Notes - Jan 28

Rap Tale is entered in the 8th at Philly Park on Saturday, an allowance for winners of three other than.. Looks like a group that she can definitely compete with. A reader mentioned recently that the purses in PA had taken a turn south, and that's quite apparent from looking at the pp's of this race. The two NW2X races in which she ran there carried purses of over $52,000; but this one is for only $43K. That in fact is less than the $46,250 she ran for in entry level allowance company, so that's a pretty stiff drop.

- Thanks much to reader o_crunk for the link to the past performances of This One's For Phil over at Illman's blog. If you covered up the Beyer figs, there wouldn't be anything unusually out of the ordinary at all in my opinion; and this reader questions the fig itself. I usually get into trouble when I do so. I guess I still don't really understand when a Beyer "is what it is," which I presume was the case here, and when they get projected, which what this case would seem to call for. So I'll stay out of that argument until we see the top two finishers run back. (I'm told that This One's For Phil earned a Ragozin number of -1, which would back up the notion that the race was extremely fast.)

As for o_crunk's disagreement about my comment about the 'public at large,' that's a fair point, but I suppose we travel in different circles of friends. My non-racing fans are in la-la land when it comes to the sport; they're completely innocent and wide-eyed and would believe just about anything I tell them (except, they've learned, who's going to win a particular race). And I don't really know any of them who thought that Barbaro or Eight Belles got hurt because of drugs. Abuse, in the form of too much racing or racing a filly against colts, perhaps, but not drugs. And, regarding Jay Cronley's column, though I've never watched the show, I'd guess that horse racing is hardly the only industry that has been sullied by CSI: Miami and other aging TV dramas as they struggle to come up with new plots that become more and more ridiculously contrived as the episodes wear on.