A MAN OF SAVES AND WINS : Cincinnati Reds Reliever Rob Murphy Is Also Pitching His Computer System to Pick Race Horses

Compatibility between a manager and a relief pitcher never hurts, but in the case of Pete Rose and Rob Murphy of the Cincinnati Reds, there’s an extra dimension.

What counts most for Rose, of course, is that Murphy continues to throw shutout innings for the Reds in relief.

If along the way, though, Murphy can occasionally throw a fast race horse Rose’s way, that only enhances their relationship.

Since the parimutuel handle has never been known to suffer when Rose visits a race track, he needs all the fast horses he can find.

During spring training in Tampa, Fla., in March, Murphy fed Rose a horse named Bet Twice, who was fast enough to win the Fountain of Youth Stakes at Gulfstream Park near Miami.

“I hope you’ll remember that horse at cut time,” Murphy said to Rose in a hotel coffee shop the day after the race.

Rose might have bet on Bet Twice anyhow. As the result of a friendship with Cissie Levy, one of the owners of the horse and a minority shareholder in the Philadelphia Phillies, Rose was given a small interest in Bet Twice, one-fifth of one percent.

So in touting him on Bet Twice, and reminding him of it, Murphy was being facetious with Rose. After struggling for five years in the Reds’ farm system, 1981’s No. 1 draft choice had already made the parent club, the result of a 6-0 record and a 0.72 earned-run average after having been called up for the last 2 1/2 months of the 1986 season.

“The difference between spring training in ’86 and ’87 was like the difference between hell and heaven,” said Murphy, who through May 11 had a 1.40 ERA, having appeared in more than half of the Reds’ games.

The tip for Rose on Bet Twice was more than just a casual joke by Murphy, though. He got it came through the courtesy of M375 Thoroughbreds, a computer system that the tall left-hander has been refining ever since he correctly picked the first three finishers in the 1978 Kentucky Derby--Affirmed, Alydar and Believe It--for a senior class project at Christopher Columbus High School in Miami.

Murphy continued to mix pleasure with academe for 2 1/2 years at the University of Florida and the University of Kentucky, majoring in computer programming until the Reds signed him for $30,000. Now, after studying 5,000 thoroughbred sires and analyzing more than 26,000 horses sold at public auction over a nine-year period, he has launched M375 Thoroughbreds, which is named after the computer he uses.

The system is designed more to minimize the risk in buying horses than it is to give Rose and Murphy himself winners at the betting windows. “Specializing in computerized pedigree selection,” are the bywords of M375 Thoroughbreds, much to the relief of Bob Murphy, Rob’s father and, with his wife Evelyn, the operator of a small broodmare farm in Ocala, Fla.

“I’m glad Rob’s going in the direction of racing that’s not gambling oriented,” Bob Murphy said. “It’s all a business, but the general public may not be aware that there’s so much more to this game than just cashing a winning ticket.”

But for a misunderstanding between Rob Murphy and his bidding representative at a Hollywood Park sale of 2-year-olds last year, the pitcher would probably own Chart the Stars, a horse who went on to win the $181,700 San Felipe Handicap at Santa Anita, one of seven major prep races for this year’s Kentucky Derby.

Of the 700 horses catalogued for the Hollywood sale, Murphy’s computer liked only two. Murphy saw videotapes of Chart the Stars, who had already brought $20,000 as a yearling, so he established a credit line of $61,000 with the sales company, even though he was going to be busy with the Reds in Florida.

A group that included trainer Dick Mulhall eventually bought Chart the Stars for $39,000, which was actually $4,000 over its budget. Mulhall said later that a bid of $40,000 would have chased his people away, but Mark Harman, Murphy’s representative, dropped out before the $39,000 mark was reached.

“It’s difficult, bidding for someone who isn’t there, and trying to read their mind,” Harman said.

Murphy isn’t bitter about losing Chart the Stars. “Mark was the guy who sent me the videotapes of the horse,” he said. “I’ll be going back (to the same sale), and I think he and I understand each other better now.”

