Dark Day Files

THE DARK DAY FILES: War Stories

Posted on by Andrew Champagne

The idea for this installment of “The Dark Day Files,” admittedly, came partially from the world of professional wrestling. Often, when a wrestler of considerable renown isn’t contracted to a particular company, he or she will do what’s known as a “shoot interview” and provide some background on his or her experiences, as well as tell stories and shed some light on stuff fans and followers may not be aware of.

It first occurred to me Sunday that I had enough material to start telling stories. I was working from The Daily Racing Form’s newest temporary bureau, a Starbucks in Santa Monica, ahead of an attempt at the Los Angeles trivia championships, where the winning team splits $1,000 (spoiler alert: we didn’t win, but we led at the halfway point and finished a respectable 11th of 32 finalists). In and of itself, this coffee shop just off the beach could provide the setting for the 2017 answer to Billy Joel’s “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” given the eclectic mix of people coming and going (the great Hunter S. Thompson would have had a field day psychoanalyzing some of these people!).

However, my epiphany came when an older woman asked if she could sit down at my table so as to plug her laptop in to charge. I obliged, and we started talking. She asked what company I worked for, I answered honestly…and it turned out that this woman, who I had never met or heard of before, had freelanced for my current employer many years prior.

I was floored. What are the odds of such a chance encounter happening in a random coffee shop 3,000 miles away from the company’s headquarters? Seriously, if there’s a mathematician out there that has nothing better to do, I’d love for someone to try to calculate it.

Ultimately, I realized that I’ve been lucky enough to do way more cool stuff that can be claimed as “work” than any person should be allowed to experience. Of course, spending multiple summers at Saratoga is near the top of that list, but I was on-site at the 2010 Winter Olympics in what doubled as my first taste of post-college employment. I did a radio broadcast of an NCAA men’s lacrosse tournament game at the Carrier Dome, one of the best venues for the sport anywhere in the world. I shared a press box with fellow Ithaca College alum Karl Ravech during regional play of the 2010 Little League World Series. I’ve gotten to meet world-renowned members of the sports world like Warren Moon and Jim Boeheim, as well as a lot of athletes you’ve never heard of, but would do well to know.

This column tells a few fun stories that I think you’ll like. If the reaction is there, I’d be happy to try to do it again in a few weeks. Got a question? Got something you think I should tackle? Write it in. I see everything that comes in, and if I can make this stuff more enjoyable for you to read, that’s a win for me.

With that said, here we go!

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ERROR-GATE

Back in the spring of 2013, a colleague of mine at The Saratogian went to cover a high school baseball game featuring the paper’s hometown team. The Saratoga Springs Blue Streaks’ best player was Alex Chandler, who went on to play for four years at St. Rose, a Division II college, following his graduation. This particular game, though, was not Alex’s finest hour. He committed four errors, and my colleague did his job by writing about it in a truthful, honest fashion. The writer didn’t go out of his way to humiliate the kid, but he did note the facts, since these misplays were pivotal points in the game.

When the athletic department at the school saw the story, certain officials went ballistic. They claimed that the story should have said the team made four errors, not one particular player. Everyone at the paper thought that rationale was ridiculous, as it’s the job of a sportswriter to accurately tell the story of a game’s events. Eventually, all parties involved got over it, or, more accurately, got tired of screaming at one another and agreed to stop. The truce put an end to that matter…or so I thought.

A few months later, I covered a summer league game featuring the Saratoga Stampede, a local American Legion team that featured many of the same kids that were on the Saratoga Springs High School team. Their coach that year was Eric Thompson, an assistant at Skidmore College that I had a great relationship with thanks to many basketball games spent with him working the table and me not being willing or able to shut up (shout out to Skidmore SID Bill Jones, who will gladly verify that fact if asked!).

