What makes the Spa so great! check out the opening day feature

[covelj70]

Anyone who has been wondering if Saratoga would be able to differentiate itself from the Mommouth meet need look no further than the opening day stake for older horses.

There have been Breeders Cup races the last few years with lower quality fields than this overnight stake.

Absolutely awesome.  

The spa is back and I love it.

[Funny Cide]

A 10-horse competitive field of top quality horses.  Everyone should be all over this race.

[Michael D.]

covelj70 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Anyone who has been wondering if Saratoga would be
> able to differentiate itself from the Mommouth
> meet need look no further than the opening day
> stake for older horses.
>
> There have been Breeders Cup races the last few
> years with lower quality fields than this
> overnight stake.
>
> Absolutely awesome.  
>
> The spa is back and I love it.


Jim,

You\'re putting the cart before the slow rat. It\'s one day.

Prepare for a deluge of NY bred races.

You\'re right though - a good start. I like 4 of the races, including the 6.5 and 7f dirt races featuring a number of quality runners. All those 6f races down at the shore are driving me bat sh;t.

Can\'t wait for the JDandy and Haskell. Leaning towards FOF and Trappe Shot as I await the fields and #\'s. Might be a crowded trade, both of them, but I\'m not a big fan of the triple crown colts.

[MonmouthGuy]

I would hope that the entries of First Dude, Looking at Lucky, Super Saver and Ice Box makes a potential Trappe Shot trade somewhat less crowded.  Really looking foward to seeing the #s in this race, as I also think Afleet Again could be very live at a price.  He was the high weight in the Pegasus with a 3W4W(?) trip and although his running style dictates that he is likely to be wide again, he is certainly going to be overlooked in a star studded field.

[jbelfior]

Mike:

I don\'t disagree but Friday\'s card is as good as any Monmouth has had so far.

Let\'s hope Haskell Day doesn\'t disappoint. Speaking of the Haskell, any word on if Zito is sending Miner\'s Reserve.


Good Luck,
Joe B.

[milwmike]

Per DRF story:
Zito said he is leaving his options open regarding Miner\'s Reserve, who finished second, 2 1/4 lengths behind A Little Warm in a hot second-level allowance race at Delaware Park on June 29. One potential spot is the Curlin Stakes at Saratoga on Aug. 1.

[MonmouthGuy]

I think this race could be bombs away.

Vineyard Haven is 3/5 on the morning line off of a 9 month layoff and not as fast on his best as some others. Second choice Cool Coal Man has a history of reacting badly to big negative efforts.  I will play against both.

Will stay away from horses coming off long layoffs. Will use Le Grand Cru (2nd time Pletcher) as my key at 12-1 and also You and I Forever liberally 20-1, hoping they can get back to their numbers earlier in the year.  I expect both to be running late.

Haven\'t formulated exotics yet, but considering Halfmetaljacket and Flat Bold underneath.

[covelj70]

Monmouth,

I am right there with you on LeGrand Cru.

He\'s 0-2-X, he will be a price and he has Pletcher and Gomez.

[MonmouthGuy]

If it comes up wet (which looks likely), I will also protect with the favorite on top of LGC and YAIF.

[Uncle Buck]

Is it just me or does it rain EVERY Spa opening day? What a mess. Off turf, distance changes, scratches and Pletcher\'s horses laying down to die after about 3 furlongs. Go baby Go

[Lost Cause]

Uncle Buck Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Is it just me or does it rain EVERY Spa opening
> day? What a mess. Off turf, distance changes,
> scratches and Pletcher\'s horses laying down to die
> after about 3 furlongs. Go baby Go

I was telling someone the same thing earlier...The first week is usually a mess out there.  It dries up in Aug..

[PapaChach]

Having attended almost every Opening Day at the Spa since 1990, I can attest to the fact that it actually rarely rains on Saratoga\'s first parade.

I missed the festivities in 1993 as I had two poorly-paid summer jobs that I desperately needed in order to raise the capital necessary for an early September trip to England to visit my then-fiancée. It rained at the tail end of that card, though I remember stopping by an off track betting emporium whilst traveling between my two jobs to catch the late double that day and the finale remained on the turf.

I missed again in \'94 for a different sort of festivities: my own wedding on the shores of Lake Windermere. But word got back to me that the sun shone upon the Spa on that day.

In \'96 they took the races off the turf due to an all-night rain storm, but the sun had come out early that day.

My memory, now under assault from the potent combination of the ravages of middle age and the consequences of an ill-spent youth, could have it wrong, but I think rain did not spoil an Opening Day again until 2008.

As bad luck would have it, that Opening Day came just eight months after the sudden and premature death of the woman I married back in \'94, and it came on July 23rd, the fourteenth anniversary of our marriage. My eldest son, who got hooked on the proceedings at the Spa at what any competent child psychologist would surely say was far too young an age, insisted we attend the races on that day. It poured buckets, the weather matching my seriously foul mood; even with umbrellas to shield us on the walk from the car to the clubhouse, we got soaking wet. We arrived right before the third, and as we walked over to our seats I spotted all the old familiar faces, the people I\'d seen on Opening Days for fifteen years or more, and I turned to my son and told him I couldn\'t do it, couldn\'t take it, told him that we had to leave, and in spite of his protestations, we did in fact leave.

