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    A Few Memories that made Horse Racing Special in 2013

    The year is almost over and so now is as good of a time as any to look back on the horses and moments that made 2013 special. Overall, there have been better years for our sport. From a pure racing perspective, 2013 will not go down in the history books as one of the better years, but from a human-interest perspective this was a year to remember.

    The year started out with arguably the best west coast jockey of all time-Gary Stevens launching a comeback. I am not the type of guy who is going to lie to you. I thought that he would finish fourth or fifth in the jockey standings at Santa Anita and capture a few grade twos and threes along the way. Well, Stevens served me some crow when he piloted Oxbow to victory in the Preakness for D. Wayne Lukas, the man who practically gave him every good three-year old he has ever ridden. What must’ve made the victory especially sweet for Stevens is that he rode the speed horse to near perfection- a lost art in today’s racing. I really believe that there is no jockey in the country who could’ve ridden Oxbow as well as Stevens did except for Rafael Bejarano. Of course, Stevens wasn’t done as yet. He rode incredibly well throughout the year and earned himself a ride aboard industry darling Kathleen Ritvo’s Mucho Macho Man. Once again, Stevens made the difference and beat the late-charging Will Take Charge by a nose, and showed why horse racing is such a unique sport. A man retires at the top of his game, leaves the sport, and comes back to take the sport’s biggest prize. The types of things that people wished would happen in basketball or football actually do happen in racing.

    Speaking of Oxbow and Mucho Macho Man, Kathleen Ritvo coming out of nowhere and D. Wayne Lukas making a huge comeback are two other big stories this year. Female trainers have always had a tough time in the racing industry because, let’s face it, this is an “old  boys” sport. Of course, Ritvo loves horses so she has always done the best with what little she has had and has been content to do so. Mucho Macho Man has put her on the map since his gutsy third in the Kentucky Derby, and has stayed in top form thanks to the steady guidance of Mrs. Ritvo. In a day and age when so many trainers push there horses to the brink, Mrs. Ritvo thinks primarily of keeping a horse happy and healthy.  She was finally rewarded for her tremendous display of integrity when Mucho Macho Man helped her become the first woman to ever capture the Breeder’s Cup Classic.

    I have long wondered why the golden boys of the 90’s D. Wayne Lukas and Nick Zito don’t get the best horses anymore. With all due respect to Todd Pletcher, he couldn’t sniff Mr. Lukas’s or Mr. Zito’s jockstrap so to speak. So, needless to say I was pretty happy when I saw Lukas capture his record 14th Triple Crown race. Maybe this isn’t a sign of anything or maybe it’s a sign that owners are starting to realize that the masters will always be better than the pupils-only time will tell.

    I don’t think it’s ever too early to start talking Kentucky Derby. There is nothing that gets me more excited than seeing 20 horses duke it out for a shot at racing supremacy, and with the Kentucky Derby future book, finding that derby horse before anyone else does can really pay dividends.  There are some horses here that I think are really milers asquerading as derby horses and then there are some true contenders-let’s sort them out shall we?

    The Cash Call Futurity really shook the derby picture up. Shared Belief tracked the pace so professionally and then ignored that horse who made an early move. When you see
    a horse tune out his competitors and just wait for his cue to run you’ve got a smart horse; smart horses are dangerous come derby time so I do like Shared Belief a lot. Now for the
    negatives, he looks like he would rather stay at a mile and a sixteenth. His pedigree isn’t bad, but it doesn’t scream distance. You might say he didn’t look tired after the race but none of the horses really challenged him. The race must’ve felt like a seven furlong race rather than a mile and a sixteenth. I’m not saying that I’m throwing out Shared
    Belief    , I’m just saying that there are more intriguing prospects out there.

    Honor Code is not the type of horse that’s easy to fall in love with. His times are never that dazzling and he always runs in New York. The thing that makes Honor Code intriguing to me is that I believe that in the Champagne Havana was fully cranked up and Honor Code still gave him the race of his life- there’s something to be said for that. People also decided to deride the horse over the bizarre running style of the Remsen,
    but don’t they realize that they should praise him? He is a closer who had absolutely no pace at all to run at and he got the job done anyway. I really believe if that race were run with a halfway decent pace Honor Code wins by three. You also have to accept the fact that trainers count and Shug knows how to get a horse ready for the run for the
    roses.

    Now, you can never predict the conditions in Louisville on Derby day so the next part of the puzzle becomes who like mud? The answer to that is several horses do, but it seems like Strong Mandate wants to bathe in mud and eat mudpies and watch the Matthew McConaughey movie Mud-you get the idea. His win in the Hopeful was breathtaking and hopefully a sign of things to come. I like seeing Deputy Minister as the broodmare sire and Tiznow as the sire because I think this will give him some tactical speed. The devil is in the details, so take a look at Strong Mandate’s Breeder’s Cup Juvenile. He committed every single cardinal sin in the book and still came in third! That to me is the sign of a horse that is a bit of a freak.  There is so much upside on this horse that Lukas must be licking his chops right now. He has a monster in the barn and he knows it.

