Monday Night Notes - Nov 28

- Just watched the Real Quiet Stakes from Saturday at Hollywood, which featured the controversial DQ of Bob and John, who won with by six while hand ridden home at 1-5. Based on the outrage expressed by Bob Baffert at Valenzuela ("[Valenzuela] rode him out the whole way......Dirty riding and we get disqualified. It's a joke, unbelievable." ) and jockey Victor Espinoza ("You have to wonder if the stewards here can see what is going on.”), I expected the foul to be less obvious than it appeared to me. [LA Times] If the rules require a DQ if the stewards felt that Bob and John coming over on Kissing Knight cost the latter a placing (he missed the place in a head bob), then don’t you have to disqualify him, no matter how much I’m sure they’d have preferred not to? And as for Valenzuela, it wasn’t like he was chasing Baffert’s horse out to the middle of the track. He rode him off the rail, sure, he's a race rider as we know, but he actually hit the horse right-handed right before the incident.

This reminds me, especially since I’m on this thing about how the TV coverage we see from abroad seems far more innovative than what we see here, of the sprint on Dubai World Cup day. Alex Solis claimed that Javier Castellano on the late Saratoga County (how about him for the sprint Eclipse?) impeded him and cost Pico Central second. If you saw the telecast, you’ll certainly recall the live coverage of the stewards explaining their decision to the two jockeys. They acknowledged that there was interference, and that it did cost Solis second, but the rules in Dubai do not call for a DQ unless they thought he would have won the race. So under those rules, Bob and John certainly would have been left up.

Bob and John is a blue-blooded Stonerside homebred, by Seeking the Gold out of graded stakes winner Minister’s Melody (Deputy Minister), and a half-brother to 2005 NY stakes winner Connie Belle. Bob and John’s third dam is Too Bald, the dam of Exceller, Capote, and Baldski.