Congrats to your friend & David. Pretty much the same points your friend makes were made by Paul Daley in an article in the Lowell Sun. I'm as big a fan as anyone of big picture, out of the box thinking, but the logic escapes me. To state the obvious, just because one thing follows another doesn't mean that it caused it to happen. What he's saying only seems to make sense if the Calif horses as a whole were better before the rains came, & if this was something that only started to happen this yr. Remember Southern Image? Two yrs or so ago he shipped into CD from Calif for a big race which was the rotw(the Clark?) & appeared completely overmatched on nos, only to trounce the supposedly faster horses. The same thing had happened so many times before Southern Image's race that some of us were already subtracting 2-3 pts from the nos of the Calif shippers. The Baffert comment about how Calif shippers had been doing across the country was also long before the rains came. Not sure why this would be the case, but it has been happened enough times over a long enough period to convince some of us that it is the case, which why we used Wilko in the last leg of the pick4.