    The next horse we need to talk about has what I call a case of the Animal Kingdom. We all know that Animal Kingdom was basically a turf horse who could transfer about 90% of his form to dirt and so he wound up winning the Kentucky Derby. Well, I’m willing to believe that Bobby’s Kitten can transfer 90% of his turf form to dirt; the question becomes whether or not Bobby’s Kitten at 90% is as good as or better than the rest of these two-year olds, and I just don’t know, but boy am I intrigued.

    There are a bunch of other Juveniles who are worth mentioning like Havana and Giovanni Boldini. I think Havana still has a lot to prove, but there’s a chance that he progresses and being by Dunkirk I’m not too worried about his distance limitations. Giovanni Boldini is the horse that frustrates me. He is owned by Derrick Smith and
    Michael Tabor which means he probably isn’t headed to Kentucky unless it is as
    a stud. I wish his connections would reconsider because if this horse is anywhere near as good on dirt as he is on turf then we have ourselves the Kentucky Derby winner. Like I said before, there isn’t much point talking about him because he probably isn’t competing in the derby, but if you asked me who I think the most talented two year old is right now, I would easily say it’s this scrappy son of War Front.

    Handicapping with Jockeys vs. Trainers

    Anyone who knows me knows that I love talking jockeys. I’ve waxed philosophical about the brilliance of Bailey, the rail skimming trips of Borel and how underrated Johnny V and Mike Smith are on the turf. The negative to all of this is that it gives readers the false
    impression that I handicap jockeys more than trainers when the truth is quite the opposite.

    If there are any football fans out there, I would equate the jockey to the best cornerback, the trainer to the quarterback and the horse to everyone else. This means that the horse is the most important, but the trainer is a close second and the jockey is just the icing on the cake.  In fact, I believe that horses that get a true trainer upgrade off a claim are some of the best horses to play next time out.

    Of course, all of this is just a bunch of talk without some data to back it up right? So, I decided that the best way to illustrate this point would be with some stats. I took all jockeys and trainers with a rating of 80 or higher and called them “good”. I took all
    jockeys and trainers with a rating below 80 and called them “bad”. I then compiled the results from several of the tracks that I play over a six-month span and came up with the following:

    Jockey Trainer combo Win%
    Good Jockey/Good Trainer 28.7
    Good Jockey/Bad Trainer 20.5%
    Good Trainer/Bad Jockey 22.4%
    Bad Trainer/Bad Jockey 11.7%

    Now, I didn’t segment the data based on turf, dirt, sprint and route and I know these things will affect the results. However, the point that I am trying to make is that you should always be more of a student of trainers than jockeys. You should use the trainer’s
    data on Thoroughbred Analytics to glean insights on which surfaces, distances and tracks each trainer prefers. I am a big proponent of beefing up our trainer analytics because I believe that much in handicapping trainers.

    When preparing a horse for a race, there is so much to do and so much to get wrong or right. When riding a horse, you basically need to know how to save ground and what position to put your horse in. Are there jockeys who struggle to figure this all out? absolutely, but the percentage in most jockey colonies is probably around 5%. The amount of trainers who don’t know how to get a horse ready to run is probably around 20%.
    A good experiment is to look at horses that have gone through jockey changes and horses that have gone through trainer changes and observe which horses changed more. I have seen horses get claimed by a top trainer and move up two or three classes. I have never seen horses move up two or three classes off of a jockey change-even if it was to Jerry Bailey!

    So, does all of this mean that you stop handicapping jockeys? No. It just means that you if you spend two hours in the jockey analytics section of the site, you should have spent 4 hours in the trainer section. You should look at how trainers do off of three-month layoffs,
    sixth month layoffs, twelve-month layoffs. You should see what their preferred distances are, their record when moving from a Lasix state to a non-Lasix state.  I remember when Drosselmeyer was entered in the Belmont Stakes. I knew that Bill Mott had a huge respect for the classics and didn’t enter a horse just for the hell of it. I didn’t like Drosselmeyer, but decided to put him in a few exactas in the hopes that he would come running late and pick up a paycheck. Of course, he wound up winning which leads to my biggest reason to study trainers- they know their horses. Jockeys may be notoriously bad handicappers, but trainers are impeccably good handicappers. If you see a trainer showing confidence, give the horse a second look.

    In the next few weeks, I will talk about some more angles and try to point out examples of how studying trainers has paid off in the past. If you have any comments or care to disagree that handicapping trainers is worth the effort, by all means send a comment through TA Support. Last week we received a great comment about Boom Towner and how Diane Nelson may be underrated if anything.

    Reminiscing about Boom Towner

    The thing that I love most about Boom Towner is that if you’re a New York racing
    fan you know him, if you’re from anywhere else you probably think his story is made up. He started his career at Rockingham Racetrack, the type of track where jockeys and trainers drive used pickups to get to work and a losing streak means having to decide between putting gas in your truck or food on your table. He quickly proved that he was too fast for the local horses and was on his way to Aqueduct to race on the NYRA circuit.

