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DAILY SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA HORSES |
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Physicality |
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Charles Carroll
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TRACK SPECIFIC BREEDING Breeding has always played a major role in my decision-making. This is doubly true when it comes to the turf. In the near future, you are going to hear the term "track-specific" breeding used quite often by knowledgeable handicappers all over the country. It is a term that is very common to clients of my DAILY SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA HORSES TO WATCH. In fact to the best of my knowledge, we are the only publication offering this kind of breeding information to its patrons and have been doing so for quite some time. After this writing is published, I am sure that many more breeding services will begin to copy our format and do exactly the same thing for their readers. As you will soon see, to do anything less on a day-in and day-out basis when using breeding as a handicapping factor, invites nothing more than our old nemesis "downside risk"! If you read my annual summer contribution to American Turf Monthly on Del Mar, I have been presenting a small sliver of this "track-specific" breeding. Every year I offer the readers of this article the leading Del Mar turf sires since 1993. This is "track-specific" breeding for the Del Mar turf course. Some time ago, the SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA HORSES TO WATCH decided to take this winning Del Mar turf concept a step further to an even more profitable conclusion. Instead of just offering this invaluable information for a single surface at only one of our three major tracks in Southern California, we at the DAILY SCHTW elected to do both surfaces for all three tracks. Our clients are still thanking us and our new patrons cannot believe their accuracy if used properly. A horse is said to have "track-specific" breeding when his parental lineage has produced winners over the specific dirt or turf surface that you are handicapping now. "Track-specificity" is closely akin to the common terminology "a horse for the course" and perhaps explains the "how and the why" a certain runner has a decided edge over his non "track specific" competition when racing over today’s more favorable surface. New offspring’s from past winning sires over a specific surface (and sometimes that surface alone), have a decided edge over non-winners of that same exact surface. Certain bloodlines perform better or worse over certain surfaces because all of these surfaces (dirt or turf) are markedly different. (How’s that for Rocket Scientry?) If the sire, grandsire and/or the broodmare sire have a proven past record of producing winners over this exact same dirt or exact same turf surface, chances are very favorable for untried runners over this specific surface with similar strong breeding. As a simplistic example, suppose you were looking at and perhaps even considering betting a runner in tomorrow’s "feature" whose many career victories have only come over wet or sloppy dirt tracks. Additionally, you also know that there is no rain forecast for tomorrow and the track is "bone dry" now----and will be "bone dry" tomorrow as well. Is there any need to go handicapping this horse or even keeping him as a contender? I strongly doubt it--at least if everything else is equal. Why would this off-track runner suddenly show a liking to a hard and dry surface? Fact is, he won’t! He should be quickly eliminated over a dry track. Without the factor of "wetness" in his corner for tomorrow’s race, this "off-track specialist" quickly becomes an also-ran! If breeding can be that powerful over an off-track and we’ve all seen the above example hundreds of times in our horse-playing careers, then surely breeding can favor certain horses on other "specific surfaces" --- both dirt and turf. When you give the concept "track-specificity" a little thought, it makes a whole lot of sense! No suppliers of pedigree information refer to "track-specificity". These rating systems concern themselves with what I call a "universal rating" that comes about by this or that sire and/or broodmare sire producing a certain amount of winners from races won all across America and or the entire world. This is certainly a diluted rating, because how a specific sire performs over your home track has nothing to do with what he might accomplish nationwide! In other words, a certain sire could have a very high "universal rating"; yet still perform miserably every time he raced at your specific home oval for any number of reasons such as soil composition. While one might argue that it is better to have a "universal rating" rather than no rating at all, there is a major flaw inherent in giving a horse a general, common, or universal rating that includes "stats" from racetracks other than yours. Services offering ratings in this manner give "credit" to horses whose entire parentage on both sides might have never "actually raced" over today’s specific surface! In other words, a "universal rating" might label him a "star" in a "general sense" over the dirt, but his "universal rating" could be meaningless at your home track. Perhaps his parental lineage either has never run over the specific surface, or has run, but has never produced a winner! Take sire Cee’s Tizzy for an example running over the dirt in Southern California. This California bred runner looms very large at both Hollywood Park and Santa Anita while still holding his own at Del Mar. Combining all three ovals, he has sired well over 100 winners in the past 4 years. Needless to mention, he ranks among the top Southern California sires. That’s a strong amount of wins for the 4 year time period, but many of those winners were in races restricted to Cal-breds only! Take a horse sired by Cee’s Tizzy and run him in Florida and most players would say, "Cee’s who?" The one and only Tiznow might have changed that a bit recently. However, before him, I would have defied you to find handicappers outside of the state of California who knew of Cee’s Tizzy’s actual worth. And rightfully so! He’s a domineering sire in California , but almost a meaningless sire 3,000 miles to the east. xxx Part two of Track Specific Breeding follows here
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