The stallions to be standing for the first time in New York this year aren’t the only thing new about the 2009 New York Stallion Register. Not by a long shot. This year’s Register, with its new title, new look and new features on every page, has a great deal of new style and substance, which every member of the NYTB, indeed every prospective breeder of a New York-bred should appreciate.
The production of this year’s New York Stallion Register was a joint venture between NYTB and the Thoroughbred Times Co. Inc. As Don Clippinger, the editorial director of the project, writes in his introduction, he and his team contributed their
“expertise in producing stallion directories, and have accented the publication with features that are distinctly and uniquely New York.”
The result is without question a success: a beautifully-produced, colorful Stallion Register, chock-full of useful information and peppered with extras that are informative or just plain fun.
The stallion pages themselves are naturally the heart of the matter. Even a quick flip through the Register reveals its most visible upgrade: the addition of pages for color conformation or action photos of the subject stallions. Many stallion owners leapt at this opportunity: well over half the stallions featured in the register have a photo page. It takes a little bit of a closer look to see the upgrade on the statistics page, but it is certainly there also. Many features familiar from the Thoroughbred Times Stallion Directory page-layout are now here to enlighten New York readers, making each page more informative and substantial than in years past: the first three generations of the five-cross pedigree, for example, now have sire and racing stats included, along with Sire Index (SI) and Dosage Index (DI) where applicable. For the subject stallion himself, there are: SI, Comparable Sire Index (ComSI), Dosage Profile, and Ragozin Numbers; there are also average Rags for the progeny. One particularly nice feature is that the information on a stallion’s Sire Line is cross-indexed in most cases with an “Active Sons Index” at the front of the Register (a list of subject stallion Sires with their most important active siring sons). This clears up room on the stallion’s page for Sales Analysis and more detail on the female family line.
Before the stallion pages significant material appears that is either informative or helps to make the Register easier to use. Useful indices help the reader dig into stallion family connections (Pedigree Index, Sire of Sires Index, Active Sons Index), get help in planning matings (Nicking Index, Inbreeding Index) or just get a good summary of information (Farm Index, Alphabetical Index [all Stallions standing in NY whether appearing in the Register or not], Stud Fee Index and New Sires Index). Some extra icing on the cake, of course, those NY sires listed in both the Thoroughbred Times Stallion Directory and our New York Stallion Register are available online, readers can get constantly up-dated information on progeny race results and additional statistics. Some stallions also have video presentations on the site.
Other prefatory material provides a nice mix of the beloved and familiar with the completely new. The Register still features pictures of the NY-bred champions’ connections taken at the annual awards banquet. There is also coverage of Showcase Day (but with action shots, race conditions and result summaries rather than winner’s circle photos with only the race name and winning owner, breeder and trainer). The list of leading sires in NY is expanded to 55 (from 20) and new to the Register is a list of NY leading sires 1990-2008.
Finally are those more unique NY “accents”: John Sparkman’s historical essay on New York Sires (from the 17th century to the present), coverage of some of the outstanding NY success stories on the racetrack from 2008 and, interspersed among the stallion pages, a handful of delightful one-pagers (“Notable New Yorkers”) featuring photos and brief biographies of some NY-bred luminaries. It would be a shame to conclude without noting that the talented Barbara Livingstone has “done it again,” having shot the dynamic image of New York’s leading sire in 2008, Freud, that appears on the cover of the Register.
The 2009 incarnation of the Stallion Register certainly sets a high standard for the future, but the resources and care given by the NYTB’s Thoroughbred Times collaborators on this year’s project give promise that this standard will be met in years to come.