&&&

My personal Opening Day this year came on Saturday. Yes, I know it rained on the real Opening Day, but still.

I wrangled some seats in Section E and went on up with my eldest and with, as strange as it sounds to say it as a forty-four year old widower and only parent to three young children, my new girlfriend. I had assumed for a long time after the death of my wife that the romantic love portion of my life had passed me by for good, but life will surprise in both very bad and very good ways, and here we are.

The new girlfriend has a bit of the horse whisperer in her, and as the horses came out onto the track for the sixth, a NY-bred semi-slow rat non-winners of two other than, she offered her observations. She insisted that the two best-looking boys in the line-up were Come Undone and Saginaw. My handicapping of the race had uncovered Spa City Fever and Prince Dubai as the best chances. She requested a real longshot with a chance and I offered Alltiffedoff as a possibility.

She asked how we might make some money off of this mish-mash of opinions. I meekly suggested a one dollar trifecta box of our five picks, thinking that she\'d never agree on putting up thirty dollars apiece into a race, and knowing my old hardcore betting self saw a five horse tri box as a sucker\'s bet, but she smiled at me and reached for her purse and said, what the hell, let\'s do it.

So we did it. She handed me the thirty and I went up to the window and put the bet in.

To my surprise, it came in. To my surprise, it paid a touch over $700. We walked up to the window together and as the teller counted out the $351 my new girlfriend\'s face lit up like a Christmas tree and she giggled like a schoolgirl and I handed the teller a ten dollar tip and my girlfriend $175.

\"I like this place,\" she said with a laugh. \"I like it a lot.\"

Granted, the first time her soft-hearted, animal-loving self sees the blue curtain come out, the bloom will come off the rose and she\'ll punch me in the arm for my support of this game, but for now, she\'s bought in: she has already asked me more than once about going back again. She\'s got a bit of Spa City Fever herself.

&&&

Yes, Saturday brought with it the kind of oppressive heat and humidity that leaves people cursing the Spa and left me mopping the sweat that disgraced my forehead with a handkerchief. Certainly, Saratoga is not what it once was: not so long ago, I would have laid any odds that I would never live to see the day when they would ever run the kind of card that they will run tomorrow.

But whether it rains on Opening Day or tomorrow or on Travers Day, whether the Spa\'s best days lie in the rear-view mirror, it is still Saratoga. My girlfriend, in between the time spent meeting the dozens of old friends I only seem to run into up there and the time spent watching that sixth race, commented that it seemed one of the few places left in this land of ours that has changed little over the past eight or nine decades.

When she said this I thought of my horse-playing Papa, my mother\'s father, and of hearing my Nana, still alive and now a hundred years old, telling me how much he loved the track. He died suddenly at forty-on and left my Nana alone with my mother and four other children. Her obviously demonstrated courage in the face of that loss, the stories of it, inspired me as I walked through the early days of my own loss.

I thought of him on Saturday, I thought of how in spite of the changes here, he\'d still recognize the place, and there are few places about which one could say that.

&&&

I fully recognize that this is a website dedicated to the studious application of high-end speed figures, frequented by serious players, and out of respect for those facts I generally read and otherwise keep my big mouth shut, and I apologize in advance for spewing my somewhat off-topic invective here tonight. But there was something about the sarcastic \"go baby go\" comment that drew me out from the shadows.

I could sit here and testify about the occasional days over the past few years when I have employed the numbers to profitable effect, and surely the fact that I have managed to afford staying home with my motherless children for more than two years now offer some sort of cockeyed endorsement of the product on offer here, but none of that really touches upon what I wanted to say tonight.

Really, I just wanted to offer a praise chorus to Saratoga in response to what I perceived as an attack on it.

For awhile there, I thought my life had come to a screeching and permanent halt.

The other day, Saturday, I sat in some seats up at the Spa, my right arm around the shoulder of my son, my left around the arm of my girlfriend, and a dear old friend sitting next to her. A minor profit in my pocket, an ice-cold fresh-squeezed lemonade with two straws in it in my right hand, me and my girl drinking up the cold drink, the four of us sitting there in some sort of very hard-won peace, a post parade prancing in front of us, and an old lyric came to mind,

\"Well, life has been cloudy and gray.
Take the bad memories and put them away.
The sun has come out. We\'ve waited so long.
All of the hard days are gone.\"

It may rain cats and dogs on Opening Day, the old track\'s glory days may be gone, but me, I\'ve waited so long for the hard days to be gone, no matter what they do to this place, it\'s still a place for the hopeful, no matter what they do to the place, it\'s still Saratoga.

[RICH]

That is one wonderful and emotional post, good luck

[Beginner]

Papa,
you missed your calling - you clearly have a way with the word.  That is the best \"non-sheet\" post I\'ve ever read on this board.  I hope the Spa continues to heal you - it is certainly a special place.  All the best to you.

[TGJB]

Chach-- great stuff (again). My only problem is that you tipped the teller. Pretty sure he wouldn\'t have tipped you if you lost.

Red Smith said (roughly), how do you get to Saratoga? North of Albany, make the turn at Union Avenue, and go back a hundred years.

And you didn\'t mention the price of the lemonade. I buy them too, but what do you think the vendor\'s ROI was on that?

Thanks for the endorsement, as well.