A humble analysis of Kentucky Derby 136

“Space is the place.” – Sun Ra
“Pace is the race.” – R.A. Fritz

….Mine That Bird? Mine That Bird? Mine That Bird?

Oh, wait, this is 2010. That’s different. Never mind.

After I got through the five steps of accepting that the best 3-year-old of this year would not be racing in the Kentucky Derby, I watched the field take shape and couldn’t believe what was happening.

At the risk of tempting the racing gods, things were starting to look almost too easy.

A principle of pace handicappers, such as me, is that several confirmed front-runners are likely to tire each other out contending for the early lead, which sets the race up for a closer. In a race such as the Derby, though, there are often few horses that have to have the front end, so the come-from-behind wins that people love to see don’t happen too often.

This year is an exception. For some reason, there’s enough speed in this field for three Derbys, as several of the major preps were won by front-runners who were able to get an easy lead and carry it to the wire. They will not have that luxury Saturday.

Then there’s another weird phenomenon. The graded earnings requirement, which limits the field at 20, seems to have encouraged the connections of several horses to try the Derby even though most of their graded earnings have come on the turf, or as 2-year-olds who have since fallen off that early form. Just because you can enter your horse in the Derby doesn’t mean you should. (A caveat—and no, not the Belmont winner—here, though: Mine That Bird qualified for the Derby based on graded stakes earnings as a 2-year-old.)

As such, I have found it easy to eliminate two groups of horses.

The following horses either lack any foundation on a conventional dirt track, or do not have sufficient recent form to prepare them for the Derby: Stately Victor, Dean’s Kitten, Make Music For Me, Paddy O’Prado, and Homeboykris.

This group will be too busy beating each other early and figure to have nothing left for the legendary Churchill Downs stretch: Super Saver, Line Of David, American Lion, Conveyance, Discreetly Mine, and Sidney’s Candy.

The next one out is Noble’s Promise. While he’s been consistent up until the Arkansas Derby, and his running style suits the race, there’s just too much question about his condition. No horse, to my knowledge, has won the Derby three weeks after a lung infection.

I don’t see Dublin winning. I don’t care for his tendency to hang in the stretch, and his fractiousness during recent workouts is troublesome. If he thought marathon runners were too disturbing, how will he handle 100,000 drunks singing “My Old Kentucky Home” off-key?

The next horses I eliminated were Mission Impazible and Jackson Bend. I had to throw some more horses out because I don’t have the money to play them all. The speed figures on these two indicate to me they are a cut below the top group. Besides, Mission Impazible is a stupid name and I just can’t see it on a mint julep glass.

So here are the five horses that I plan to use in my Derby wagers.

5. Backtalk. My “Are You Kidding?” selection. Nobody but me likes this horse, which may be a bad sign right there. But if you draw a line through his Illinois Derby—a race where they always get in a straight line and walk to the wire—there are a few things to like. He’s the only horse in the race to have won twice at Churchill Downs and twice on off tracks (some are predicting an apocalyptic flood Saturday). Plus, he’s by Smarty Jones, who won the 2004 Derby in a swamp.

4. Awesome Act. He has a big shot here if he runs back to his Gotham Stakes. Trainer Jeremy Noseda said he lost a shoe in the Wood Memorial, and he does appear to not be going well in the race video, so that start can be thrown out. The distance should suit him too, if his late run in last year’s Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Turf is an indication.

3. Lookin At Lucky. He’s been the most consistent of this bunch, as he was beaten only a head in seven starts prior to his awful trip in the Santa Anita Derby (not that he’d have beaten Sidney’s Candy that day anyhow). The problem here is his post. A stalker like him is likely to run into a lot of trouble from post 1, as 19 horses will be trying to get into his lane. Can’t leave him out of the gimmicks, but a win looks unlikely.

2. Devil May Care. If you like my top selection, you have to like Devil May Care, too, since she won the Bonnie Miss on the same day—in the same time—as my top pick’s last race. There’s also some racing karma at work here. Trainer Todd Pletcher and jockey John Velasquez lost their chance with Eskendereya. It would be a perfect chance for the racing gods to repay them.

