Before we talk about the Haskell… I think we have to talk about The 7th at Saratoga… and the 6th at Del Mar…  At Saratoga… my “V” horse (and listed as POP OUT KEY on the JJPP-PLUS), rolled to victory at 31/1.  Even survive and inquiry… but they had to agree this horse was just too good to DQ.  So we got the win and we took a chunk out of the exacta pool with a $587/$2.00 exacta.  I know many of our players had win and win/place money… but the exacta didn’t speak to our players universally getting the exacta.  That was not the case in Del Mar…

In the 6th at Del Mar… a two year old race in which ALL the horses were “first time starters”.  In this race we had two horses with a STAR.  1 was Poetic at 9/1 and the other was True Royalty at 23/1.  The ran 1-2 for a cold exacta!  The exacta should have been at least 240/1, but it only paid $130/$1.00… The price was nearly cut in half from what would be expected!  Ya thin the JJPP players did a little damage.  I think so…

Now we see Girvin step up with a beautiful stretch run to reach out and catch McCraken at the wire.  It looked to me that McCraken started to kick back when he saw Girvin, but it didn’t matter.  Girvin is a real horse with plenty of kick.  This looked like a very good figure race, lets’ see if these colts can build on this… More to follow on Wednesday…

We are killing both meets… I know this because so many of my customer’s are sending me wonderful e-mails, telling me I am killing this meet…so I must be…

I will have some time on Tuesday to update all our stats and give you a nice full bias report and a RAce Day Plays report…

Good Samaritan, one of the best 3 year old Turf colts, in a season of very good turf colts, defeated Always Dreaming and the other main Track colts in the Jim Dandy.   We might have a real shift in this division starting right now!  It wasn’t close!

By the end of the season, as Tapwrit and Irish War Cry and others mature, this group could be a “horse of a different color” by Breeders’ Cup time…  This is starting to get real interesting…

July 30, 2017                                                  Handicapped for:   FAST / FIRM

 
The Haskell at Monmouth

Race #12

 2 BATTLE OF MID (m)  78.3*   Starting to get very good, in sync. 

                                                       

   MCCRAKEN      ( )  78.0*   Early leader of pack, hitting stride, a threat.

      

   TIMELINE      (p)  77.8    Coming of age, off New Life TOP, hard to repeat

                                                          

 1 IRISH WAR CRY ( )  77.8    Company up front, makes this a little tough.

                                                          

   GIRVIN        ( )  77.5    Chance to show his stuff, better than KD…   

                                                       

   PRACTICAL JOK (p)  76.8    Still not hitting Grade 1 figs.    

                                                     

   HENCE         ( )  75.0    Rank outsider to me…

 

To my eye, Battle of Midway is about to run the kind of race that will impress. With a form cycle that shows incremental improvement, with him always getting good enough to “class-up” to any competion.  Hisreturn to the races after his very decent KD, was a beautiful and easy effort that should set him up to “explode” today.

 

While I am also really interested to see if McCraken will fulfill the early promise of his races in the G-2 race of Nov 26-2016 at Churchill and then is magnificent race at Tampa Bay Downs on Feb 11-2017. These were both high class effort and the kind of figs we would associate with a potential champion.  He’s had some mis-steps, but this would vault him and this class way up.

 

This is easily the most interesting Haskell from a handicapping perspective as 6 of these 7 runners have some reasonable chance to win… and I argue with anyone who sees it differently… This is a good one!