Travers

[mjellish]

The horse freaked.  Caught a surface and distance he really liked, at minimum.  I didnt have him, but he wasn\'t impossible to come up with.  His last race he only had to beat 2 horses and ran fast enough to beat them after breaking slow and rallying into a slow early pace.  Been well regarded and odds on all 4 of his races vs short, over matched fields.  He\'s also a 3 year old and elligible to improve.  Everything Baffert put out there on Sat at Saratoga ran well.

I\'ll be waiting for Arrogate to run again as the chances of him repeating that type of number are probably less than 5%.  We\'ll see if he runs between now and Breeders Cup or just trains up to race, if he makes it that far.

[BitPlayer]

Where did you get 40 lengths?

[Wrongly]

Baffert said he plans to train up to BC.  Guess he\'s trying to avoid a massive bounce.

[RICH]

1 point = 2 lengths at 10f

4 to a -6 = 10 pts

10 points = 20 lengths?
that is hard to fathom

[BitPlayer]

20 lengths is what I came up with.  I agree with mjellish that it was a perfect storm, although he neglected to mention the Mike-Smith-on effect.  I am reminded of Dreaming of Julia\'s 11-point jump in the 2013 Gulfstream Park Oaks, her last victory.

The Travers was also an odd race from a pace perspective.  Who would have guessed that the half would go in 46-4/5 and the horses running 1, 2, and 4 at the half-mile pole would make up the trifecta.

[jerry]

I don\'t buy the freak theory. Not an 8pt. jump up assuming he gets a -4. Everything else you say is just red boarding. He wasn\'t a TG sheets play. This race was a miss.

[jerry]

Assuming a -4.

[jerry]

My bad. I thought a point was 5 lengths. So it\'s really only 16 lengths with a -4. That\'s easier to swallow.

[jerry]

Pace isn\'t highly regarded around here although I personally disagree with that position. The track was playing fast but it was fast for everyone else. Some part of the winning margin could be due to Arrogate being the only horse wanting 10 panels. None of the others have impressed me as true 1 1/4M horses.

[sekrah]

Yet someone who uses TG sheets religously had him as their key.

[jerry]

Only if you adjust his last figure down to a 3 and that\'s not TG textbook practice. BTW, how did you come up with that number? Calculated or guestimate?

[jimbo66]

MJ,

He was a tough horse to have for a TG user.  He just was.  

I don\'t want to start on the TG California routes issue, other than to say that the routes in California generally get different translations between TGJB and Beyer.  TGJB has discussed the reasoning here and people can make their own adjustments or not when they handicap.

But even if you didn\'t believe the TG numbers for Arrogate (which I didn\'t), I still couldn\'t use him.  if you thought he ran 1\'s or 2\'s, you still had to look at HOW he ran those numbers.  To me, running a good figure in a 3 horse field, a 5 horse field and a 5 horse field, with not a single runner in the three races has to be looked at skeptically (unless you are \"old school\" and \"a number is a number\".

And whether you thought that TGJB and his 4\'s were right, or Beyer and his 97 to 103\'s were right, you couldn\'t have predicted a Beyer 122 (TG negative 6?), no matter how you graded his earlier races.

As for the comments about waiting to bet against Arrogate again, \"if he runs\".  Think you are doing a major disservice to Baffert.  Baffert has proven time and time again that he is in a different league than Pletcher with his top horses.  He runs them and he gets them to run their numbers on short rest and on long rest.  And his horses don\'t disappear like Pletcher\'s after a big number at Gulfstream.  

The horse will run again.

sure, the 5% chance of running back to the Travers sounds right.  But he won\'t need to, no matter where he runs.  And he won\'t be overwhelmingly bet either, if he runs back in the Breeders Cup Classic.  If he runs against California Chrome and Frosted, amongst others, he will be a price again.  And not sure there will be much value in betting against him.

Jim

[mjellish]

How the hell do you come up with calling me a red boarder when I said I didn\'t have the horse?  I really didn\'t even share my pre-race opinion on the horse.
 
For the record here\'s what it was.  As a lightly raced, highly regarded, well-bred Baffert runner that was shipping in - of course I looked hard at him.  He looked a little slow though.  But like Sek, I was willing to give him extra credit for his last effort because he broke slow and rallied into a slow early pace in a 3 horse field.  I\'ve posted many times on this board about how I view slow early race shapes and the effect they have on figures because a horse can\'t close his last 1/4 in 21 and change to make up for the slow early race shape.  It\'s something called looking at how a figure is earned, and its often practiced by very good players who aren\'t dogmatic about the numbers.  So based on all of that I knew Arrogate could be ready to run a new top.  But to do that, after drawing the rail, he would probably have to break well which is something he hasn\'t done in 50% of his starts, then send and try to wire the toughest, largest field he\'d ever faced at a new longer distance of 1 1/4 that he\'s never tried (he\'d never even been a 1 1/8th), and he had to handle the ship from west coast to east.  I didn\'t view that as likely.  In fact, I figured he would be done at the 1/4 pole.  So he was a toss for me.

[mjellish]

Jimbo, fair points about Baffert and I agree 100% with regards to him.  But I would seriously doubt Arrogate could run with Frosted and Chrome early and still fire in the stretch in the BC Classic.  This is getting way ahead of myself, but as of right now I would very much like to see him make that race as not only would I make him a strong bet against, on a fair track he could also help compromise the chances of the other two I just mentioned.

[johnnym]

Their is no piece of paper that could of predicted that horse to freak like he did.

Silver Fox came to town with 4 horses, scratched 1, got two first (both won for fun) and a second not a bad road trip.

2015 Run Happy
2016 Arrogate
2017

Again congrats to Sekrah