Re: Travers (894 Views)
Posted by:
mjellish (IP Logged)
Date: August 29, 2016 01:08PM
How the hell do you come up with calling me a red boarder when I said I didn't have the horse? I really didn't even share my pre-race opinion on the horse.
For the record here's what it was. As a lightly raced, highly regarded, well-bred Baffert runner that was shipping in - of course I looked hard at him. He looked a little slow though. But like Sek, I was willing to give him extra credit for his last effort because he broke slow and rallied into a slow early pace in a 3 horse field. I've posted many times on this board about how I view slow early race shapes and the effect they have on figures because a horse can't close his last 1/4 in 21 and change to make up for the slow early race shape. It's something called looking at how a figure is earned, and its often practiced by very good players who aren't dogmatic about the numbers. So based on all of that I knew Arrogate could be ready to run a new top. But to do that, after drawing the rail, he would probably have to break well which is something he hasn't done in 50% of his starts, then send and try to wire the toughest, largest field he'd ever faced at a new longer distance of 1 1/4 that he's never tried (he'd never even been a 1 1/8th), and he had to handle the ship from west coast to east. I didn't view that as likely. In fact, I figured he would be done at the 1/4 pole. So he was a toss for me.