Monday Morning Message with Jason Beem July 15, 2024

A good Monday morning to you all! Hope everyone made a pile of dough wherever you were betting this weekend. It was a strange opening week on a few levels at Colonial Downs, which I’ll talk about in a bit, but just wanted to start with Saratoga as we’re now one week in. 

I was watching their races Saturday between our races at Colonial, and the early ones were chalking out pretty hard. I think a lot of us who try to be contrarian can get bogged down and frustrated when a series of races goes really logically to strong favorites. I also think some of us counteract that by instead of sticking to our plans and opinions, we sometimes start looking for really illogical things to happen to get even or just get back in gear. While I think it’s important to think outside of the box, sometimes chasing longshots just because it’s been chalky is just throwing logs on a fire. It’s just a different form of chasing your losses. 

I saw some people post their tickets online for those early races, and as a general rule I don’t like to “ticket shame.” I prefer to “ticket discuss.” What someone does with their money is their decision. However, I also think there are big learning opportunities by examining anyone’s tickets. 

Two of the tickets I saw for those early Pick 5s both seemed to have to  me the same core issue. It’s one thing to like favorites, but if you do, in those P(insert number) wagers, you have to be very strong with them. All the tickets I saw had at least one race where they had the top three choices in a three-deep race. 

Tripling your ticket cost when the other three or four legs of your ticket are all favorites or second choices just becomes such a killer in my opinion. Even just going two deep in a race with a 4-5 shot as one of them is so brutal if your other horse is the pretty logical second choice. Your ticket cost is doubled, and most of the time you’re going to get the favorite who everyone else has. Some of the times you’ll get your second choice, and that’s your best-case scenario. But you had to double your ticket cost to get there and it’s likely not that big of a separator. And again, what does the rest of your ticket look like? 

OK, now back to the racing side of things. I think the Diana (G1) was the race I was most excited for this weekend, and about midway down the backstretch, you could kind of see how it was playing out. That :49 and change half mile time went up, and you could see that Flavien Prat was sitting very comfortable on Whitebeam, and you could sense she was probably long gone. 

One of the funny things about turf racing is that it looked like such an easy victory, and yet the margin was only three-quarters of a length. It was, however, very cool to see Moira fire a good effort off of the bench. She ran so well in third in the Breeders’ Cup Filly & Mare Turf (G1), and to come back off the layoff and run a good second here behind a perfect-trip winner bodes well for her this summer. I would think she’d head back to Woodbine in the fall, but maybe we see her once more at the Spa? 

Here in Virginia, we had a very good opening day on Thursday. It started raining after the races that night and didn’t stop for about 36 hours. Our Friday evening card got washed out. Saturday things came back to normal though, and we were able to run our Million Preview card. 

The stakes all scratched down a bit, and Integration only had to beat two rivals in his win the Preview. Kendrick Carmouche was back on board, and down the lane it looked as though Integration was struggling to switch leads and maybe focus. I’m not a great judge of horses by any means, but I found it a bit concerning if we’re projecting ahead to running in the Arlington Million (G1). But once he did switch and level off he looked pretty good. The other thing is that the turf was soft, so maybe it just didn’t have the normal springy look to it we’re used to at Colonial. 

Speaking of Colonial Downs, I’m going to have a weekly column here on TwinSpires.com that will come out Tuesday mornings with some thoughts on horses and racing from the past weekend at Colonial Downs. It’ll be called “Catching My Eye,” and I hope you’ll check it out. 

Everyone have a great week!