How on earth did Hollywood players let McKenzies Way go off at 10-1 in the 6th yesterday, a nw1x which he summarily won? McKenzies Way had been off since a 4th-place run at Delaware in June, but was first time Mike Mitchell with Julien Leparoux up. To be honest, I thought 7-10 on Genius was more than fair value, but there were a couple of other horses in there at 7/2. McKenzies Way had back class, too, or at least "back talent." He'd broken his maiden in a big field at Del Mar easily in his second start and gone on to run a competitive 2nd to Premier Pegasus in the Jack Goodman.
I know that bettors are sometimes very reactive to trainer changes. If they are, Mike Mitchell should be prominent in their adjustments, but it seems like he is not. People need to understand that he doesn't just give horses little boosts. Betting his new trainees isn't like betting a horse who was wide last time out. He not infrequently gives horses makeovers. The DRF statistics support this well enough: a 34% winning percentage, and a $2.64 ROI first out from 142 starters.
It's possible that the Mitchell factor in the betting is muted when he is merely taking over a horse, which he did with McKenzies Way, rather than claiming him. The change is in the past performances in both cases, but is more at the front of the mind when it was a claim, and perhaps easier to spot in the past performances in that case as well.
Sunday, December 18, 2011
Friday, December 16, 2011
Is Gulch a bad broodmare sire, or just snake bit in 2011?
This is part II in my thoughts about broodmare sire, percentage of stakes winners; as I'm posting both parts this morning, you might want to start with the earlier one....In looking at broodmare sire stats at the bloodhorse.com site, there is one disadvantage, which is that I am looking at the 2011 top 100 broodmares sires by earnings. My interest is in finding truly good and truly bad broodmare sires, and if the broodmare sires are bad enough, perhaps they're not on the list at all. That said, the top 100 is not a small list; being in the top 100 is nothing to write home about, and signifies a large number of runners, more than anything else. So I do think there are some underperforming broodmare sires on there.
My first candidate for that was Gulch. He is #52 on the earnings list, but his top earner is Glenwood Canyon, with just $164,907. More shockingly, he has just two 2011 stakes winners. Of the 51 broodmare sires ahead of him in earnings, the lowest number of 2011 stakes winners is just 5. Twenty-five of the top 28 earning broodmare sires have double-digit stakes winners in 2011. On the whole top 100 list, all broodmare sires but Gulch, Bertrando, and Regal Classic have more than two 2011 stakes winners, and Bertrando and Regal Classic have fewer starters than Gulch.
It then occurred to me that it was stupid to be evaluating Gulch by his 2011 number of stakes winners. What does that mean, really? Why should I invite flukes into the process? Gulch's overall percentage of stakes winners as a broodmare sire is 3.6, with 1646 foals. The percentage is on the low side, but he had plenty of company on the top 100 list with it. Gulch's percentage of stakes winners is not remarkably bad, the way it has been in 2011.
This whole line of thinking about 2011 versus the duration of the stallion's broodmare sire history got me thinking about something my father and I used to argue about before he passed away. He was always scouring stallion statistics year by year, looking for stallions who had had drop offs, who had gotten old. Actually, he believed young stallions could drop off, too, because he believed mutations were the driving force to this. I explained to him that the degree of expected fluctuation because of sample size was so great that a mutation could never be inferred, and career statistics were far more helpful in predicting future performance than recent statistics.
Now, it occurred to me that year by year broodmare sire statistics are the perfect place to point out the random component, outside of mutation. The daughters of a stallion are an ever changing lot, bred to an ever-changing lot of stallions. If I could show that broodmare sire stats fluctuate as much year to year as stallion stats, wouldn't that be instructive?
I knew that Gulch had had 60 stakes winners overall as a broodmare sire, but just two in 2011. That got me wondering what his number of stakes winners were in other years, and whether the role of random fluctuation could be well demonstrated with him. Here are his number of stakes winners and starters yearly since he began appearing on the top 100 broodmare sire list in 2004.
