For the first time in its history, the Breeders' Cup World Thoroughbred Championships was hosted by Del Mar, the racetrack built by Bing Crosby and Gary Cooper among other notables from Hollywood and which proudly carries the motto "Where the Turf Meets the Surf."
In the weeks leading up to this years running of the Breeders' Cup, The Old Master of the Turf supplied me with ample research material:
The photo above depicts most - but not all - of the race day programs and past editions of the Daily Racing Form that Mr B provided to me.
The week immediately preceding the Breeders' Cup is among my favorite each calendar year; Just a boy and his Daily Racing Form "Breeders' Cup Advance" issue with its lifetime past performances for all pre-entries from all around the globe.
I quickly got down to serious handicapping. My serious handicapping was, just as quickly, derailed by the silliness revealed within the DRF's pages:
Van Dyke, D is a jockey, not the famous actor Dick Van Dyke.
Kiki Dee is a horse, not a duet partner for Elton John.
Interesting trends were revealed among the European invaders:
In one European race from earlier this year, Hydrangea ran a close second to the victorious Rhododendron. Potted plants must have gone delirious.
A strong martial theme was easily discernible among this years Euros:
Close inspection revealed old friends and old friends cracked wise:
Never try to match dinosaur humor with a paleontologist. They're too good!
Deep investigations into DRF lifetime past performances reliably turns up oddities:
The European horse in question here - Karar - went so wide turning for home that he drifted out all the way to the grandstand side railing. Talk about understeer?! Karar still managed to finish that race in second by a neck! Even a minimally better effort and Karar may have won that race by 10 lengths. I blame the jockey! I always blame the jockey.
The following trouble line comment by a DRF editor fairly well defined the term "empty:"
This horse started strong; 1st by a length at the start, then extended the lead to 1st by a length and a half. However, the wheels rapidly came off; 2nd by two and a half lengths, 6th by 20 lengths to finish 7th (and last) by 39+ lengths.
Empty indeed.
Perhaps most shockingly, the *1.05 notation indicates this horse went off as the 1-1 even money favorite! "Empty," and for the horse players brutal.
The B Team Syndicate returned to scenic Shelbyville, Indiana for this year's Breeders' Cup. Of all the regional places that we might patronize for this event, Shelbyville is the preferred choice for The Old Master of the Turf. Unquestionably, Shelbyville offers the best buffet, the shortest lines at the betting windows and provides the most comfortable setting. Plus, I know the location of a secret, executive-quality restroom at the racino. Due to conflicting travel arrangements, we made the drive in two different vehicles. Lou and Mr B departed from the Fairfield office early on Saturday morning, with Lou doing the driving westbound on I-74. Getting a head start on them, I left from The Ranch in the Jeep Main Battle Tank and headed - first - northwest for Liberty, Indiana on US 27 before reorienting to a more westerly and southwesterly direction on Indiana state highway 44. A dense fog greeted me just west of College Corner, IN:
The dense fog made for an eerie backdrop as I navigated the dark, undiscovered country of south central Indiana farmlands where wild and fearsome beasts - like Big Randy - are reported to roam. Light traffic and a fairly straight highway led me through a rapid succession of Johnny Cougar Indiana small towns; West College Corner, Cottage Grove, Lotus, Liberty, Connersville, Glenwood, Homer and Manilla [?!]. One small town stood out as the highlight for me:
Rushville, Indiana! [Insert here ubiquitious Rush video clip]
Arriving at the racino shortly before 11am, I wasn't certain whether my B Team Syndicate partners had already arrived or whether I'd gotten there first. By way of finding out, I sent them a selfie - what else? - from the 3rd level of the parking garage.
Their reply; Still about 15 minutes outside Shelbyville.
This, I gleefully recognized, would simultaneously sit well and not sit well with Mr B who likes to be early. VERY early. First, in fact. He would have been happy that I was there "on time" and ready to get down to bizniz. He would also have been disappointed that he didn't beat me there.
