Purses a'Plenty

- Right on to NYRA's plan to boost purses at Saratoga for longer and fuller races. Steve Crist writes in DRF Plus that a high-grade money-won allowance race with a field of 12 could be worth $114,000 instead of $74,000. Saratoga already was the top purse-per-day track in the country, and this could send their numbers through the roof; and this all, of course, without slots. This is the kind of thing I had in mind when I said during the franchise process that NYRA's experience conducting top-notch race meetings had to count for a lot. Do you think Capital Play or Empire would have thought of this?

Racing secretary P.J. Campo hopes to have an easier time filling the longer distance races. In the meantime, in order to fill the races during the always difficult final weeks downstate, he's had to resort to a generous dose of maiden claiming sprints on both dirt and turf, and with claiming tags as low as 25K. But he seems to have gotten them all out of the way now, and the closing weekend cards look OK on first glance.

I think that Campo gets high marks for this meeting. As I've said before, we're probably never going to see the kind of consistent quality that we used to have here, given the way the better horses are handled more carefully and raced less, and the NY-breds that need to be accommodated. That will be the case at Saratoga as well once it gets into the middle of the week-or-so-too-long meeting. But, using variously conditioned claiming races (including, of late, dual condition beaten claiming races), starter allowances, and, yes, those ubiquitous hard-to-handicap but fun-to-watch turf sprints, he was able to present cards that I found consistently interesting and competitive. Campo has been helped too by a lively claiming trainer colony, infused by relative newcomers like David Jacobsen, Enrique Arroyo, and Bruce Brown, and featuring a purse structure which has encouraged them and others to race their horses at levels at which they can win. Here's hoping that all of the above, plus these new purse incentives, makes for some great betting days upstate.