Sophie’s Salad at Saratoga, can also be found on the menu at Mesa Grill! (Sarah K. Andrew)

The minute I don’t post for a day or two all kinds of things come up that I want to point out, or how to turn several small posts turn into one really long post.

Back in Action:

NTRA has several items of note on those who are back in action, of one kind or another. Great Hunter & Spring at Last are back in training and Rags to Riches is preparing to start training in Cali.

You’ll have one more time to ask yourself “Will He Shine?” as he will retire after his next start in the De Francis Dash.

In a Back in Action two-fer, or perhaps a Back in Action one-fer and a Back in Cali one-fer, one of my favorite turfers, Obrigado, is set come back after a few months off on Saturday at Hollywood Park with Patrick Valenzuela up.

Following-up:

Slew’s Tizzy showed in Commonwealth Turf Stakes. He seemed to like to surface and started to come on in the end. If it were me I would probably run him on the turf again or perhaps send him out to Cali to see how handles the various synthetic tracks.

Around the blogosphere:

Speaking of synthetic tracks, Teresa at Brooklyn Backstretch, one of the only folks I’ve seen to consistently raise this worthy issue, has a post on the “big toxic waste dump” factor.

John at The Race is Not to the Swift has a couple of posts of note. One has two interesting videos of Aqueduct… one that documents some shuddered off areas and one that’s a bit of profile and/or ‘whatever happened to’ as told by those who are there. This post generated some discussion about NYRA that’s worth checking and perhaps chiming in if you’re interested.

His other post that has several video clips of sires being shown off at stallion tours. The one of Giacomo, no doubt preparing for his work day, is somewhat alarming (perhaps impressive?) yet also giggle worthy with ridiculous background music and angle of the video. All in a days work!

Valerie at Foolish Pleasure has a nice homage to Octave, a horse that no doubt didn’t get the respect she deserved being R2R’s stable mate.

This also generated some interesting discussion about how the current graded stakes system fails to recognize horses like Octave, among other things. If you’d like to see the American Graded Stakes Committee do something about that, and I know you would, go here and leave a comment.

I Rarely Disagree:

A few opinion pieces and interviews from 2 folks I rarely disagree with… Steve Haskin does not disappoint in his Talkin’ Horses transcript that’s full of great insight and commentary.

Dan Liebman has 2 nice editorials of note, one suggesting that there are plenty of ways in which tracks can work together to better each other and one that discusses a new heartening direction in marketing for the BC.

Finally, I had a business lunch today at Mesa Grill, owned by noneotherthan Celebrity Grill Master and Horse Owner extroadinare, Bobby Flay. Sophie’s Salad was on the menu but no Catmosphere burger… probably not a bad thing.

After Market at the Lane’s End Stallion Open House (sj block)

Apparently After Market had a quiet little retirement after being scratched from the BC [Thoroughbred Times].

I would have thought that I was the only one who missed it but I was reading a handicapping article entitled Big Names to Bet Against [DRF+], and guess who one of the big names was:

As events proceeded, After Market had to be scratched at Monmouth Park because of the soft turf he cannot navigate. That meant After Market will return in the Nov. 23-25 Hollywood Park Turf Festival, where he will likely be dominated again by Crossing the Line, who will no longer be a double-digit overlay, but an overlay nonetheless.

The retirement article was dated Oct 29th and the article quoted above is date Nov 12th.

That’s a quiet retirement if the DRF doesn’t know about it! Dan Illman also published an updated Disabled List today with no inclusion of After Market in the Retired Column.

I’d love to think that maybe he’s really not retired, although being paraded around at the Lane’s End Stallion Open House 11/03/2007 would indicate otherwise.

I was just watching Law & Order SVU, a variety of Law & Order that I rarely watch, (when did Jack McCoy become DA?) and saw this Ebay commercial. It’s really more of a dog racing reference, but pretty funny nonetheless.

It’s hard to see in this version but in the last scene there’s a nice horse plate on the upper right hand corner of the wall… shop victoriously!

Hard Spun at Darley’s Open House at Jonabell (sj block)

To Darley at Jonabell, that’s where… and if you’re missing them as much as I am, check out this set of photos on flickr entitled Darley at Jonabell Stallion Open House.

It’s a living museum, if you will, of great talent that could have been legendary talent.