I got to the field, shook Eric’s hand, and talked with him for several minutes, all the while noticing several teenagers giving me the dreaded stink-eye (important note: Alex Chandler was not in attendance that night). I thought it was curious, but I hadn’t done anything to those kids. After all, I was the lacrosse writer that spring and didn’t cover a single inning of high school baseball. For that reason, I didn’t sweat it as I walked to the visitor’s dugout to get their lineup.

As I walked back the other way to my seat in the bleachers, though, I heard Eric lay into several of his players, and I will never forget what he said or how he said it.

“IF DEREK JETER COMMITTED FOUR ERRORS IN A GAME, DO YOU REALLY THINK THE NEW YORK POST WOULD SAY THE YANKEES COMMITTED FOUR ERRORS?!?!?!”

It was all I could do to not burst out laughing as the kids stood there, positively shell-shocked by what they were hearing. I don’t even know if Eric knew how much delight I took in hearing that, but he certainly knows now. Eric: Find some way to get Skidmore a West Coast swing!

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THE BEST HIGH SCHOOL FOOTBALL GAME I’VE EVER SEEN, AND THE BEST DEADLINE-DRIVEN WRITING I’VE EVER DONE

Two very small towns between the New York State Northway and the New York-Vermont border each house high school football teams that were competitive at a state-wide level when I wrote for The Saratogian. In 2012, they came together for a night I’ll never forget.

Cambridge was one of the top-ranked Class D football teams in the state. They were experienced, had tons of athleticism for a school that small, and had an aggressive coach that didn’t hesitate to use said athleticism against overmatched foes. Their rival, Greenwich, didn’t necessarily have the speed or quickness to contend with them, but what they did have was running back John Barnes.

You know the old football adage about certain coaches having three plays: Run left, run right, run up the middle? This game was that mantra, come to life. John Barnes carried the football 46 times for 377 yards that night, an average of more than eight yards per carry (as if that wasn’t enough, he also added one catch for 30 yards). However, Cambridge, which played from behind for most of the night, tied the game in the fourth quarter, stuffed Barnes at the goal line on the last play of regulation, and won in overtime on the fourth touchdown run of the contest by that team’s own star running back, Matt Parmenter. Side note: Only later did I find out that Barnes had lost his grandmother shortly before the game, which added to the stream of tears he talked to me through. To his everlasting credit, when an assistant coach saw him crying and tried to end the interview early, Barnes waved him off and finished talking to me.

The game started at 7 p.m., and it was over at around 10. By the time I had gotten my interviews and moved to a place where I could write the recap, it was shortly after 10:30. The Saratogian’s hard deadline was 11, and the closest thing I had to an office was the front seat of my 2007 Chevy Impala.

I wrote like a madman, trying to convey the emotions of what had happened along with the enormity of the performance John Barnes put together in the loss and how this one game sent both programs on opposite paths for the rest of the season. Twenty minutes later (at about 10:53), I wound up with what I still consider to be the best piece of deadline-driven journalism I’ve ever written. If you’re so inclined, you can read it here.

Oh, and if any of you know John Barnes, thank him for me, would you?

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BREAKING UP A ROAD TRIP LIKE A DEGENERATE

Back in 2010, I, like every other college student who graduated that year, was beating the pavement looking for work relevant to the field I was in. The economy was a mess, and amidst many stories I could tell about my time looking for a job (there’s no shortage of them, and they’ll pop up whenever I write this stuff), I’ll focus on one a lot of you will get a kick out of.

I had secured an in-person interview for a news reporter position at a radio station in Charleston, West Virginia. This may not be tops on your list of vacation destinations, but for a recently-graduated Television-Radio major at Ithaca College, this was a big deal. According to recent Nielsen data, it’s the 70th-biggest media market in the United States, and it’s not often that a new college graduate breaks in, on the air, in a top-100 market.

I packed a bag, drove my car for the better part of 12 hours (it should’ve only taken 10 from New York’s Hudson Valley, but traffic was heavy through Pennsylvania), and arrived at a Best Western down the road from the station. My interview the next day went well (or so I thought), and after stopping at another motel near the West Virginia-Maryland border, I set about driving the rest of the way home.