(Also—and I’m not making this up—the other night I had a dream about the Derby card where the 11 won and “Duke” was in the horse’s name. The dream was about an earlier race on the card, so bear that in mind. I looked at the entries and didn’t see a horse with “Duke” in its name on the whole card, so I figured I just ate too much Fresh Fish Basil from The Green Mango—great place if you’re in the Pittsburgh area, BTW. As I write this, it dawned on me that Devil May Care is number 11, and Duke’s nickname is the Blue Devils. And this dream was before the post draw. Read into it what you will.)

And the Oscar goes to:

1. Ice Box. It’s been years since I’ve seen a pace scenario set up as perfectly for a horse. There are six horses here who figure to be on or near the lead, and Ice Box is the only stone closer. He came from last at the top of the stretch to win the Florida Derby, and the blazing fractions—and maybe a deep, tiring track—set up a similar scenario Saturday. Expect Ice Box to come in from Terre Haute in the stretch to give Nick Zito his third Derby victory.

Here's what would be a miracle.

It's been 30 years, as we are constantly reminded, since the "miracle on ice", the US hockey team's defeat of the Soviet team in the semi-final round of the 1980 Olympics. There has been endless, exhaustive analysis of the game and for good reason-it was extraordinary that a rag tag bunch of amateur hockey players from colleges and backyard rinks across the US would ever manage to beat the well-oiled Soviet hockey machine. It happened. We all know. Lots of us even watched the movie, which was good, and those of us who live in Pittsburgh, "Hockeytahn" as we like to call it, home of Craig Patrick and sometime home of Herb Brooks, the coach of the winning team, get it even more often.

Here's the thing, though. Men's Olympic Hockey is a completely different game than it was in 1980. Professional players from top teams in the NHL primarily but also other leagues around the world are now allowed to play. The USSR no longer exists, and the Russian team, while formidable, has finished no better than silver and was out of the medals in 2006. Olympic hockey has a much more level playing field as a result. Sweden has won gold twice since 1994 and Finland has the most medals with two bronze and one silver. Canada is a perennial contender, but has only managed one gold since 1952, despite having the likes of Mario Lemeiux, Wayne Gretzky, and Sid Crosby play for the national team. (To be fair, this is pretty much Sid's first Olympics as an adult, so who knows what can happen. So far this year, he's saved Canada from the inglorious fate of being beaten by Switzerland.)

IIHF hockey is wonderful to watch. There are less fights and more scoring. The lines on the rink and the dimensions are subtly different. There are some rule differences that make the game move faster and to me at least make the game more interesting and more fair, like no-touch icing and automatic misconduct penalties for hits to the head, and no restrictions on where the goalie can play the puck. If only the IIHF had any power over the NHL.

It's a good thing to remember the glorious day that the US men's hockey team pulled off their miracle, but honestly, we're not going to learn anything from further analysis. The sport is too different. The Games are too different. Enjoy the now of seeing the Stanley Cup champions playing for three different teams, seeing Jagr back on the ice in this hemisphere, and seeing hockey in its second-purest form once every four years.

Purest form? That would be women's international hockey. Enjoy the games!

And yeah, Johnny Weir got robbed. He did.

Images of gold

Once again, we are in the midst of Olympic fever.

The Winter Olympics have a more limited audience than their summer counterpart, but they still have one of the biggest audiences of any sporting event. Few events define sports like the Olympics in either season.

Start with “Bugler’s Dream,” the song that has been used in Olympic telecasts since I can remember. Few songs are more recognizable, and none are more associated with a single event.

Then there are the events themselves. They are so varied that it’s hard to imagine there isn’t one that somebody isn’t interested in. Ever wanted to watch curling or skeleton? Here’s your chance.

And then there are the Olympic nations. While TV coverage is slanted toward the U.S. and the other countries that regularly face them, the Olympics are a great geography lesson.

The first Olympics I remember were the summer games in Munich in 1972, when I was six. My first knowledge of the Olympics came one Saturday morning in August when I was told that my cartoons weren’t on TV that day. In their place were, in the words of my mom, “all the runners and jumpers and throwers.”

But the first athlete I remember seeing that day was a swimmer who always seemed to win. His name would become immortal before the next week passed—Mark Spitz.

Over the next few days, there were not only runners, jumpers, throwers, and swimmers, but also gymnasts, boxers, wrestlers, divers, basketball players—and terrorists.