    My grandmother, who used to take me to the track, always gave me one piece of
    advice “do not bet on anything Diane Nelson rides, she has stonehands!” I had no idea what my grandmother was talking about, but I tried my best to follow her advice. I don’t remember much, but I do remember seeing Boom Towner make his Aqueduct debut and passing up on him because Nelson was riding. As Boom Towner quickly mowed the field down, I realized that I had made a mistake and that maybe my grandmother wasn’t right about everything.  Of course, since I was seven, I still needed her to place the actual bets for me, so I would have to wait to cash in on this mystery horse from Rockingham.  Two more races went by and nothing changed, Boom Towner won without me cashing in. My
    grandmother could see that I was upset and not even delicious Aqueduct racetrack pizza could make me happy- I was missing out.

    I believe he wound up running a few weeks later and I was determined to place a win bet on him. By this time he wasn’t a secret and his odds were much lower. I was  disappointed that I hadn’t got on the bandwagon sooner, but rules were rules and betting Diane Nelson was against the rules. I finally got to put a win bet on him but he had already won three times in a row, could he make it four? I don’t remember the details of the race, but I remember seeing him cross the wire first with Diane Nelson sitting in the irons like a statue and old men in the stands applauding.

    If you ask me details about any of the major stakes races or the horses who won that year, I wouldn’t be able to tell you, but I remember Boom Towner pricking his ears back and running his foes down. With all of the medications, poor diets and poor bloodlines horses don’t start as much as they used to and that worries me. The racing industry needs kids to fall in love with the sport, and kids don’t fall in love with the Bernardinis of the world; they fall in love with the Boom Towners.

    The Nafzger Dilemma

    In 1990 a man named Carl Nafzger captured everyone’s heart when his little horse
    Unbridled stormed to the front of the pack to win the Kentucky Derby. He helped
    a little old lady get capture the holy grail of racing and cemented his place
    as a legend. Nafzger bucked the trend of big name trainers having overinflated
    barns-he kept things small. In his heyday, Carl Nafzger averaged approximately
    700 starts every 12 months. To put this in perspective, Steve Asmussen has had
    1,507 starts over the last twelve months.

    In a day and age where horses run only once every six weeks, each horse in a
    trainer’s barn is good for about 8.5 starts a year. If you keep eighty horses
    in your barn, you should make 700 starts per year.  Though it depends on the individual, most trainers can usually provide hands-on attention to about fifty horses, after
    that they must hire assistants to do the bulk of the monitoring and day-to-day decision-making.

    So, what’s the problem with this?

    The problem is that the head trainer has the requisite knowledge to keep the horses that he sees in peak condition, but only if he sees them face-to-face. If a horse seems
    slightly off, it is up to the assistant trainer to say something, but what
    assistant trainer has the gall to go up to a living legend and say “should we
    really be breezing this horse 6 furlongs today?” When you’re an assistant
    trainer and your paycheck depends on diplomacy, there is little incentive to
    exercise sound judgment. So, we get horses who breeze 6 furlongs when they
    should have just walked the shedrow. We get horses who don’t need a certain
    medication being prescribed it anyway. We have horses who are stabled on track
    when they’re demeanor suggests that they should be stabled in much more quaint
    surroundings. Basically, we automate one of the few jobs that can never be
    automated- the thoroughbred racehorse trainer.

    To illustrate this point, lets compare two great trainers with completely different approaches- Steve Asmussen and Chad Brown. From the period of November 16th to November 29th, Asmussen has started horses at seven different tracks. Over
    the same period of time, Chad Brown has started horses at two different tracks.
    Last weekend, Asmussen saddled 32 horses at 5 different tracks, but saddled is
    used loosely here, becauses unless Asmussen has developed the ability to
    teleport there is no way he could have saddled all of those horses himself,
    however it is very plausible that Brown saddled all but two of his horses that
    weekend since he raced only at Aqueduct save for the two horses he raced at
    Laurel.

    It is also important to note that though Steve Asmussen has a very good record
    keeping horses safe and sound, Chad Brown’s record is impeccable. According to
    the NY State governments report on injuries and fatalities, Brown has only had
    four breakdowns in the state of New York over the last four years while
    Asmussen has also had four. At first glance this seems okay until you realize
    that Brown has a much larger presence in the empire state than does Asmussen.
    Over the past two years, Brown has made 666 starts in the empire state compared
    to 413 for Asmussen. The numbers show that although Asmussen is doing a good
    job of keeping his horses sound, Chad Brown is doing a phenomenal job.

    Though I know most owners will not read this, for the few that will, I challenge you
    to ask a big name trainer like Asmussen or Pletcher when was the last time he
    saw one of his claiming horses breeze in person, then ask Chad Brown the same
    question; the answer will tell you all you need to know.

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