I headed inside. And rubbed it in.
I know. If you've seen the inside of one Midwestern casino, you've seen them all.
Meanwhile, Lou and Mr B arrived.
Lou captured this action photo (above) of Mr B charging full steam ahead!
I couldn't help myself. This photo was taken just outside the race track's grandstand. Which we soon discovered, to our shared disappointment, wouldn't open for another hour. The B Team Syndicate had beaten all the patrons... and staff... by a mile.
A familiar name was found in the race program for the Breeders' Cup undercard:
Claudio's namesake ran third.
Long, gruesome story short; The B Team Syndicate was shutout. Not one of us cashed a single winning ticket.
Here were my close calls:
Here were the tickets I wasn't even close on:
Here are the sum total of my spent shell casings:
I came tantalizingly, agonizingly close on two races late in the day:
Each of these two wagers (above) are superfecta boxes that require each of the selected four horses to finish in any order 1st through 4th (the horses are listed on the tickets merely in order of their program numbers). Down big, and having been shut out all day it was doubly painful to see my selections finish 1st-2nd-3rd-5th in the 9th Race and 1st-2nd-3rd-?th in the 11th Race. In the 9th Race, there was a photo finish for 4th place.... and my horse was edged out of 4th into 5th place by a nose. Respectively, these two tickets - had they been winners - would have paid me about $400 and $700.
That 9th Race was the Breeders' Cup Mile. I'd told anyone who would listen, all that week, that the Mile was the most challenging race to handicap. It was difficult to fathom. I'd given that BC race more consideration than any other on the race card, +/- 3 hours total, and to come that close to nailing it was bittersweet.
The 2017 Breeders' Cup lived up to its reputation of being the most challenging day of handicapping, the proof being found in that day's payouts.
The first four Breeders' Cup races this year saw winning horses with odds of;
17-1
30-1
67-1
11-1.
Resultingly, the Early Pick 4 (which included all four longshots, above) paid an astronomical $289,005.40. That, for a $1 wager. Somebody had it, but not anyone who handicaps horse racing. That is the payout for somebody who just plays "their numbers," akin to playing the lottery. [By way of comparison, the Late Pick 4 with winning horses off at odds of 3-1, 12-1, 14-1 and 2-1 paid a more pedestrian $1,257.15.]
In those same four (Early Pick 4) races, the favorite finished;
7th
10th
7th
7th.
In the very next race, the favorite ran 6th.
A favorite did win - at long last - the next race (that devilish 9th Race) but longshots (odds of 12-1 & 14-1) won the following two races.
The winning Pick 6 payout, of which there were a handful of winning tickets sold, was $388,423.15. If you were holding a ticket with 5 of 6 winners, your consolation payout was a respectable $1,381.80.
This is the point in the recap where I take pride in pointing out how I correctly picked more winners than did the assembled collection of DRF writers. But having been shut out at the betting windows, I cannot make that claim for the 2017 Breeders' Cup.
Of the 15 DRF experts that published their picks for the BC race card, four were similarly shut out. This includes such illustrious DRF experts as Mike Watchmaker (the DRF's in-house odds maker) and Andrew Beyer (innovator of the eponymous Beyer Speed Figures).
Pretty good company with which to be shut out!
Six more DRFers correctly identified just one winner. Of the 15 experts, nine had one or no winners. It was that kind of day. That's horse racing, as Lou was heard to say. DRF dude Jay Privman was the champ having correctly identified four winners. Privman knows his sport. Good job, Jay!
Roll the credits!
The interminable length of 2017 MLB playoff games was a hot topic on my text feed last month.
The initial and obvious target were the American League games with their infernal, damnable Designated Hitter:
The sweet spot for 9-inning MLB games is +/- 3 hours. Longer if it's a warm, sunny "Business Day Special" in June, more brief when it's a cold, rainy night game early in the month of April. Likewise, the National Anthem should not last longer than 1 minute 20 seconds just as God and John Phillip Sousa intended. It's the National Anthem, not an operetta or a Broadway tryout.