You know the feeling you can get when you’ve been in a car for 18 hours over a three-day period? If it could be described in words, it would say, “I don’t care where I stop, BUT I NEED TO GET OUT OF THIS CAR!!!” That’s how I felt going through central Pennsylvania with no company but the car radio, so I started looking for a spot to pull over. All I was looking for was a rest stop with a picnic table and a vending machine, just a place where I could park the car for 20 minutes or so, breathe in some fresh air, stretch my legs, and clear my head.

Imagine my shock when I started seeing signs for Penn National.

I had never been to Penn National, and given that the day I rolled through was a dark day, I would not be seeing any racing there. What I did take in, in vivid detail, were the bright lights, loud sounds, and pretty colors that could only be associated with one thing: A casino.

I strolled in and found a $15 blackjack table, which at the time was the lowest-limit game they spread on the casino floor. To this day, I don’t understand why I sat down and bought $100 in chips. Even now, when I go to Vegas, I usually play $5 blackjack. I will occasionally play $10 blackjack if the structure is agreeable or I find a good “blackjack switch” game (you play two hands and can switch the top cards, and in return, blackjacks pay even-money and all dealer 22’s are pushes; at this point, my father is probably shaking his head just reading my description). That said, even in a comfortable financial state, I don’t touch $15 blackjack.

You probably think this is setting up for me to get killed, but in a plot twist, the gambling gods were kind to me. I played just one shoe, killed the 20 minutes I wanted to kill, and walked away with enough of a profit to fill my gas tank a few hours later in the middle of nowhere. Plenty of eye-rolling ensued when I told my parents about the unplanned pit stop later that night!

And no, I didn’t get the job. They were nice people, and it makes for a heck of a “what-if,” but ultimately, I firmly believe that I got to where I’m supposed to be…which seems like as good a spot as any to end this week’s column.

THE DARK DAY FILES: Using the Double to Your Advantage

Posted on by Andrew Champagne

My first exposure to the daily double wager came watching the classic movie, “Let It Ride.” If you’ve seen it, you know the scene I’m referring to, and you’ll have to visualize it because I can’t find the clip on YouTube (trust me, I looked, and I’m not linking to a pirated version of the full movie). The protagonists walk into the track, and a tout is screaming, “HAD THE DAILY DOUBLE!,” in an attempt to sell his tip sheet. The punch line, of course, is that he had it…18 months ago.

Back then, daily doubles WERE once-a-day wagers, usually on the first or last two races of every card. As other multi-race exotics wagers gained popularity, doubles were offered more and more, and most big-time racing jurisdictions now offer them in every possible race.

The double has long since relinquished its crown as the most popular multi-race wager. 50-cent Pick Fours and Pick Fives, along with some jackpot Pick Six wagers at even lower minimum increments, have surpassed them in average handle. However, 28 years after “Let It Ride” was released in theaters (yes, that was almost 30 years ago; news flash, we’re all old), I’m a firm believer that the double is as good a place as any to find the commodity that drives wagering on horse racing: Value.

I do a daily bankroll play for The Pink Sheet. The premise is simple, and similar to that of the “Battle of Saratoga” that was once must-read material in the New York Daily News. I’m given $1,000 at the start of the meet to bet with however I wish, and I keep a running total while also getting a few paragraphs to speak my piece on whatever I want. I’m not restricted to any particular bet, and one tactic I’ve found great success with is keying an otherwise-prohibitive favorite in doubles and using it with a small number of horses in surrounding races.

I’ll demonstrate. In last week’s Shine Again Stakes, Carina Mia was a 1/2 favorite in win wagering. She had spent most of her career running into the likes of Songbird, and this spot represented serious class relief. I played three $10 doubles that singled her in the first leg. She won, and a first-time starter from the Todd Pletcher barn won the finale. The $2 double paid $21, an incredible value given the circumstances, and my $30 investment returned $105. A simple $30 win wager on Carina Mia would have returned $46 and change. Instead, we got 5/2 odds on our money.

