As I said in an earlier post (\"Question For Len\", above), Hawthorne has been featuring some split variants recently, with no weather changes. Another occurred on the day of the Illinois Derby, and made for an extremely tough decision.
There were two ways you could do the race, and neither had anything to do with the other 3 routes on the day-- if you did it with them, the winner would get somewhere between negative 7 and negative 12, with the horses behind him also getting correspondingly crazy figures, 6 to 10 points faster than I gave them. I chose the way you will see below, with the alternative being to take off another 1 3/4 points. It\'s a very close call, as you will see-- and if you do it the other way SNS gets a neg 3, which is why I\'m mentioning it.
I\'m going to review the race as the horses come back, and it\'s not inconceivable that I change it before the Derby.
Meanwhile, it\'s worth noting that Ragozin did the race FOUR points faster than I did. Which almost certainly means he did all the routes together-- giving the other races lousy figures, and this one ridiculously fast ones.
JB,
No matter how you slice and dice it, SNS has one of the nicer patterns I have seen going into a derby.It\'s tough now by what you said because the last line could actually be more explosive had you gone a different way.I thought his run thru the lane was huge.
Mike
Not quite Miff, if he takes off more, we\'re looking at neg 3 or more, which would play more to a possible off effort, nonetheless his line looks very good right now. However, If JB has concerns with his #, I am really concerned. JB when will you put out the pre-derby sheets with Lex included?
Rich
SNS will either get what he has now, or exactly 1 3/4 points better. No other options.
The current Derby set is the only one that will be available until the night of the draw, when we put up the final set with the seminar.
Showing Up went forward 1 1/2 points. On Ragozin, he went back 4 points. Meaning, had he only run back to his allowance win (good enought to beat Chatain by 2 lengths), Ragozin says he would have won the Lexington by 8 lengths, beating Like Now and the rest.
I\'d love to see what the rest of the Lexington and Illinois Derby fields look like on Ragzoin. They have Showing Up winning the Lexington with about the same figure as Malameeze got getting beat 12 lengths in the Ill. Derby.
Rich,
Don\'t agree. If Jerry decides neg -3 is more representative, the line still looks good(not as good as present) The neg came off good foundation and with nice spacing so I do not regard the move as completely over the top like say Sin Min.
Mike
The horse hasn\'t gone backwards yet in his racing career. Agreed that with a negative 3, we are looking at a 4 point top, instead of a 2 point top, which would seem to make him more likely to regress, but the horse has yet to regress in his 6 races, so I am not sure i would be so sure that he regresses next Saturday.
He may only need a pairup to win and he figures a fair price, maybe 8-1 or so.
Hawthorne has been playing great on TG as you probaly already know .
It\'s Looking like an A Track all the way !
- how them other guys doing ?