Intelligent baseball cognoscenti shared my sentiment:
Regrettably, the epic-length playoff game malaise was not restricted to the Junior Circuit:
Watching Cubs' playoff games approaches war crimes-level of torture under the best of circumstances.
MLB does itself and its next-generation of baseball fans no favors by scheduling the start time for playoff games at 8:20pm in the Cincinnati Time Zone, Cincinnati being the ancestral home of professional baseball. MLB should re-institute day games for the World Series. My proposal is that each participating team host one day game, Games 2 and 4. This allows each city to host at least one primetime World Series game with all the pomp and circumstance of player introductions, fly-overs, etc and provides MLB with their requisite TV viewership and lucrative commercial revenue from advertisers while still ensuring the youthful fans in those same host cities the opportunity to watch their home team play (daytime) World Series games in their entirety.
The glacial rate of playoff games inspired me to write poetry:
Haiku fits perfectly within the visual limitation of smartphone screen size.
I was unstoppable. As were, seemingly, the playoff games.
All was not playoff doom and gloom and the poetry inspired thereof:
One-upmanship at its barroom finest.
Along with MLB payoff games, October ushers in the fall racing meet at Keeneland:
The World Series presented America with the too-cool for cheering fans of the N.L. Champion L.A. Dodgers:
Being a Senior Circuit fan, I was forced to root for the Dodgers..... painful as that always is. At least my boy Joc Pederson was crushing the ball.
A World Series Game 7 is a world-stopping event, or at least it once was long ago in Pax Americana. I headed down to Lou's palatial estate with a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos to watch the spectacle unfold in his baseball museum. Rocking out in the Jeep Main Battle Tank to satellite radio, the foreboding musical selections foreshadowed the looming Dodger demise soon to befall L.A.:
I hope somebody alerted the Z-list celebs stuck in traffic on the 405! A fire of a different sort was bearing down on Chavez Ravine!
Another wrong turn on MLB's own I-405 traffic jam to irrelevancy is November baseball. The World Series is and should always be an October event and preferably it should conclude no later than the middle of the month. The red line was crossed before out of necessity. Anything short of a national catastrophe should preclude November baseball. Yet there we were, again, this year and the satellite radio immediately followed Chuck D's Game 7 warning with another prescient alert:
Indeed, it was a cold November rain in the lead-up to Game 7:
You will note in the somewhat blurry photo above, from the helm of the Jeep Main Battle Tank, the rain-drenched street, GNR "November Rain" [talk about interminable!] on the radio and the 46-degree temperature indicated in the instrument panel.
A more-blurry version of the photo above makes for better art:
In the aftermath of the Dodgers Game 7 defeat, interminable playoff games and interminable songs on the radio, for my early-morning drive back to The Ranch I was treated to an epic-length performance done right!
I caught all 20 minutes!
Turning onto Curve Road, shortly after 1am (thanks, MLB!), I was gently serenaded by satellite radio's most-played song:
Roll the credits!
October 14th, a warm and sunny Saturday here in SW Ohio, the Green Diamond Gallery hosted an open house. For a minimal cover charge, the general public was welcome to tour the Montgomery baseball museum which normally requires a $2,400 annual membership to gain entry. This was a return engagement for Lou and me. Our first visit was recounted here in the digital pages of Heavy Artillery last year in On Days Like These; October 2016.
Herewith, a few items of note which did not appear in the previous recitation.
Among the two dozen Babe Ruth autographed memorabilia on exhibit [!!!], this Ruth-signed baseball stands out as the best example and is easily the best example I've been fortunate to observe firsthand.
It is possible, I'll allow, that I may have seen a comparable Ruth-signed ball when I visited the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown way back in the 1980s but I don't now recall that. It's safe to say that, outside of Cooperstown, you would be hard-pressed to encounter a more impressive example.
