1. I'll Have Another
2. Bodemeister
5. Creative Cause
6. Liason !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
8. Rousing Serman
A few random thoughts. Four of the top six horses are west coast. Guess they all were pretty darn fast. No more taking these horses lightly. Baffert knows what he is talking about when he says a horse doesn't like a certain track. Liason ran a good one.
The road to the Derby went through Santa Anita this year.
Big props to the Left Coast. It's been a while, fellas. Good to see the Santa Anita mojo carrying over to CD again.
Liason ran a nice, even race. Backside chatter said for two weeks that he looked nothing like the dud who'd run at SA all year.
Can't get too excited about Rousing Sermon though. He just passed tiring horses.
No one who finished behind Creative Cause did much running. It's that way damn near every year. If you don't earn a check, you're just window dressing. Somebody has to finish 6-20 after all.
I'll say this, though -- CB, robertbrown and probably others were dead right about the non-sheets figure-makers bollixing the SA numbers. The raw times were much more revealing than anyone's adjusted times.
No regrets here. The fig-makers have saved me a ton of money in recent years by compelling me to toss empty suits like Midnight Interlude, Colonel John, Buddy Gil and even Pioneerof the Nile. They got it bad wrong this year, for sure. Oh well. Nobody's perfect.
Santa Anita went back to dirt when this 3yo crop were 2yos, and in the next year, Santa Anita-based 3yos finished 4 out of 6 in the Kentucky Derby.....and Rousing Sermon was 8th. There was no California horse that failed to beat more than half the field in the Kentucky Derby.
There's no way that this is a coincidence. Santa Anita's return to a natural dirt surface has made it relevant again in the Triple Crown trail after three years of total mediocrity. Yes, maybe it's too hard and fast a surface, and the track super continues to work on that, but the fact is that it's REAL DIRT, and 4 out of the first 6 finishers in the Kentucky Derby being based at Santa Anita speaks volumes.
We're back folks! And real dirt at Santa Anita is a large part of the reason why.