2011 2 389
2010 8 388
2009 4 374
2008 4 351
2007 9 313
2006 6 257
2005 7 167
2004 6 257
I think the numbers make my point, but not as lucidly as I would have hoped. Gulch's average number of stakes winners from 2004-2010 was 6.3 with 301 starters, compared to 2 with 389 starters this year. His precentages in 2008-2011 have fallen off from the 2004-2007 time. Whether the main factor is coincidence, or a slight aging on teh average and subsequent decreased effectiveness of his broodmares, or something else, I have no way of knowing right now.
My first candidate for that was Gulch. He is #52 on the earnings list, but his top earner is Glenwood Canyon, with just $164,907. More shockingly, he has just two 2011 stakes winners. Of the 51 broodmare sires ahead of him in earnings, the lowest number of 2011 stakes winners is just 5. Twenty-five of the top 28 earning broodmare sires have double-digit stakes winners in 2011. On the whole top 100 list, all broodmare sires but Gulch, Bertrando, and Regal Classic have more than two 2011 stakes winners, and Bertrando and Regal Classic have fewer starters than Gulch.
It then occurred to me that it was stupid to be evaluating Gulch by his 2011 number of stakes winners. What does that mean, really? Why should I invite flukes into the process? Gulch's overall percentage of stakes winners as a broodmare sire is 3.6, with 1646 foals. The percentage is on the low side, but he had plenty of company on the top 100 list with it. Gulch's percentage of stakes winners is not remarkably bad, the way it has been in 2011.
This whole line of thinking about 2011 versus the duration of the stallion's broodmare sire history got me thinking about something my father and I used to argue about before he passed away. He was always scouring stallion statistics year by year, looking for stallions who had had drop offs, who had gotten old. Actually, he believed young stallions could drop off, too, because he believed mutations were the driving force to this. I explained to him that the degree of expected fluctuation because of sample size was so great that a mutation could never be inferred, and career statistics were far more helpful in predicting future performance than recent statistics.
Now, it occurred to me that year by year broodmare sire statistics are the perfect place to point out the random component, outside of mutation. The daughters of a stallion are an ever changing lot, bred to an ever-changing lot of stallions. If I could show that broodmare sire stats fluctuate as much year to year as stallion stats, wouldn't that be instructive?
I knew that Gulch had had 60 stakes winners overall as a broodmare sire, but just two in 2011. That got me wondering what his number of stakes winners were in other years, and whether the role of random fluctuation could be well demonstrated with him. Here are his number of stakes winners and starters yearly since he began appearing on the top 100 broodmare sire list in 2004.
2011 2 389
2010 8 388
2009 4 374
2008 4 351
2007 9 313
2006 6 257
2005 7 167
2004 6 257
I think the numbers make my point, but not as lucidly as I would have hoped. Gulch's average number of stakes winners from 2004-2010 was 6.3 with 301 starters, compared to 2 with 389 starters this year. His precentages in 2008-2011 have fallen off from the 2004-2007 time. Whether the main factor is coincidence, or a slight aging on teh average and subsequent decreased effectiveness of his broodmares, or something else, I have no way of knowing right now.
Broodmare sire % of sw -- confidence intervals
This is going to be an exploratory post, if you'll indulge me. The truth is that you can't trust most breeding statistics. The basic statistics, such as percentage of stakes winners, do not provide simple answers. You can't sort from highest to lowest and trust that the stallions really rate in the order they come up. For broodmare sire percentage of stakes winners, for instance, we have the following confounds.
*Which mares are going to stud? The A. P. Indy mares are virtually all being bred; the Lear Fan mares aren't. That means that the Lear Fan mares that are being bred had to do more on the track than the A. P. Indy mares, all things being equal. Then again, A. P. Indy is a better sire than Lear Fan, so the beginning odds are that the A. P. Indy mares did more on the track. And broodmare sire stats might not be reflecting A. P. Indy's ability to elevate his mares at all, but the fact that the A. P. Indy mares are out of better mares than the Lear Fan mares. You see how teasing out the broodmare sire role goes on and on?