A similar situation unfolded Sunday, when Rally Cry won the Alydar, a 9/2 shot won the fourth, and a $2 double paid $31. That day’s bankroll section had $35 worth of double plays, and even though we whiffed on the first few, we got back $77, thus doubling the odds on Rally Cry (who was 3/5 at post time and ran like it).

Turning a 1/2 favorite into a 5/2 shot, or turning a 3/5 favorite into a 6/5 shot, doesn’t sound sexy. From a mathematical standpoint, though, that’s what you need to do if you’re grinding it out on a daily basis. There’s a lot to be said for going after the big score in the Pick Six, but not everyone has the bankroll or horse racing acumen to do that. Additionally, it can get discouraging playing reasonable Pick Four or Pick Five tickets often and going 3-for-4 or 4-for-5. In those situations, the player is right more often than not, yet isn’t rewarded for it.

I’m not trying to disparage those bets and those who play them. I love the Pick Four, especially when the sequence features favorites beaten by logical horses and the payoffs increase accordingly. However, it’s easy to get on a long losing streak with such wagers. I’ve been there. At my previous employer, I tracked my tickets (two years before someone on Twitter had that idea!), and while I was profitable with such wagers in 2015, I went 3-for-4 on about two-thirds of Pick Fours I posted during the 2016 Saratoga meet. Unfortunately, they don’t give discounts for coming close!

Doubles are straightforward, easy to understand, and fairly simple to explain to a gambling novice. If you can use them to build around a heavy favorite in one leg and a few horses you like in another, you may be able to extract some value out of them. Like anything else in handicapping, getting the most out of the double is about picking your spots, knowing your bankroll, and getting your money in when situations are advantageous to you. Watch the probables in races starting and ending with an odds-on favorite, and you may be surprised at the value you’re able to get.

THE DARK DAY FILES: Short Fields in Big Races, and How to Stop Them

Posted on by Andrew Champagne

Sunday’s Shuvee at Saratoga made handicappers from all walks of life wince. The race named for a mare that won back-to-back renewals of the Jockey Club Gold Cup in 1970 and 1971 (back when that race was the biggest race for older horses on the east coast), one that boasted Grade 3 status and a healthy $200,000 purse…drew just a three-horse field.

This is a recurring theme this year, and it’s a growing concern around the country. The Beholder Mile, a Grade 1 race for older fillies and mares at Santa Anita, saw another three-horse field. Sharp Azteca demolished just three others in Sunday’s Monmouth Cup. Saturday’s Jim Dandy, the main local prep race for the Travers Stakes, had a five-horse field, as did the Grade 1 Clement Hirsch at Del Mar a day later.

What’s going on here? These races are the ones fans care about, and, allegedly, they’re the ones big-money owners get in the game to compete in. If that’s the case, why are top horses continually avoiding these spots, leaving the track, fans, and gamblers to suffer and grouse?

As I mentioned in Sunday’s edition of The Pink Sheet, there’s no easy answer to this problem. What we’re seeing here is a combination of factors, ones I hope to shed a bit of light on in this edition of “The Dark Day Files.” Got something to add? Think I nailed it? Think I’m full of…something? Send in your questions and comments. I promise, I read every one.

The first thing to consider is the declining foal crop. When you start off with less possible horses and have the same number of races, average field size is going to decrease. This, unfortunately, is a problem that isn’t going away anytime soon, nor is there anything resembling an easy solution. Thankfully, there are other factors the industry can influence that may lend a hand in solving the short field conundrum.

I’ve talked at length in past columns at many previous stops about the breeding industry and how the tail wags the dog in many instances. In prior decades, horses were bred to run and did just that for many years. It wasn’t uncommon to see top horses run 10-15 times per year for multiple years. Now, though, if you’ve got an exceptional 3-year-old male, stallion rights are often purchased very early, and the priority often becomes getting them to their second careers unscathed.