Garret Gomez after riding AGS in the Classic (Raymond Haddad)

On tying Jerry Baily’s 2003 record for 70 stakes wins in a year… and the year’s not over yet!

His next chance to break the record is in today’s 8th at Hollywood Park, the Moccasin Stakes aboard 9-5 morning line favorite Spring Awakening.

Good Luck!

(and check out the rest of Raymond’s stellar BC photos here!)

The Red Smith was a jam packed field of evenly matched horses. So jammed packed that my pick, Encinas, got completely bottled up behind a wall of horses. He was the first post position but had the bad fortune of being stuck behind Bee Charmer, who starting going backwards at the top of the stretch. He definitely had some run but nowhere to go so I’ll be keeping an eye out for him.

The payouts were kind of insane! Ah, the joy of a big field with no clear favorite.

Exacta: $191

Trifecta: $3,711

$2 Super: $62,207

Dime Super: $3110.35 (!!)

I liked many of them. Besides having Encinas to win I had an exacta box of True Cause (placed) and Musketier (showed)… they both looked great in the parade. In addition to about 3 dime super boxes I also had Crown Point across the board. He lost show by head bob. What I liked about him was that his last win came off of a switch to dirt and then back to turf. His last race on polytrack so I thought he might improve, and he did, just not enough!

As for Dave, he seemed to have a good trip and closed impressively. I’m always happy to see Barclay Tagg win! Dave is owned in part by Parting Glass Racing, a partnership group, another thing I’m always happy to see.

Slew’s Tizzy and Robby Albarado pulling an upset in the Coolmore Lexington (Emily Cathcart)

Slew’s Tizzy is entered in the Commonwealth Turf Stakes this Sunday at Churchill.

I really like this guy and hope that perhaps he’ll like the turf given his penchant for polytrack (and slop!). I didn’t catch his run on the BC under card where he showed, but his last few races prior to that were less than stellar. Hopefully he’s one of those horses that improves with age.

Speaking of which, there’s an interesting discussion going on over at Superfecta about “who would you want to see challenge Curlin next year?”.

I think there are plenty of 3 year olds with potential to blossom in the way Lawyer Ron did this year, don’t you?

I had the good fortune to be at Belmont for the running of the Garden City (full recap here) and, as I noted, Alexander Tango looked AMAZING in the parade.

Usually the only thing I can tell you about a horse by looking at it is whether or not I think it’s cute, but she looked so ready to kick a$$. She reared up a bit in the parade and the crowd really reacted. Her run was impressive, about 4 wide and coming on strong in the stretch. I feel very lucky to seen it it live.

Here she is in the Irish 1000 Guineas Trial (Gr3). She sits nicely just off the pace and then explodes in the stretch. Again, impressive.

Perhaps the saddest part is that they were looking forward to running her next year, something we could use a lot more of around here.

Alexander Tango far left coming on to win the Garden City at Belmont (Sarah K. Andrew)

What a hideous way to start the morning. Apparently Alexander Tango died in a freak accident over night.

More info here.

Since this was past weekend was the first weekend in a loooong time that I wasn’t busy handicapping, I attended to many festering projects around GbG manor.

One them was what I refer to as the annual tax write off. The Lady and I ruthlessly edit our various belongings with the goal of donating as much as possible to a local thrift shop (that has great stuff btw).

I had been wondering about the location of the Exacta plaque for awhile. I got it in a thrift store in Stockholm in 1999 as a joke gift for The Lady as she has a thing about always being right. Not knowing an Exacta from lingenberry, I thought it was Swedish for exactly (it isn’t).

When I gave it to her, along with a few other thrift scores, she looked at the whole lot and shrugged. I specifically asked her “don’t you like this?”. I believe “eh” was the answer. I liked it, but she kept it and stuffed away somewhere (which is why we have to do a “space clearing” at least once a year).

At some point during this summer I remembered the Exacta and asked if she remembered where it was. She thought it was in her closet but didn’t want to deal with looking for it because it would mean having dig through an inordinate about of stuff.

Fast forward to this past weekend. The annual crap-be-gone yielded one the of the many eerie premonitions of my new found “hobby”. It’s worth noting that the Exacta is also my favorite and most frequently placed bet.

Now I just have to find a good place for it. As it stands at the moment it’s probably going to go right below a weird painting that consists of 9 horses and looks like a study in perspective by either a child or an undergrad painting student who’s major is not art… another weird precursor.