*What quality of stallions are the daughters of the stallions being bred to? At least we can get a good idea of this from Comparable Index, while the selection effect mentioned in point 1 would require extensive research to pinpoint.
*Over what years have the broodmares' foals been running? Percentage of stakes winner norms clearly have evolved for stallions over the years, and have to be evolving for broodmare sires as well. What we want is more rankings year by year, and then an aggregate, rather than just the aggregate. Is Seattle Slew's career percentage of stakes winners from foals as a broodmare sire of 6.8 really better than Seeeking the Gold's of 6.3, when Seeking the Gold is 11 years younger, and compiling his numbers in a tougher era? Probbaly not.
All of these problems present themselves even before we get to "sample size." A lot of people don't understand the nature of the sample size problem. In a nutshell, it's that rates like percentage of stakes winners never just represent ability, but luck as well. So, pretending for a moment that there are no confounds, Storm Cat's 5.8% of stakes winners as a broodmare sire is higher than A. P. Indy's 5.2% percentage of stakes winnes as a broodmare sire. But we cannot necessarily conclude that Storm Car is really the better stakes winning producing broodmare sire. He may just be the luckier one. Unfortunately, if the sample sizes for the two stallions aren't big enough to interpret the difference, there is no way of telling whether it indicates better luck or better ability.
The formula for standard error for percentages is fun and simple, at least if a person has done some statistical reading. It's the square root of (p*(1-p))/n, where p is any percentage. A 95% confidence interval requires more than a standard error, however, but 1.96 standard errors.
I ran confidence intervals for a bunch of different broodmares sires. A rule of thumb is that a broodmare sire whose daughters have been at it for a while has +- of about 1% on his percentage. Sadler's Wells, with a gigantic 4294 foals as a broodmare sire, has a 95% confidence interval on his % of stakes winners of +- 0.7; A. P. Indy, with 1,377 foals as a broodmare sire, has a 95% confidence interval on his % of stakes winners of +-1.2.
These error ranges might sound small, but they're really not. Use +- 1%, and you can see that we can't separate Storm Cat and A. P. Indy; Storm Cat may really be at 5%, and A. P. Indy at 6%, while on the statistics to date, it's been basically the reverse. Deputy Minister at 7.2% with 2735 foals is probably actually really good.
I've seen enough surprisingly talented runners out of Dixieland Band mares, for instance, that my gut tells me the role of the broodmare sire is important, that if we make too big a deal of it, that's only by a modest margin. But the skeptic in me looks at the rather narrow range of the broodmare sire percentage of stakes winners and wonders if the broodmare sire is playing any role at all. We could just be looking at confounds and luck, my head tells me. I think maybe a Dixieland Band or a Carson City broodmare stands out mostly in that they can get a freak once in a while, more than they make a difference horse by horse.
If you believe in the broodmare sire, Conquistador Cielo and Devil's Bag may be your best argument. They were born three years apart. Both were memorable champions of even greater ability than accomplishment, and both were trained by Woody Stephens. Both were dissatisfying stallions, although they couldn't be called out and out bad. Yet Conquistador Cielo's % of stakes winners as a broodmare sire is 5.8 from 2195 foals. Devil's Bag's is 3.8 from 2001 foals. Within 95% confidence, Conquistador Cielo could be as low as 4.8%, and Devil's Bag as high as 4.6%. Those figures don't overlap. The Comparable Index of the stallions bred to Conquistador Cielo mares is 1.41, and the Comparable Index of the stallions bred to Devil's Bag mares, 1.45, reinforcing that they are a pretty fair comparison.
But some of my statistics teachers would have said, "David, well of course you can cherry pick one or two examples of broodmare sire performance differing from expectation. You didn't make a blind test. The idea of the 95% confidence interval is bogus in this context." And my teachers would be right. But the Conquistador Cielo, Devil's Bag comparison is still interesting.
