Keeneland claimers

[Valuist]

Definitely very high quality maidens, allowance and stakes races at Keeneland but you cannot find more overpriced claimers anywhere. The horses coming out of these Kee claimers are great go-againsts, when they venture to CD, AP or Belmont. Today has a couple prime examples: the 3rd was a 50000 claimer for older males. A whole field of 5 went postward, and other than the winner, nobody else is worth even half of 50000. The 4th at least has 8 horses but only one horse in the field managed to run an 80 Beyer last out and that was a wire job in the slop. A good rule of thumb might be to divide these claiming prices in two.

[Valuist]

5th race at Churchill a classic example. We had two horses coming out of the same Kee open F25000 race taking money, another out of a Kee F15000 race and one filly coming from an OP F20000 field. Amber Jule, the Oaklawn invader, just destroyed the field. I would not be surprised to see more of this at the CD meet.

[JackS]

Perhaps because Kentucky is an incubator for high quality and high priced American horses in which the best are sold to race elsewhere. The effect might be that horses leftover after the sales are less than their equals in other states?

[Valuist]

I think barns tend to bring mostly top quality allowance, stakes and maidens there and you have a lot of uncompetitive claiming races in which half the field is comprised of horses eligible for NW2 and NW3 claiming. TP cards quite a few of those but Kee doesn't run conditioned claimers; they just run those horses for inflated open claiming tags.

This may also explain why Kee often has numbers which are inflated, even at the stakes and Allw levels. If pars are used to project numbers in the claiming races, those projections are likely to be too high, which will throw off the other figures as well.