Chas04 Wrote:
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> Good point. Mixing in two other 7 horse field
> stakes races surrounding them before scratches
> seems dangerous. Couple scratches we got 6 x 4 x 6
> by 10. That’s some Big A December type ish come
> on man

No one likes short fields.

I must question however if you have ever been at Aqueduct in December.

Although the four stakes on Saturday at the Spa have relatively short fields,
they are GIII, GI, GII, GII. Many of the runners in these races are prepping
for big races on Travers Day, or prepping for the Travers itself. Because they
are preps for Travers Day races, NYRA has an obligation to horsemen to run
these races, not to mention that if a graded race is not run each year it faces
the risk of being downgraded the next time it is contested.

In 2017, NYRA moved its Cigar Mile card from the Saturday after Thanksgiving to
the first Saturday in December. Other than that one schedule adjustment in
2017, I think you could go back through the years and rarely see a single
graded stake run at AQ in the entire month of December.

I will write off your questionable comparison of Saturday's card at the Spa to a
December AQ card as what the attorneys might call an "excited utterance". And
since we should all be accentuating the positive, there is a 9 runner turf
stake (Bowling Green) which has only one Chad Brown runner, as opposed to last
weekend's Diana, where there were three Chads in a seven horse field.