Gulfstream Pick 3

- I’m going to try the Pick 3 at Gulfstream that starts with the Aventura. I was going to do the Pick 4, but I feel like I’d have to go at least five deep in the 10th and it’s too expensive for me to commit myself to here, because if I said it and then wimped out on it and it came in, you wouldn’t see me back here until around Preakness time. Besides, I want to finish with a bang with a single in the 9th.

7TH (Aventura) – I’ll be rooting for longshots Itsallboutthechase and Dixie Swinger, but will use two others who will be shorter prices. A second look at Catcominatcha’s win in the Iroqouis in which he closed into a slow closing half shows that he ran very fast to keep close to the leaders, and then was game in coming through between horses and nipping High Cotton. Though beaten soundly by that one in the Kentucky Jockey Club, he turns back here to one turn and I think he’ll be tough. And I’m also using Saint Daimon, in large part because I feel a bit freer to spend more having abandoned the idea of the Pick 4; but he's working really well despite what Jerkins said about the last one maybe being too fast. He may be trying to fool us, after all.

8th – I’ll use four of them here – dropdowns Sugar Booger, She Can Punch, and Holden Champagne, and move-up Lady Hartwood, who I could make an elaborate too-much-information kind of case to go against, but I’m not going to leave him out.

9th – The Mr. Prospector Handicap is, to me, one of those races the guys on TVG talk about in which you could go six deep, or just say fuck it and single the one you really like. So I’m going for Nightmare Affair. He’s coming off a layoff since late August, but his workouts are very (too?) fast, and there could be plenty of pace to set up his late run. He’s shows an 0 for 8 at Gulfstream, but had two seconds and a third in four starts over the new main track here last year. He showed nice improvement over the summer at Calder and seems to have found a niche at six furlongs after having run in routes earlier in his career.

So there it is, just 16 combos. I’m cautiously optimistic that I will get to the 9th alive and though I’m worried about the layoff of Nightmare Affair, he looks like a live one at what could be a pretty good will pay. His trainer Manual Azupar even shows, on Formulator, two wins off layoffs of 132 and 133 days at Gulfstream in 2004, around the same length of this rest. Go baby go!

- The Head Chef just called (it's 10:30 P.M. Friday night); she and Eileen are standing right in front of the Gulfstream main track, on the apron, off to the side of the clubhouse. She said there's some kind of shed there with a bar, and that there's a decent enough sized apron in front of the clubhouse. So maybe I should lighten up and just get on the first plane out of LaGuardia tomorrow.