There's another problem. The confidence intervals underestimate the true size of the range. Here's why. Conquistador Cielo has had 2195 foals as a broodmare sire. But he hasn't had 2195 daughters producing the 2195 foals. He's probably had more like 500 or 750. And that changes things. Broodmare sire numbers, and many breeding counts in general, are what is known as multi-layered data. Blue hens can skew the data; not all Conquistador Cielo daughters are equally good producers, and that renders the 2195 count inaccurate.
*Which mares are going to stud? The A. P. Indy mares are virtually all being bred; the Lear Fan mares aren't. That means that the Lear Fan mares that are being bred had to do more on the track than the A. P. Indy mares, all things being equal. Then again, A. P. Indy is a better sire than Lear Fan, so the beginning odds are that the A. P. Indy mares did more on the track. And broodmare sire stats might not be reflecting A. P. Indy's ability to elevate his mares at all, but the fact that the A. P. Indy mares are out of better mares than the Lear Fan mares. You see how teasing out the broodmare sire role goes on and on?
*What quality of stallions are the daughters of the stallions being bred to? At least we can get a good idea of this from Comparable Index, while the selection effect mentioned in point 1 would require extensive research to pinpoint.
*Over what years have the broodmares' foals been running? Percentage of stakes winner norms clearly have evolved for stallions over the years, and have to be evolving for broodmare sires as well. What we want is more rankings year by year, and then an aggregate, rather than just the aggregate. Is Seattle Slew's career percentage of stakes winners from foals as a broodmare sire of 6.8 really better than Seeeking the Gold's of 6.3, when Seeking the Gold is 11 years younger, and compiling his numbers in a tougher era? Probbaly not.
All of these problems present themselves even before we get to "sample size." A lot of people don't understand the nature of the sample size problem. In a nutshell, it's that rates like percentage of stakes winners never just represent ability, but luck as well. So, pretending for a moment that there are no confounds, Storm Cat's 5.8% of stakes winners as a broodmare sire is higher than A. P. Indy's 5.2% percentage of stakes winnes as a broodmare sire. But we cannot necessarily conclude that Storm Car is really the better stakes winning producing broodmare sire. He may just be the luckier one. Unfortunately, if the sample sizes for the two stallions aren't big enough to interpret the difference, there is no way of telling whether it indicates better luck or better ability.
The formula for standard error for percentages is fun and simple, at least if a person has done some statistical reading. It's the square root of (p*(1-p))/n, where p is any percentage. A 95% confidence interval requires more than a standard error, however, but 1.96 standard errors.
I ran confidence intervals for a bunch of different broodmares sires. A rule of thumb is that a broodmare sire whose daughters have been at it for a while has +- of about 1% on his percentage. Sadler's Wells, with a gigantic 4294 foals as a broodmare sire, has a 95% confidence interval on his % of stakes winners of +- 0.7; A. P. Indy, with 1,377 foals as a broodmare sire, has a 95% confidence interval on his % of stakes winners of +-1.2.
These error ranges might sound small, but they're really not. Use +- 1%, and you can see that we can't separate Storm Cat and A. P. Indy; Storm Cat may really be at 5%, and A. P. Indy at 6%, while on the statistics to date, it's been basically the reverse. Deputy Minister at 7.2% with 2735 foals is probably actually really good.
I've seen enough surprisingly talented runners out of Dixieland Band mares, for instance, that my gut tells me the role of the broodmare sire is important, that if we make too big a deal of it, that's only by a modest margin. But the skeptic in me looks at the rather narrow range of the broodmare sire percentage of stakes winners and wonders if the broodmare sire is playing any role at all. We could just be looking at confounds and luck, my head tells me. I think maybe a Dixieland Band or a Carson City broodmare stands out mostly in that they can get a freak once in a while, more than they make a difference horse by horse.
If you believe in the broodmare sire, Conquistador Cielo and Devil's Bag may be your best argument. They were born three years apart. Both were memorable champions of even greater ability than accomplishment, and both were trained by Woody Stephens. Both were dissatisfying stallions, although they couldn't be called out and out bad. Yet Conquistador Cielo's % of stakes winners as a broodmare sire is 5.8 from 2195 foals. Devil's Bag's is 3.8 from 2001 foals. Within 95% confidence, Conquistador Cielo could be as low as 4.8%, and Devil's Bag as high as 4.6%. Those figures don't overlap. The Comparable Index of the stallions bred to Conquistador Cielo mares is 1.41, and the Comparable Index of the stallions bred to Devil's Bag mares, 1.45, reinforcing that they are a pretty fair comparison.