The politics of the games hadn’t quite sunk in to me yet. I had a vague idea that the U.S. was a “free” country and the Soviet Union was a communist country, but I wasn’t really sure what those things meant yet. But I was convinced that the Americans were the good guys, of course. And I had little knowledge of the situation in the Middle East that provided the backdrop for the deaths of the Israeli athletes at the Munich games. But I remember the reports on TV and I knew that some people had been killed. And I was left with a powerful image. To this day, my image of what a terrorist looks like is the picture of the ski-masked gunman standing on the Olympic village balcony.

Images are what each Olympic Games leave with us, and the Winter Olympics are no exception. The first winter games I remember were the Innsbruck games in 1976, which I associate with Franz Klammer gliding down a mountain en route to a gold medal.

The most indelible image has to be the U.S. men’s hockey team beating the Soviets in 1980. By then, I knew a lot more about the Cold War and the “us vs. them” mentality that came with every event in which the teams faced each other. I also knew that the Soviets had a huge advantage in many Olympic sports because professional athletes were not allowed in the Olympics back then. When the U.S. won that game, I knew that I was watching one of the greatest sports upsets in history.

World politics—and Olympic politics—are different now. The days of “us vs. them” are gone. When my favorite NHL team won the Stanley Cup, a Russian was named MVP—which would have been unimaginable just three decades ago.

While many things about the Olympics have changed, the images will remain, and this year’s Winter Olympics are sure to add more to our collective memories.

P.S. Jamie said that Johnny Weir got robbed.

This used to be my playground

While aimlessly Googling last week, I stumbled across a website which tells part of my life story.

It’s officially called the Daily Racing Form Historical Online Archive. It includes PDF files of all copies of Daily Racing Form since the 1890s—at least all of them that have been entered online so far.

It’s an ambitious undertaking, and I’m not surprised that most days are unaccounted for. Issues from May and June—Triple Crown season—are the first to be preserved for posterity in most years, which is not surprising, because those are the issues that historians and fans care about the most.

It’s fun to go back to Secretariat’s Belmont and relive the anticipation of the real prospect of the first Triple Crown winner in 25 years. It’s eye-opening to read articles about the big races after the fact to see just how wrong the experts can be. The 1971 Derby edition shows that shocker Canonero II, while not completely dismissed, received baffled mentions as the mystery horse from Venezuela. The past performance lines from that renewal are good for a laugh, as I scoured the lines and the accompanying articles for any indication that horses such as Fourulla and Royal Leverage deserved to be in the race.

But it isn’t the famous races that I find the most fascinating. Having misspent much of my youth at Beulah Park, I’m attracted to the lines on $2,000 claimers at tracks that may or may not exist today—Narragansett Park! Lincoln Fields! Havana!—the grist of racing back when it was king.

Beulah isn’t in the current archives much because its race meets back in the day usually took place in the spring and fall (its spring meet still ends on Derby weekend), so many of my reminiscences must be experienced through other Ohio tracks (although I did find several cards from the ‘80s when Beulah was being mismanaged under the name Darby Downs).

It all comes back to me...those Sundays in the chilly air, maybe some rain, as they played the National Anthem and track announcer Jim Dolan gave the changes for the day, and I wrote down every last one of them with more zeal than I ever gave to any classes in school. I would hand two bucks to my dad to bet for me, and he would make no comment one way or the other, even if he thought my choice was ridiculous.

Then I would rush off to the paddock and study the horses intensely as if it were the Kentucky Derby. Then off to either the rail or the grandstand to see the race. I usually lost because my handicapping methods were pretty unsophisticated (“Hey, this week I’ll just go down the program until I find a horse that’s dropping in class!”). But it was my own, action-packed little world for one day a week.

And through it all was the Form. I would read it cover to cover the night before while listening to "Saturday Night Cruisin’", an oldies show on WBNS radio. Even before I set foot in a racetrack for the first time, I was familiar with the Form. There was just something about the mass of statistics that approached art.

While handicapping is far more sophisticated than this, there was something that showed me the general difference between a good horse and a bad horse at first glance. The better horses’ lines appeared cleaner, loaded with small numbers, 1s and 2s. Slow horses’ lines appeared cluttered, full of 11s, 12s, and, in later years, negative comment lines. How simple, and beautiful.

It may sound weird to discover such splendor in race horse statistics, but it’s no stranger than finding beauty in, say, Campbell’s soup cans.

Secondary is primary

A Deadhead would say “What a long, strange trip it’s been.”

