Friday May 7, 2010
Resulting Free Plays:
Friday’s FREE Play (4/30)Hollywood…Race #5…Sirocco Strike won paying $6.40…
Saturday’s Free Play…Lichtenstein …Scratched
Sunday’s Free Play…Hollywood – Race #7… Fifie’s Fantasy won paying $4.40
Wednesday Free Play…Hollywood – Race #5…
Island of Zen won paying $4.20
Thursday’s Free Play…Hollywood – Race #5…Cookie’s Jewel off at a decent price, but lackluster in the stretch…The Favorite won at 3/2.
Friday’s Free Play; Hollywood – Race #7… Brenhurst place 2nd, exacta score with one of our Exacta connects, Spirit of Cochise…pretty good!
Today’s Free Play:
Hollywood’s – Race #5…In today’s Mervin LeRoy Handicap a Grade – II we have a big questions to answer, is Slew’s Tiznow a better horse at 5 than he was at 4. The 2nd question is, is he better on Hollywoods synthetic than on Santa Anita’s synthetic. Then the most important question is he in “improving form”. The Power Page is telling us, by virtue of his STAR that he is on the improve statistically through the use of perfomance speed figures, additionally we could guess that by simply noticing how well he raced at Santa Anita in his last 3 races compared with any of his previous races. Last year at Santa Anita in both the San Fernando and The Strub he competed for about 7 furlongs or a mile and then fell back. So those races might have been either too classy or they may have just exposed that he didn’t handle that surface last year very well. It’s a pretty fair guess that he didn’t care for the going all that well, when we see how much better he did this year. And as he progressed through the opening 3 races, he should be razor sharp today on the Hollywood Surface, and last year when he went to Hollywood he ran one time and hit a fantastic 78.7 and we are only rating him at 76.3 today. So he has bit upside. On top of that, Rail Bird is coming off a layoff and I have only rated him at 77.0 and while he did run an 81.0 last year, he is coming off a layoff this year and most of his 4 year old races were in a range from 75.8 to 77.0, with the one giant effort of 81.0. Which leads us to ask if the 81.0 he ran at Del Mar in the Pacific Classic HURT him. The guess is that it did, because he has been off since then, that’s 9 months without a race! For having not raced since August he gets to give 7 pounds to Slew’s Tiznow!
Here is the prop, it’s a fair guess that Rail Bird is most likely to race his weakest in his first race back for a variety of reasons, including letting him get used to racing again before he’s asked to “lay his body down”, but he will take much more money than he should and consequently, make Slew’s Tiznow an overlay…Slew’s Tiznow is the play, some exacta boxes with Dakota Phone and Rail Trip should suffice….Good Luck…