Sunday, February 07, 2010
The 77% Non-Solution
Zenyatta got 77% of the turf writers' Horse of the Year vote--the vote by West Coast turf writers, that is. But the West Coast is under-represented among the turf writers who vote--82% come from outside California, Nevada, Washington and Western Canada--so as a result Rachel Alexandra still dominated this bloc, just as she dominated the entire election.
Of the three Eclipse Awards voting groups, the turf writers are the only bloc that publishes how each individual votes. The Daily Racing Form and the National Thoroughbred Racing Association, which is heavy with racing secretaries from member tracks, keep their votes private.
None of this should be misconstrued as an argument that the voting system needs to be overhauled, or that the Form and the NTRA need to follow the turf writers and disclose their votes. There aren't as many West Coast voters among the turf writers because there simply aren't as many news outlets as there are in the East. Those are just the facts, ma'am.
It's interesting, though, that at least among the turf writers, the election closely followed geographical lines. There was a definite West Coast bias in favor of California-stabled Zenyatta, an East Coast bias that favored East Coast-based Rachel Alexandra. I'll see those biases and raise you. . .
To recap, this is how the total vote went, with Rachel Alexandra leading all three groups:
Turf writers, 71-51
Racing Form, 31-23
NTRA, 28-25
The total in favor of Rachel Alexandra was 130-99. Many thought the outcome would be closer, and some thought that Rachel Alexandra wouldn't even win, since she didn't run against Zenyatta in the Breeders' Cup Classic, a race that Zenyatta won with authority. Both horses were undefeated in 2009, Rachel Alexandra in eight starts and Zenyatta, who has never lost, in five. Rachel Alexandra had three wins against males, Zenyatta one. Both horses are still in training, and are expected to meet at least once this year.
Looking over how the turf writers voted, I concluded that 22 of them could be considered from the West Coast. Seventeen of them voted for Zenyatta, five supported Rachel Alexandra (full disclosure: I was one of the five who went against the majority).
In the rest of the country, there were 100 voting turf writers, with 66 of them voting for Rachel Alexandra.
This is how one-sided the geographical split among the writers was: West Coast, Zenyatta 77%, Rachel Alexandra 23%; rest of country, Rachel Alexandra 66%, Zenyatta 34%. In the overall voting for the entire election, it was Rachel Alexandra 57%, Zenyatta 43%. No other horses received votes, and three votes didn't count, when voters either tried to split their votes, which is against the rules, or left the space blank, ostensibly because they couldn't separate the two rivals.
It is a cinch that the Racing Form and NTRA groups are also top-heavy with Eastern voters. There aren't as many tracks for the Form to cover in the West and, for the same reason, there are fewer racing secretaries in the West.
But I can't think of a better voting system than what we have now. Until a change was made several years ago, the winner was decided by bloc vote, supposedly to compensate for the clout the turf writers had because of the disproportionate number of their votes. The Horse of the Year had to gain a plurality from at least two of the three voting blocs. It never happened, but there was the danger that a Horse of the Year could be crowned without he or she garnering the most votes.
I recently ran into one of the West Coast turf writers who had voted for Rachel Alexandra. When I told him I voted the same way, he said: "Well, that's a relief. I thought that maybe I'd be the only one."
It turned out that there were five of us. The West Coast Five, that has a ring to it. There's room on the board for all of our photos, in the event John Shirreffs ever takes up darts.
Written by Bill Christine
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Lemon Drop Kid Deserves a Look
It's the time of the year when the Racing Hall of Fame's nominating committee begins thinking about which horses and horsemen deserve to be on the ballot that's sent out to voters in a couple of months. I'd like to see the committee consider Lemon Drop Kid. Should The Kid ever make the ballot, he's one of those horses whose vote-getting is deeply dependent on the appeal of the horses going against him. Which is one of the flaws in the system, but as you Americans put it,
c'est la vie.