The Steelers’ season is over, and while many are disappointed that they didn’t get the help they needed to get into the playoffs, everybody—even the Steelers themselves—agrees that it should not have come down to needing that help.

Things started out so well, as the Steelers went 6-2 and beat Denver and Minnesota.

Then came a bad slide in the middle, with losses to Kansas City, Oakland and Cleveland.

Maybe the Steelers were listening a few weeks ago when I called them the worst NFL team at that moment. After that, they won their last three games, including a stellar 500-yard performance by Ben Roethlisberger against the Packers. But it was too late, as there was just too much to overcome to make the playoffs.

Mike Tomlin has started to clean house quickly. He's fired the offensive line and special teams coaches, which were two of the weakest links on the team this season. But the most crucial area is the defensive secondary.

The secondary's weakness was exposed when Troy Polamalu was injured. We know that Polamalu is a world-class player who can put himself anywhere he needs to be on the field, but I figured that the rest of the secondary was strong enough to fill in.

The Troy-less pass defense was the weakest part of the team. In some of the most egregious losses, the Chiefs and Raiders were able to pass on the Steelers all day. One of the most embarrassing stats is the number of interceptions by cornerbacks during the season--one, by Deshea Townsend (who was not a starter) in the final game against the Dolphins.

Tomlin is already working to improve the Steelers for next year, but special emphasis should be placed on the secondary. While just about every position except quarterback (and maybe the receivers) could use some work, cornerback would be the perfect first-round draft pick.

First to worst?

The Pittsburgh Steelers might be the worst team in the NFL at this moment.

You might think that’s an exaggeration, but look at the teams they’ve lost to lately. The Kansas City Chiefs. The Oakland Raiders. The Cleveland Browns. These are among the bottom feeders of the league. While they don’t have the worst record (because they did well earlier), I don’t think they could beat any team right now.

Many reasons are being offered for their miserable performance. There are some that need to be reviewed.

The play calling is not what it was during last year’s Super Bowl season. There have been some calls that have been mystifying. The Raiders game started to unravel when the decision was made to go for a 53-yard field goal. Jeff Reed missed it and Oakland turned it into an easy score.

Injuries have not helped. Many people have talked about Troy Polamalu being out for much of the season. Less attention has been paid to the injury to Aaron Smith, one of the major playmakers on defense. The concussion sustained by Ben Roethlisberger has not helped, either, although Dennis Dixon did not do badly as the backup against the Ravens.

It has even been suggested that President Obama is to blame for sending Dan Rooney to Ireland. Sounds like another excuse for right-wingers to bash Obama, but what do I know?

The offense has been reluctant to use the run for some reason. Even though Rashard Mendenhall was the star in the Broncos game—the Steelers’ last win—the offense has been going to the air too soon and too often. This is, or can be, a power offense. Why are they afraid to run more?

The weakest part of the team lately has been the secondary. While Polamalu may well not come back this season, the remainder of the secondary has not done well. Look at the Oakland game. The Steelers were beaten by big plays—long passes with no defender within 10 yards of the receiver. The receivers were unknown outside of Oakland. There was Louis Murphy, and I can’t remember the name of the other guy. We’re not talking about Randy Moss here. The draft should concentrate on cornerback and safety.

The offensive line has been inconsistent. In the Steelers’ wins, they have played impeccably and opened holes for the running attack. At their worst (Thursday’s Browns game), they have folded like an accordion and given defenders a straight shot to Roethlisberger’s head.

Special teams have been awful, with several return touchdowns allowed and at least one big return guaranteed in each game. Jeff Reed’s non-attempts at tackling have made ESPN’s “C’mon, Man!” more than once.

But what it comes down to is a lack of desire. Something is missing. This team just doesn’t want to win. You could see it in the Browns game. This was a team going through the motions, one with no drive, one that might as well not show up.

There are three more games left, and they will not be easy. The Packers, Ravens and Dolphins are all fighting for playoff spots. The Steelers? It’s really hard to ask professional athletes to play for pride, but what’s left?

Penguins 4, Avalanche 1.

Tonight, from the mind of Bob Errey.

"You gotta have that fire in your pit!"

"The Avs, over by the bench, you can throw a blanket over them! (I still don't know what that means.)

"The Pens just want to keep their sticks down and keep their hands off of bodies!"

"Billy Guerin, you could see it in his voice!"