From the financial standpoint of owners and breeders, this is logical. A male horse can only earn so much money in a career, and will earn exponentially more at stud. Take, for instance, American Pharoah, who commanded $200,000 for his breeding services in 2016 and had dates with more than 200 mares. On paper, that results in a cool $40 million, and we won’t even know if his offspring can run until 2019! That we didn’t get to see him race against California Chrome and Arrogate as a 4-year-old is unfortunate, but given these financial figures, we should be extremely grateful we got to see him run three times after he made Belmont Park’s grandstand shake.

I have nothing against breeding operations, many of which double as some of horse racing’s top owners and do great things for the sport. They’re taking advantage of a proven business model, as they have every right to do in such a competitive industry. With that said, here’s the most important question that we need a definitive answer to: Are we still breeding to race, or are we racing to breed?

If we’re breeding to race, let’s breed for stamina and soundness instead of pure speed and, ahem, “brilliance.” Let’s make sure the horses that rise to the top of the game are given the chance to stay there and can run more than once every two or three months, and let’s give fans chances to see them do their thing at racetracks around the country. If we’re racing to breed…well, then that opens up a can of worms this column can’t address.

Meanwhile, there’s also plenty that tracks can do to solve the problems short fields bring. They’re hurt by those in many ways, from the negative publicity they result in to the lack of handle they generate. NYRA, in fact, buried the Shuvee as the first race on Sunday’s card, so as to keep it out of the Pick Six and Pick Four sequences.

The most obvious answer is to reward the horses and connections that run multiple times at the highest level. Give them additional reasons to show up, perhaps bonuses for horses who sweep certain races or finish best in a certain series. Forever Unbridled skipped the Shuvee, a race she would’ve almost certainly been favored in, to await the Personal Ensign on Travers Day. Would that decision have been made if, say, $250,000 was to be awarded to connections of horses who win multiple graded stakes races at the same Saratoga meet? I don’t know, but I bet that carrot being dangled would have at least gotten the connections thinking about it. Furthermore, that could’ve easily brought a mare or two from Monmouth’s Molly Pitcher (which somehow drew eight horses for half the purse) up north earlier than anticipated. To go further still, imagine what such a bonus program would do for 2-year-old races at Saratoga, which are already considered some of the most competitive in the world.

Del Mar has gotten rave reviews for their “Ship and Win” program, one that helps ensure fields are full and brings in connections that don’t normally frequent California meets. Install a similar program at Saratoga, one that provides travel reimbursement and purse incentives, and you’ll likely see an increase in field sizes, especially for big races. NYRA can certainly find the money to make all of this happen, and for the sake of the product and to avoid future embarrassment in graded stakes races on big stages, they should do just that.

There are other, smaller things that can be done, of course. Let’s get a neutral study on the effects of certain race-day medications (like Lasix) on a horse’s long-term soundness and strength. Let’s forgive horses that lose (looking at you, Arrogate bashers), or horses that win, but not the way we want them to (looking at you, Songbird bashers). Let’s appreciate the horses that stick around for a while and make us remember why we fell in love with the game, rather than attempt to nitpick their resumes for what they didn’t do (looking at you, Wise Dan bashers who couldn’t stand that he raced mostly on turf).

I’m a handicapper, a gambler, a social media producer, and a writer. Above all, though, I’m a fan of this great game, one where you can be closer to the athletes than anywhere else and legally make money if your opinion is correct. I sincerely hope that this trend of short fields goes down as an unfortunate fad akin to the pet rock, the Macarena, and male rompers. If it doesn’t, top-tier racing, with the exception of a few big days, could be in for a world of hurt.

THE DARK DAY FILES: Slumps, Family, and Lady Eli

Posted on by Andrew Champagne

“I suck.”

Not the way you expected this to start out, huh? Well, that’s what was going through my head this past weekend.

