Snitzel who is borderline horrible in the SIM vs real life. Finally, you are parsing your argument by isolating it to two stallions which is simply your personal preference in that you want Constituion to get an upgrade and apparently, a downgrade for Honor Code (and American Pharoah). This is a nonsensical use of data and completely biased. I could just as easily say, Munnings should be the highest rated dirt stallion in the SIM. Or Twirling Candy. Or Not This Time. The problem with your call for nerfs to (dirt) stallions is they are never balanced by elevations. Many, many dirt stallions underperform in the SIM vs what they do in real life. Hard Spun, Maclean’s Music, Violence, Cairo Prince all perform better in real life and despite the (minor) upgrades some of them may have gotten in the SIM they still throw a ton of bad horses and the chasm between them and say Tapit in the SIM is far, far greater than it is in real life. All in all, a bad use of data by the author, in my opinion. Lobbying for horse upgrades is cringe-worthy and fraught with personal bias and unfairness to the game population as a whole.
Mike has made it clear sim sire ratings are based on real life results. We can therefore in theroy gauge a relative sires worth. Though we have to factor in the sim cost to understand if a sire is really good value.
You should ignore past results if you believe in yourself and your opinions right or wrong. Think of yourself as a wolf the others sheep. It might take you three weeks to get a meal but in the end you gain a bigger prize.
As for the sires listed we shoudl look at cumlitatve results these do not take into effect factors which can shape sim success, like maturity, surface and distance preferences. Two percentages are for Black type horses/graded stakes winners per named foals.
Constitution 18.05/4.3
American Pharoah 10.17/2.75
Honor Code 7.14/1.23
Karakonte 8.74/2.73
Competitive Edge 8.72/1.54
Secret Circle 10.23/2.27
It would be fair to assume Constituion will be the highest rated sire from the upgrade notes this is probably already true. Mike does not put up non major downgrades and has been on record to say these happen at a slower rate. Therefore beleive american Pharoah is getting knocked down each year. His result are not that bad really Mike just wrongly overhyped him. He should have had a similar rating to karakonte on success markers for sires and results are similar. Honor Code is easily the worst stallion here.
Secret Circle I know nothing about but his results and sim price make him the best option to breed especially if purchasing now for 2023. 70bps for 2.27% chance is way better than 1,000bps for 4.3%.
Interesting article bobthehat. In my opinion though, if you’re looking to compare sires, this isn’t the correct comparison between Constitution and Honor Code. From your article (I think things have changed slightly over the past week), Constitution is the 35th ranked KY sire, while Honor Code is 13th. But that’s based on ALL-TIME sire results. Which means that these rankings include the early years of those two at stud, when it wasn’t known exactly who would be the better sire (or how good Constitution was), and when Constitution’s stud fee was $25,000 compared to Honor Code’s $40,000. Any sim horse bred prior to their first real foals racing (so any sim horse bred in 2016-2019 for these two sires) would, for the most part, reflect the initial guesses of how these sires would perform.
I think the better comparison would be the sire stats for 2020-2022 (meaning 2yos-4yos of these two sires). And here are some of the numbers on those (excluding hot races):
Constitution – 477 runners, 344 winners (72.1%), 30 stakes winners (6.3% of total runners, 24.6% of stakes runners), 8 graded stakes winners, 18.2% First Time Out winners, 47.3% 2yo winners, an average of 3.82 races prior to his progeny breaking their maiden, and an Average Winning Distance of 7.74.
Honor Code – 369 runners, 225 winners (61%), 16 stakes winners (4.3% of total runners, 21.1% of stakes runners), 6 graded stakes winners, 13.3% First Time Out winners, 34.5% 2yo winners, an average of 4.62 races prior to his progeny breaking their maiden, and an Average Winning Distance of 7.82.
Based on those figures, it seems pretty clear to me that as of this moment, Constitution is a better sim sire than Honor Code. That’s not to say that either sire is properly rated currently or that changes shouldn’t be made. It’s just that I don’t think looking at the all-time numbers paints an accurate picture of a newer sire’s current sim standing.
~Shag