But some of my statistics teachers would have said, "David, well of course you can cherry pick one or two examples of broodmare sire performance differing from expectation. You didn't make a blind test. The idea of the 95% confidence interval is bogus in this context." And my teachers would be right. But the Conquistador Cielo, Devil's Bag comparison is still interesting.
There's another problem. The confidence intervals underestimate the true size of the range. Here's why. Conquistador Cielo has had 2195 foals as a broodmare sire. But he hasn't had 2195 daughters producing the 2195 foals. He's probably had more like 500 or 750. And that changes things. Broodmare sire numbers, and many breeding counts in general, are what is known as multi-layered data. Blue hens can skew the data; not all Conquistador Cielo daughters are equally good producers, and that renders the 2195 count inaccurate.
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
South Florida takes those beloved 'B' claimers in a new direction
I was interested to see the Gulfstream twist on the popular "alternate condition claimer" (which is often denoted in the Racing Form with a 'B' at the end of the race condition). The alternate conditions have gotten more and more complex since I first started seeing a lot of them in 2005 or so. But the one element that has remained fairly consistent is that 3-year-olds of any stripe are eligible for the races. The traditional mix is 3-year-olds vs. older horses who haven't run past certain conditions (like winning a certain number of races lifetime). In Gulfstream's 7th on Sunday, I notice that only 3-year-olds who hadn't won in the last six months were allowed. This is interesting; had 3-year-olds really been running roughshod over the poor older horses, who needed to be protected from them? I wouldn't think the problem could be a particular monster 3-year-old; the claiming requirement alone should discourage such a creature from forming. Even the fact that Gulfstream is making the alternate claimer MORE restrictive rather than LESS restrictive is interesting. The species has generally been getting more and more open, obviously to draw more and more contestants (i.e., larger fields).
Yes, the trainer can't win first out. But why? We can figure this out.
I'd like to see data about how often various trainers have their horses break poorly early in their careers. After the first start, we might find that all breaking problems had more or less been eliminated, except for random slow learners and problematic horses here and there. (Indeed, if breaking problems persist past the debut, I think that's when as an owner you would really have a problem with them. Bad breaks in the debut can be part of giving horses a race, which is an accepted practice.) But I'd still like to see the data through starts 2 and 3, or really until they stopped showing differences among traines.
People might say that we don't need "bad break" statistics for trainers, because we have win-early statistics on them, and the rate of bad breaks could be inferred from the win-early statistics. But the bad-break statistics would just break down the issue of early performance further. And I have to say that having a trainer who couldn't get a first-time starter to break would concern me more as a handicapper than a trainer who maybe just didn't have a lot of 2-year-old types in his barn. If the trainer DID then have a first timer who looked like a win early type, and the trainer's history suggested he got his first timers to break (and also not run short, which could be gleaned from interval by interval data in charts), then I might still select the horse.
The reason I think trainer statistics on breaking would not be a waste of time, and would show something, is partly Barclay Tagg. If I've seen one Barclay Tagg firster break slowly, I've seen 100. Well, maybe 3. But 100 sure sounded good.
People might say that we don't need "bad break" statistics for trainers, because we have win-early statistics on them, and the rate of bad breaks could be inferred from the win-early statistics. But the bad-break statistics would just break down the issue of early performance further. And I have to say that having a trainer who couldn't get a first-time starter to break would concern me more as a handicapper than a trainer who maybe just didn't have a lot of 2-year-old types in his barn. If the trainer DID then have a first timer who looked like a win early type, and the trainer's history suggested he got his first timers to break (and also not run short, which could be gleaned from interval by interval data in charts), then I might still select the horse.
