News and Notes - Feb 28

- Declan's Moon worked a snappy three furlongs in 34.60 on the Cushion at Hollywood Park this morning. Ron Ellis had told the Form on Feb 9 that "Everything is 100 percent....They went over him with a fine-tooth comb. It's back to the drawing board," and said at the time he was looking at a couple of months before another comeback.

- A lot of discussion about TVG over at Pulling Hair (here and here), and Lenny writes a long letter to the network. (And PHBH also links to a piece in the Louisville Courier-Journal that discusses Churchill's plans to form an ADW platform of its own). I have little to add other than to reiterate that I don't really care about exclusivity (though I do feel that having exclusives inspires the network to take more pride in the production quality of their broadcast); but more about distribution, so that we can all watch races from the tracks we want to.

I think that the ideal setup for me would be one in which we could flip through those channels with high numbers, and along with having a choice of those highly specialized music channels, we'd have (and I'm really dreaming here) a menu of every track's own simulcast presentation. Then we could watch whichever track we want, and see the post parades, get the paddock analysis, as well as some truly substantive analyses that aren't offered from afar on TVG and HRTV. Then a national network - say the NTRA Network - could concentrate on news, stakes recaps and replays, handicapping shows for beginners and "experts" (like us, hee hee) alike, discussion and debate, The Works, and special trackside broadcasts of stakes races. And, of course, those wacky infomercials. Like I said, I'm just fantasizing...though there's no reason why tracks shouldn't be offering their simulcast feeds on the internet now.

- An anonymous commenter brought the death of a two-year Storm Cat colt during the under tack show at Calder to our attention, and the fact that he was consigned by the same folks who brought us The Green Monkey. Bloodhorse reports that the cause of death was an aneurysm. Consignor Dean De Renzo said: “This was one of the hardest days of my life....The colt had all the right moves, and we had no indication anything was wrong." Our game is one of ups and downs to be sure, and even the highest of highs becomes just a distant memory when tragedy strikes.