On the subject of being hard-pressed to find better examples are these stunning, early-period autographs of Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams which are elegant, highly-stylized and nothing like that which you'll find today up for auction on websites, in auction houses or for sale in your local sports memorabilia shop:
Good luck finding a Joe DiMaggio autograph with this much flourish on the Joe.
For an autograph that is all flourish and no discernible signature, check out this example:
Give up? That is the signature of a character named John T. Brush who, among other accomplishments, owned the Cincinnati Reds from 1891-1902.
There are a multitude of strikingly good signatures on display at the Green Diamond Gallery. Hall of Famer Johnny Mize was consistently good at making a crisp, attractive signature. In last year's blog post I shared a photo of Thomas Edison's beautiful signature. Former Reds second baseman (1952-59, 1964) has a great signature:
Very simple yet artistic! Minimalist, one might suggest.
The Green Diamond Gallery has on exhibit countless authentic, game-used memorabilia. Among the collection are a wide variety of tickets to historic games:
In the photo above, reflecting my white shorts and turquoise golf shirt, is a ticket to the Yankees game of July 4, 1939. On that date, in pregame ceremonies at old Yankee Stadium, Lou Gehrig gave his immortal "Luckiest Man" speech. Of course I could not have been there that day in 1939, but to think that I could be so close this artifact - this ticket - for that historic event brings me as close as is possible. Astounding.
Some of the memorabilia exhibited are so rare as to be virtually unknown to all but the most informed researcher:
Who knew that in 1918 Hall of Famer Honus Wagner owned an automobile garage? Was that sales? Service? Both? And in 1918?! That puts Hans at the vangaurd of the automobile revolution. Incredible. I particularly enjoy seeing this iteration of an old phone number; Bell Phone 197-R. Add to it the bold signature at the bottom and this piece, to steal a phrase from Hall of Fame broadcaster Marty Brennaman, has my eyes spinning like a dial telephone.
A baseball fan can - and does - spend uninterrupted hours investigating the Green Diamond Gallery's collection. After an hour or four of being dumbfounded by so much rare and exceptional memorabilia, one almost (but not quite) becomes blase toward some displays:
Autographed bats and baseballs by every individual member of the 500 Home Run Club? Ho-hum.
Photograph signed by DiMaggio, Mantle and Williams? Yawn.
OK, OK. It should be obvious here that I exaggerate. A baseball fan would never become so immune to items such as these on exhibit, as demonstrated by the mere fact that I photographed them, to dismiss their special nature. And one cannot feel anything other than gratitude for having the rare honor of experiencing this collection in person.
The Green Diamond Gallery continues acquiring memorabilia, including memorabilia from more modern and current players:
Jay Bruuuuuce and Kris Bryant.
Ryan Sandbag and Neon Deion Primetime $anders. How could you not love Deion? To this day, Deion Sanders remains one of the all-time favorite Cincinnati Reds of My Dear Elderly Mother.
The general public was granted a mere 4 hours to tour the Gallery on that October Saturday. Afterward, Lou and I walked the two blocks up Montgomery Road to have lunch at the fabled Montgomery Inn. We'd been looking forward to that all week!
But they were closed.
Evidently, the Montgomery Inn is open only for dinner on Saturdays.
We settled for another fine establishment, midway between the Green Diamond Gallery and the Montgomery Inn, called Stone Creek Dining Company. We were shown to a table with an expansive view of the intersection of Main St and Cooper Rd "in the heart of Old Montgomery," as the saying goes.
Immediately to the left of this serene scene, on the opposite corner, was an old two-story red structure. From our table, we could see (but not read) an historical marker affixed to the siding. After lunch, we took a stroll to educate ourselves as to why this venerable old building was historically significant.
This, we discovered, was the Yost Tavern. I didn't capture it from the best angle. The Yost Tavern was built in 1805. For perspective, Ohio achieved statehood in 1803. Around these parts, that qualifies it as being ancient. Nearly pre-historic.
Roll the credits!