The reason I think trainer statistics on breaking would not be a waste of time, and would show something, is partly Barclay Tagg. If I've seen one Barclay Tagg firster break slowly, I've seen 100. Well, maybe 3. But 100 sure sounded good.
Sunday, December 4, 2011
Unusual company lines for the Claiming Crown Emerald
Presidential candidate Rick Perry recently added to his list of gaffes when he gave out the wrong date for Election Day 2012. The Breeders' Cup happens around Election Day, with the date firmly fixed in my mind, and the importance perhaps rivaling what a politician feels for Election Day. So when I see 5NOV11 and then CD to the right of that in charts, my heart leaps. (Alert: quality horses in the area)
I only expect to see those digits on select days in select races, however. Claiming Crown events at Fair Grounds are not one of them. So imagine my surprise when I saw that not one but two Breeders' Cup horses contested the Claiming Crown Emerald on Saturday. The integrity of the Breeders' Cup was preserved with Compliance Officer and Baryshnikov dominating the race, running 1-2. The exact condition of the race was starting for a claiming price of $25,000 or less from New Year's Day 2010 on.
Like much of what I write here, Compliance Officer and Baryshnikov's presence in the Claiming Crown race is more a piece of trivia than anything else. But does it say anything about racing today?
Perhaps, yes. First, it underscores the expansion of the Breeders' Cup; while Compliance Officer came from the staple "The Mile," Baryshnikov came from the bottom rung of the "The Marathon." Secondly, it certainly seems to me that the claiming ranks have expanded, and the line between claimers and truly very good horses has blurred. Thus, claimers one month can be Breeders' Cup horses the next.
I only expect to see those digits on select days in select races, however. Claiming Crown events at Fair Grounds are not one of them. So imagine my surprise when I saw that not one but two Breeders' Cup horses contested the Claiming Crown Emerald on Saturday. The integrity of the Breeders' Cup was preserved with Compliance Officer and Baryshnikov dominating the race, running 1-2. The exact condition of the race was starting for a claiming price of $25,000 or less from New Year's Day 2010 on.
Like much of what I write here, Compliance Officer and Baryshnikov's presence in the Claiming Crown race is more a piece of trivia than anything else. But does it say anything about racing today?
Perhaps, yes. First, it underscores the expansion of the Breeders' Cup; while Compliance Officer came from the staple "The Mile," Baryshnikov came from the bottom rung of the "The Marathon." Secondly, it certainly seems to me that the claiming ranks have expanded, and the line between claimers and truly very good horses has blurred. Thus, claimers one month can be Breeders' Cup horses the next.
Saturday, December 3, 2011
Sky Blue Pink: flunking with flying colors
Racing is a world of relativity, but a 41-length drubbing conveys a bad performance, regardless of the competition. If we made a list of horses that lost this decisively, some would be horses who had something go wrong on that particular day and were eased, but my guess is that most would be essentially non-competitive horses, who probably would never win again. They would be horses that perhaps owed their haplessness to specific explanation, such as a severe bleeding problem, but would come across to us, the detached fans, as simply not being able to run at all.
This is not the case with Sky Blue Pink, the horse whose connections had to endure the 41-length failure at Aqueduct today. Sky Blue Pink has been in the money eight times in 13 races, but even that doesn't convey how honest he's been. He had certainly never lost by 41 lengths before, only losing by more than 5 lengths twice. And when he did, it apparently wasn't because he ran poorly, but because he was in a little too tough, or had a "horrible trip" (so says the commenet line in one of the worst losses). He had run six straight Beyers between 80 and 85, and four before that between 74 and 80. No, Sky Blue Pink's miserable showing today appears to have resulted from leaving the safety of the turf course for the first time and venturing to the main track.
There were a couple of mildly interesting aspects to this. Number one, Sky Blue Pink changed barns from Christophe Clement to someone named Brad Baker, who was saddling only his 21st starter on the year. Sky Blue Pink was claimed on October 16 and was 2nd five weeks later for Baker, improving from 9th place in the penultimate call.
