Strange Day

There was a strange occurrence here in NYC on Wednesday. I went out for lunch, and it wasn't raining. Not only that, the sky was an unfamiliar color, a pale shade of blue. Whatsmore, there was a bright round yellow circle shining through; I stared at it in wonderment for several minutes. I found it quite hypnotic; however, now I'm seeing slow-moving spots; like a field of 5K claimers plodding by.

Well, everything's back to normal now; it's grey and raining again, and man, did it pour last night. I'm told that if the bright yellow circle appears enough, the track at Belmont will dry out. So maybe we'll have a fast track and grass racing by Belmont day. And then perhaps we'll have some more horses too. Wednesday's card (with the track actually rated good), featured a grand total of 52 horses in the nine races - only 51 of which finished. Precious Kiss suffered a fractured sesamoid to her left foreleg. She was to undergo further evaluation. [DRF] The fact is though that the fields for dirt races weren't full to start with. Throw in all the off-the-turfers, and the scene at Belmont is quite bleak. I'll start getting with the program once the programs become more attractive. As I've always said, the prospect of no more sloppy tracks is reason in and of itself to make the synthetic track project worthwhile.

- The Yanks lost in ten innings to Tampa Bay last night, and I can't imagine a more dispiriting loss for a baseball team at this still-early stage of the season. Coming after being swept (again) by the Red Sox, they trailed 3-0, but tied the game on a clutch two-out, base clearing double by Mark Teixeira in the bottom of the 8th. Then, after a scoreless inning by Mariano Rivera, they had the winning run on second with one out in the 9th, and I'm thinking, they really need to score this run. They didn't. Sure enough in the 10th, Phil Coke, their only other effective reliever of late, is greeted, on his second pitch, by a long home run by Carlos Pena (his league-leading 12th). Then, they have the tying run on third with one out in the bottom of the inning, with Teixeira up again....and on a 2-0 count, he pops up a fastball down the middle. Are you kidding me? He was barely done slamming things around in the dugout before Matsui flied out to end the game. All this played out in a depressing setting; this entire homestand has been played in the rain and before vast sections of empty seats, and not only in the $1250 section. The Yanks could use that bright yellow circle to emerge as well.