arhidia wrote:

[i]FYI The RAGS guys made huge scores on the TRAVERS as Arrogate on the RAGS was 2ND fastest to throw out Exxagerator and had a very good pattern.[/i]

This claim is false. The reality is that on Ragozin, [b]AMERICAN FREEDOM, GOVERNOR MALIBU, EXAGGERATOR, DESTIN, GIFT BOX, CONNECT, and GUN RUNNER[/b] were all "faster" than ARROGATE.

While there is no doubt that Jon Hardoon crushed this race, what his followers did remains to be heard. I do know several very good Ragozin handicappers, including myself, who made no such "huge scores". Personally, I felt that given the data I was using, GUN RUNNER at 10-1 was better value than ARROGATE at 12-1. Looking back, I was dead wrong.

Where did I err? In retrospect, several areas, including: ignoring the horrible post position on GUN RUNNER and giving him too much credit for his previous forward moving performances in 11, 10, and 20 horse fields.

But my greater mistake was ignoring my awareness of the continuously emerging changes in the winning Derby profile. No strong 2yo. foundation? So what? It's become clear that it's now only a matter of "when", not "if" the so-called "APOLLO" curse will be broken. Lightly raced? It's become an advantage, not a disadvantage, in my mind. No final prep at 9 furlongs or more? Who cares.

Just as the small new top on Ragozin indicated a [b]big[/b] step forward was highly possible, so did the tripled-up tops on Thoro-Graph. If you love a paired-up top on a lightly raced 3yo, don't you have to adore the third one in terms of the horse's future? If the pair makes him highly explosive, doesn't the tripled-up top make it even more likely the big jump is coming soon? We're not talking about an older horse who has put forth three efforts in a row and is likely to regress, but a developing, extremely talented, lightly raced young 3yo.

I remember when Baffert was interviewed years ago and someone asked him, what about "seasoning"? His reply was seasoning is for food, not horses. So, how talented is this horse? Even though I'm a confirmed final speed figure guy who tends to ignore pace (maybe too much), I've made it no secret I like Trakus. Break down ARROGATE's fractions in 2 of his 3 last routes prior to the Travers, and you'll see that he ran each quarter-mile as fast or faster than the next. Fast horses aren't supposed to be able to do that. Even very good dirt horses are supposed to start out faster, and slow down as the race goes on. Only the great ones (on the dirt) seem to be capable of running faster and faster as the race goes on. So those two past performances, from an incremental internal speed analysis, were pretty darn good predictors of the incredible ability ARROGATE possessed to carry his speed a distance in that fashion. I ignored that. Nobody's fault but mine, certainly not a figure-maker. Only his opening quarter was faster than his closing quarter mile on Saturday.

So don't blame missing a score on "Jerry's numbers were wrong". Yesterday's result does nothing to indicate that was the case. Blame it on the misguided expectation, when handicapping, that the fastest horses in the past are going to be the fastest horses in the future. And "arahia", if you are going to insist on posting a moronic taunt like you did, at least try to get your facts somewhere within the bounds of reality.

Jim