Thus far, Murphy’s nascent system--based largely on nine patterns that successful sires have established--is more known for the horses that got away than the ones it has landed. But the first horse he ever bought had the makings of a solid runner.

A son of Ack Ack, the 1971 horse of the year, his name was Artillerist and he was the only horse that the computer approved, out of a consignment of 233, at a Florida 2-year-old sale in 1984.

Murphy and a partner, Larry Hillis of Seattle, bought Artillerist for $30,000. After he had won his first two starts in fast times at Calder, the owners turned down a $300,000 offer for the colt.

Artillerist was nosed out in his first stakes race, then he won under allowance conditions before losing by a length to Creme Fraiche, who later won the Belmont Stakes. In the Tropical Park Derby, Artillerist finished second to Irish Sur and ahead of Creme Fraiche and Proud Truth, who went on to win the Florida Derby and the $3-million Breeders’ Cup Classic at the end of the year.

What happened next, however, was beyond the prediction capabilities of any computer. Artillerist, with $78,000 in earnings, suffered a tendon injury and came back from a stakes race lame. An attempt to return him to the races resulted in disaster--he became a bleeder and died of an internal hemorrhage last year.

Murphy and Hillis later bought a Washington-bred yearling--the only horse the computer liked out of 209--for $16,000 and he won a Florida stake and earned $92,000. One they missed, even though the computer told them to buy, was Icy Groom, who after bringing $115,000 in Florida, was second in the 1986 Santa Anita Derby and fourth in the Blue Grass and has earned more than $200,000.

“There were only two horses in that sale that the system liked,” Murphy says wistfully. “But when we saw Icy Groom, he was kind of short and compact and we didn’t go for him off of that.”

Racing runs deep in Rob Murphy’s family. His great-grandfather, Frank Ashley, was a widely traveled track announcer who called seven Kentucky Derbys in the era before Clem McCarthy. Murphy’s father’s stepfather, F. A. (Freddie) Smith, rode Bimelech, winner of the Preakness and the Belmont Stakes and the country’s top 3-year-old in 1940.

Smith, who died in the late 1940s of injuries suffered in a spill leaving the starting gate at Hollywood Park, missed the Triple Crown sweep with Bimelech because they were second to Gallahadion in the Kentucky Derby.

“He misjudged the finish line and stood up in the irons,” Bob Murphy says of his stepfather. “Bill Shoemaker did the same thing with Gallant Man in the ’57 Derby, but Freddie originated the act, long before Shoemaker.”

Florida tracks have long been strict about admitting anyone under 18, but Bob and Evelyn Smith sneaked their son Rob into Hialeah and Calder when he was still a teen-ager. They dressed him in a coat and tie so that they could get into the turf club when he was 16, and he remembers hitting his first daily double that day.

While Rob was attending the University of Florida, his father sent, by delivery service, the Daily Racing Form from Miami to Gainesville--in the interest of equine research, naturally.

“My mother has played the devil’s advocate in all this,” Rob Murphy says of M375 Thoroughbreds. “Whenever I come up with a reason to like a sire or a horse, she says to me, ‘Why?’ She keeps reminding me that there must be a reason--more than one reason--to prefer a horse.”

Evelyn Murphy, like her husband, has a background that entitles her to challenge her son. Besides Frank Ashley, Evelyn’s mother was a chart taker for the Racing Form at Arlington Park, Oaklawn Park and other tracks in the Midwest.

This year, the Cincinnati Enquirer asked Rob Murphy to handicap the Kentucky Derby.

His M375 picked the popular favorite, Demons Begone, who bled early in the race and didn’t finish. Murphy tabbed Leo Castelli next and he finished seventh.

In third place, however, Murphy chose Alysheba, who won the Derby and paid $18.80. Score at least a partial victory for the computer. The machine and the relief pitcher had a better idea than most of the fans at Churchill Downs.