Even with turf racing ending for the near future in New York, and Baker's having an incentive to keep Sky Blue Pink in New York as a New York-bred, one has to wonder if Clement would have taken the same step with the horse. Being able to compete on dirt certainly increases options, and when a horse proves he can do it with another trainer, the first trainer can be said to have gotten one wrong. Given today's performance, in the case of Clement and Sky Blue Pink, this does not appear to have been the case.
The second interesting angle is that Sky Blue Pink's pedigree looks strongly turf: Sky Classic out of a Grand Lodge mare. I believe Sky Classic was turf champion, and if he wasn't, he was a heck of a lot closer to turf champion than dirt champion. Grand Lodge was a group I winner in Europe, and 10th when tried on the dirt in the Breeders' Cup Classic.
Contrast this pedigree with Midnite Silver's, who also made his dirt debut far into his career on November 25 at Aqueduct, but ran by the competition in the stretch like they were stationary to score a 2 1/2 length victory. Midnite Silver is by Silver Deputy out of a Fast Play mare, names that do not get my blood pumping for the turf. You'd assume there was a good reason the horse had never been tried on dirt before, and even after the win, I'd still assume that. Maybe he has conformation or action that could compromise his soundness if he competed extensively on dirt. But with that sire/broodmare sire cross, Midnite Silver was at least worth a look on dirt.
He also had not been with the trainer who put him on dirt for very long (David Jacobson). While Baker ran Sky Blue Pink on dirt by design, what Jacobson deserves credit for is simply not scratching Midnite Silver, as his race came off the turf. Funny that the trainer backed into running was the one who won.
This is not the case with Sky Blue Pink, the horse whose connections had to endure the 41-length failure at Aqueduct today. Sky Blue Pink has been in the money eight times in 13 races, but even that doesn't convey how honest he's been. He had certainly never lost by 41 lengths before, only losing by more than 5 lengths twice. And when he did, it apparently wasn't because he ran poorly, but because he was in a little too tough, or had a "horrible trip" (so says the commenet line in one of the worst losses). He had run six straight Beyers between 80 and 85, and four before that between 74 and 80. No, Sky Blue Pink's miserable showing today appears to have resulted from leaving the safety of the turf course for the first time and venturing to the main track.
There were a couple of mildly interesting aspects to this. Number one, Sky Blue Pink changed barns from Christophe Clement to someone named Brad Baker, who was saddling only his 21st starter on the year. Sky Blue Pink was claimed on October 16 and was 2nd five weeks later for Baker, improving from 9th place in the penultimate call.
Even with turf racing ending for the near future in New York, and Baker's having an incentive to keep Sky Blue Pink in New York as a New York-bred, one has to wonder if Clement would have taken the same step with the horse. Being able to compete on dirt certainly increases options, and when a horse proves he can do it with another trainer, the first trainer can be said to have gotten one wrong. Given today's performance, in the case of Clement and Sky Blue Pink, this does not appear to have been the case.
The second interesting angle is that Sky Blue Pink's pedigree looks strongly turf: Sky Classic out of a Grand Lodge mare. I believe Sky Classic was turf champion, and if he wasn't, he was a heck of a lot closer to turf champion than dirt champion. Grand Lodge was a group I winner in Europe, and 10th when tried on the dirt in the Breeders' Cup Classic.
Contrast this pedigree with Midnite Silver's, who also made his dirt debut far into his career on November 25 at Aqueduct, but ran by the competition in the stretch like they were stationary to score a 2 1/2 length victory. Midnite Silver is by Silver Deputy out of a Fast Play mare, names that do not get my blood pumping for the turf. You'd assume there was a good reason the horse had never been tried on dirt before, and even after the win, I'd still assume that. Maybe he has conformation or action that could compromise his soundness if he competed extensively on dirt. But with that sire/broodmare sire cross, Midnite Silver was at least worth a look on dirt.
He also had not been with the trainer who put him on dirt for very long (David Jacobson). While Baker ran Sky Blue Pink on dirt by design, what Jacobson deserves credit for is simply not scratching Midnite Silver, as his race came off the turf. Funny that the trainer backed into running was the one who won.
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