In another time, Lemon Drop Kid probably wouldn't even deserve a Hall of Fame look. He lost more races than he won, was never a Horse of the Year, got only 14 votes against Tiznow for Horse of the Year in 2000, and finished his career with lackluster efforts in two spotlight races. If Point Given returns to the ballot (he lost out to Tiznow last time), I wouldn't give Lemon Drop Kid a chance in hell, but what seems to count in Hall of Fame voting is just getting nominated; many voters have a tendency to return to candidates who can't turn the trick the first time around (Tiznow, to my surprise, was outvoted by Manila in 2008).
Lemon Drop Kid had a record not unlike Kayak II, one of my favorites. Kayak II, who campaigned in the shadow of his stablemate, Seabiscuit, was probably one big win shy of the Hall of Fame, and that win could have come in the Santa Anita Handicap in 1940; there's much anecdotal evidence that Kayak II, who finished a close second, might have beaten Seabiscuit if his jockey, riding to instructions, hadn't strangled him through the stretch run. Buddy Haas went to his grave believing that he was aboard the best horse that day. The Hall of Fame oldtimers' committee, which can't traffic in woulda-coulda-shoulda, has been unable to green-light Kayak II over the years.
Lemon Drop Kid won at least one Grade 1 race every year he ran. Not many horses get to run in that sort of company three years in a row anymore. But every year, The Kid would have been better off if they had closed the books early. He won the Champagne at two, but was fifth at a short price in the Breeders' Cup Juvenile. At three, after disappointing outs in the Blue Grass and the Kentucky Derby, Scotty Schulhofer, a Hall of Fame trainer, skipped the Preakness, saddled his colt for a third-place finish in the Peter Pan and then won the Belmont at almost 30-1 as Charistmatic, bidding for the Triple Crown, broke down. The Belmont should have been Lemon Drop Kid's day in the sun, but instead he became a footnote. I remember spending a couple of hours after the race at the barns--Charismatic's barn, to see if they could save him. Lemon Drop Kid wound up getting a few crumbs in the next day's accounts.
Too bad, because Lemon Drop Kid was a good story in his own right. Schulhofer, a nice man, didn't say much, but The Kid's owners, Laddie and Jeanne Dance, had tales to tell. Both in their 70s, they had been down a lonesome road with a number of horses, before their $200,000 purchase of The Kid paid off. Not surprisingly, Dance was the auctioneer at the first major horse sale I ever saw, at Saratoga in the 1960s. He worked for Fasig-Tipton for 40 years, and had met his future wife at a sale. They eventually divorced, then remarried eight years later. "In between, we found out that nobody else wanted either one of us," Jeanne Dance said.
Lemon Drop Kid came back to win the Travers, but then that late-season door slammed shut. He was along for the ride in both the Jockey Club Gold Cup and in Cat Thief's implausible Breeders' Cup Classic. Older horses, I thought, would be Lemon Drop's undoing, but he came back with his best campaign--I wonder how many horses have won the Brooklyn, Suburban and Whitney Handicaps, and then the Woodward, in succession? He won those races with Edgar Prado replacing Jose Santos, a major concession for Schulhoffer, who had made Santos his go-to rider for several years.
On the threshold of something special, Lemon Drop went down in flames again. Odds-on, his Jockey Club Gold Cup was forgettable, and so was his attempt to beat Tiznow and Giant's Causeway in the Breeders' Cup. Still, all those Grade 1's ought to make him ballot-worthy. I would think he'd have just as much of a right to be listed as, say, Best Pal. Then let the voters decide.
The one-honoree-per-category rule is egregious--obviously qualified Hall of Fame fillies like Open Mind and Sky Beauty have had to bide their time because of it. The sad part is that Open Mind and Sky Beauty will have to wait one more year, because Azeri is eligible for the ballot for the first time. The nominating committee doesn't need any help on this one. Neither will the voters.
