Breeders' Cup Time(s)

How badly does the Breeders' Cup want to move past this year's disaster of tired synthetic track controversy, major defections, and too many races? Yesterday, they unveiled their logo for next year's event, on good old dirt, at Churchill.

(Of course, the last time they ran it on dirt didn't turn out so hot either with the track turned to slop by four days of relentless rain. And you know, if it's not synth or slop, it could be factors such as track configuration (say, the one turn at Belmont), or an unfortunate post position draw, or the use of a rabbit, or any number of things that can cast doubt on a single race as a true championship event. The fact is that horse racing is a tough sport to boil down to one day; and, on the other hand, horses no longer race enough times or against each other frequently enough to always draw any conclusions from an entire season either. Maybe they should just bag the whole Eclipse concept and instead devote all the energy involved to properly marketing the game as the gambling endeavor that it is.)

I hope and plan to get to some handicapping of next Saturday's races only here - I'll be at work for the ridiculous Filly Friday and I'm boycotting those races here and as far as my wallet goes. In any event, I obviously have not been devoting the same time and attention to the event as I have in past years; so I'd like to instead direct you to the best resource online. There are several of them; but I've found that they are of varying quality, at best.

The Breeders' Cup itself has this year offloaded most of its content to the Breeders' Cup 360 site, which, unfortunately, is dominated by Jeremy Plonk. Here we are, one week before the event, and the feature story concerns in part an account of who he bet in the 1997 Sprint. I mean, really. Below that are video analyses from Oct 11, and a contest in which readers submit their best Breeders Cup score.

What I want to see most in a Breeders' Cup site are sections for each of the 14 races which feature, with one click, relevant information neatly organized and, especially, handicapping tools. But when you click on Divisions on this site, all you get is a mish-mosh list of stories and posts, none of them more recent than October 17 as of this writing (on Oct 30). There's a dropdown list at the top to specify divisions, but still no content other than links to stories in a format unfriendly to the eye. This is all pretty weak I'm afraid, especially for a site which billed itself as a comprehensive handicapping tool. (Full disclosure: I wrote for the Breeders' Cup site two years ago and was not invited back. And I'm not ashamed to shake off my usual modesty here and tell you that I think that the stuff that both I and Paul Moran wrote that year as a whole blows this stuff away. Just my highly biased opinion of course.)

The Daily Racing Form has its usual excellent Breeders Cup Advance available for a price. But the free stuff seems lacking as well. I like Watchmaker's rankings (pdf), but otherwise it's basically just a depository of links to DRF stories, with no other tools readily available even if you click on the links for each division. The sidebar contains links to features such as DRF Plus (paid), Ticketmaster, and the Inside Track blog that are available throughout the year. The BC Challenge link is more helpful, featuring video replays of many (though not all) of those races which, as we know, hardly included all of the relevant preps this year. And they're not sorted by division. The Statistics link actually leads one to the BC site.

Bloodhorse.com's Breeders' Cup Section does have divisional links on its front page, and there's a bit more info here than the two sites mentioned above with links to profiles of the contenders. But otherwise, just another list of links to stories.

To me, by far and away the most useful site I've seen is that of the Thoroughbred Times, and its 2009 Road to the Breeders' Cup section. Click on a divisional link, and you get the whole package in one easy on the eyes shot: besides the relevant stories, a list of pre-entries with sire and trainer (is that so hard?), and, best of all, a complete list of relevant preps for that particular division, Challenge races or not, with high quality pop-up videos of every single one run in North America. There's also a Statistics link which leads one to a page (its own) containing some interesting stats on past races, including past winners (sortable by owner/breeder/trainer/jockey) post positions, and winning margins. (Would love to see a list of the past winners' previous prep race or two as well.)

So a great job by TT here, congratulations to all involved, and I'll be listing their links to each division over on the right sidebar as soon as I have a moment.