If you’re visiting this site, you probably know that, in addition to my duties as a Web Producer for the Daily Racing Form, I’m the featured handicapper in The Pink Sheet, the daily racing insert in The Saratogian. I had picked the first winner on the first day of the meet…and then proceeded to go 1-for-the-next-18 on my printed top selections.

Every handicapper goes through slumps. I’ve actually written about how to get through them and bounce back. That said, when you’re putting your name behind your picks, and your picks aren’t coming through, it’s incredibly frustrating. Add in my insane competitive streak, a chip on my shoulder (the reason for that is best saved for another column many years from now), and a general desire to put forth good work, and what you get is where I was Saturday afternoon.

Welcome to the life of a public handicapper. On its face, the task seems simple: Handicap every race, every day at Saratoga from mid-July through Labor Day, pick your top three horses, and do better than the people lined up against you. Following the retirement of Nick Kling (a world-class horseplayer and an even better guy), my responsibilities expanded to include race-by-race write-ups and a bankroll blurb, the latter of which was directly inspired by the “Battle of Saratoga” blurbs in the New York Daily News, which I devoured every time I went to the races as a kid.

When you’re going good as a public handicapper, very few things feel better, especially if you’re cashing tickets as you go. When you’re running bad, the cards seem to go by slower, and about the only thing you can do is eye the next day’s program and see if there are any opportunities to catch up. The “boo birds” do come out on Twitter occasionally, hiding behind fake names and using pictures that aren’t their own, but that, I can deal with.

I’ve always been very good at dealing with other people telling me that I stink. I’ve gotten hate mail from a Kentucky Derby-winning owner and upper management at one of the most prominent racetracks in the country. I’m blocked on Twitter by the current head of a conference whose stalwart program I worked as an athletic communications intern for from 2010 through 2012. I’ve been name-called, abused, and told I’m horrible at my job, all by the same person and all in the past two and a half months (go on Twitter; it’s not hard to find). Long story short, I’m pretty confident in my own ability to take punches that are thrown by other people.

When it’s ME telling MYSELF I stink, though? Oh, boy.

I’m extremely fortunate to have a great relationship with my father. He taught me how to handicap, he brought me to the track once a week during the summer when I was growing up, and I’ve always said that if you hang around him for five minutes, I suddenly make much more sense (this has been confirmed by many friends and co-workers over the years). Unfortunately for him, this meant that any horse racing chatter we had via text message Saturday included me bombarding him with updates on just how badly I was doing and how badly I felt about it. Not helping matters was that his computer was, in layman’s terms, throwing up all over itself, or that he possesses the most annoying text message alert I’ve ever heard (a fact that I’m sure accounted for about 15 percent of his annoyance level!).

We were both about at our respective wit’s ends before the Diana. Lady Eli, one of the best stories in racing, was running, and in fact would go off as the heavy favorite. However, before the race, she and stablemate Antonoe both broke through the Saratoga starting gate.

In the case of Lady Eli, it didn’t matter. Neither did the weight she gave to her rivals, or that she may not be quite as explosive as she was before she endured her life-threatening battle with laminitis. She and jockey Irad Ortiz, Jr., circled the field and put away the game Quidura, giving the mare another Grade 1 victory in a career that has featured such wins at ages two, three, four, and five.

It’s tough to feel bad about anything in horse racing after seeing something like that. I don’t do “sappy” much, but it was nice seeing a reminder that I’m doing what I believe I was born to do, which is talking about horses to audiences that will hopefully make some money along the way. Things got even better the next day, when I was given the green light to contribute selections and analysis on DRF’s GamePlan from time to time. The day after that, I had three winners and a second-place finish from six originally-picked winners (three scratched). It’s not the start I’d hoped for, but at the very least, whatever negative juju I once had seems to be gone.

Sorry for being a pain in the neck, Dad.

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This is the first weekly installment of “The Dark Day Files,” and I sincerely hope you enjoyed it. Got an idea for a future column? Click here to contact me.