Monday Morning Message with Jason Beem Nov. 18, 2024

A good Monday morning to you all! Opening week here in sunny Florida at Tampa Bay Downs, although we’re expected to get some significant rain on Wednesday. Fingers crossed, but the good news is with the weather expected, the whole card is on the main track so no worries of going off the turf. I hope you’ll join us this season at Tampa Bay Downs as we race from Wednesday all the way through Kentucky Derby Day. I’ll certainly write more about TBD as the season goes on. But today, let’s talk about the claimers! 

What always seems funny to me about the Claiming Crown is that none of the races are claiming races; they’re starter allowance races. Of course, they’re starter allowances for horses who have run at given claiming conditions, but that always has made me chuckle about this event. It would be kind of cool if they were claiming races, just to see how many shakes there would be for the best horses, but I also wonder how many trainers would bypass the races to avoid the claims. These kinds of ideas are why they don’t let me be in charge of anything. 

I really do love the ethos behind the Claiming Crown, and I think it’s great to give the more everyday horses shots at big purse money. Of course, you’re still going to get a lot of big-name connections who have these higher-end claimers, but I always find myself pulling for the smaller barns and outfits on these types of days. 

One thing I always try to remember when racecalling is how important every race is to the connections and beyond. Your run-of-the-mill $5,000 claimer on a Friday could be the race an owner’s been pointing to for weeks. It could be the last leg of a once-in-a-lifetime score for a player. Sometimes many of us in the racing publicity and media side of things spend so much time hyping up the big races and names, that we neglect the animals and connections who really keep the game going for our customers to wager on. I’ve said a lot lately, big days aren’t really a problem with horse racing. We have to get people to want to watch and wager on regular days because there’s a lot more of them than there are Grade 1 Saturdays. 

Claiming Crown got me thinking about some of my favorite claimers from over the years. One that has been running here at Tampa in recent years is Seventy Seventy Cat.  He’s a classic old lower-level claiming horse who didn’t get a win last season, although he did hit the board a few times. He ran my first season at Tampa and came from behind for a nice win, and I don’t know what it was about him other than his name is weirdly fun to say, but I always get excited when I see him on the track. Green and yellow silks, every time! 

Going back to some of my older favorites, before I worked at Portland Meadows, I was a fan of a horse named Tissington. He was nicknamed Fred and in 102 career starts, he competed only in Washington and Oregon. He won the Rocking Chair Handicap at Grants Pass which was for eight-year-olds and up! Just another cool throwback horse and the kind I’ll never forget. 

My first favorite claimer was from way back when I was a kid. Like a tiny kid. Fascal Rascal only ran at my hometown track of Longacres three times, but when I was like three years old, my dad knew her trainer and I got to sit on her back with my jockey helmet on and everything. Plus, what a great name. My mom even remembers the name Fascal Rascal because I said it so much as a kid. She won two of 20 starts and had career earnings of $5,600.  How crazy is that. But I’ll never forget her.  Just like in all walks of life, an everyday hero is a great thing to be. And so many of our claimers are just that.