Written by Bill Christine
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Getting Out the Vote
Combining the efforts of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Sherlock Holmes' last remaining brother, Interpol, Geraldo Rivera and an old Geiger counter that I found in my garage, I have been able to locate the only two voters who didn't vote for Cigar for Horse of the Year in 1995. Both have sworn on a stack of American Racing Manuals that they erred in filling out their ballots. They deny that the names of the horses Thunder Gulch and Northern Spur were written in their handwriting on their ballots. Their alternate excuse is that they had a spelling lapse.
I expect the Eclipse Awards, ex post facto, reductio ad absurdum, will obtain affidavits from the voters in question, give them Rorschach and polygraph tests and reverse their votes in favor of Cigar. At last the heirs of Allen Paulson will have closure. At last Bill Mott can dedicate himself to a more worthwhile crusade. Racing's second most glaring injustice will have been reconciled. The first? In 1981, when John Henry was credited with all the Horse of the Year votes. There's been a rumor kicking around for years that one voter, who is still living, meant to vote for Pleasant Colony.
This was in the day of paper ballots--you know, like the kind they use in Florida. It was a complicated process: They printed the ballots, mailed them out to the voters, gave them a deadline to return them and turned over the rest to an overpriced accounting firm in New York. It was impossible, unless you filled out your ballot by candlelight, to mistake one horse for another. Now, high tech has taken over. There's no paper, no waste, no concerns about poor handwriting--and the opportunity for one addled voter to vote for Icon Project instead of Zenyatta in the older-female division. It was a big deal, apparently, for Zenyatta to get all the votes in her class, as Rachel Alexandra did in hers, so the voter repented and the Eclipse committee took away Icon Project's vote. Damn. The next time I saw Marty Wolfson, Icon Project's trainer, I wanted to ask him if he had a relative with an Eclipse vote.
The National Thoroughbred Racing Association, which oversees the Eclipse voting, mainly because the other sponsors, the Racing Form and the National Turf Writers, want nothing to do with it, must think that electronic voting is easier, but what's overlooked is this: Just because turf writers can read a Racing Form doesn't mean they're deft with computers. I struggle with my electronic vote every year, hoping I don't hit the wrong button at the wrong time, and I know a number of colleagues who are just as klutzy. One of them called me on a Sunday this year, the day before the balloting deadline, to have me walk him through the process. It was the blind leading the blind, from flag fall to finish. I finally gave him the 800 number for the Homework Hotline.
I don't know why they don't give the electorate three voting options: The old mailed paper ballots for us Neanderthals, fax submissions for those of us who finished eighth grade, and the electronic method for those under age 55. We forget what strides the Post Office has made with ZIP codes. The Baseball Writers Association of America, which runs the Baseball Hall of Fame election, has a tight voting window, like the Eclipses, and manages with far less furor. The deadline for the Baseball Hall of Fame vote is only a week before they announce which players have passed muster, and I can't ever recall a voting snafu. They do fax and snail mail, no computers. "Some of these guys," said Jack Lang, the late secretary-treasurer of the baseball writers, "send in their votes on the backs of matchbook covers. But as long as we can read 'em, we count 'em."
This time, 14% of the eligible Eclipse electorate either didn't bother to vote or couldn't cope with the system. That's not enough to spoil a good dinner. A good dinner, that is, that was a rumor for two and a half hours after everyone was seated in Beverly Hills. That might explain why Kenny Rice, the master of ceremonies, was playing to such a tough house. The invitations should tell everyone to have a late lunch.
Recently, the Eclipse dinner was held in Miami Beach, on a night when the meal was also slow in coming, and the waiters, under strict orders, wouldn't even part with rolls and butter to go with everybody's water. A creative starveling dialed Domino's and had several pies delivered to his table. Salivating people at nearby tables asked him to name his price for a slice, but there wasn't enough pizza to go around. It would have been a grand night for that old loaves-and-fishes stunt.
Written by Bill Christine
