OFF-THE-BENCH STRIKE RATE
 

For purposes of a soon forthcoming blog entry, can anyone supply stats on how comeback runners (absent 60-90 days) fared 5 or 10 years ago as compared to today?

Fwiw, i know Mountain is opening soon so you have to be fired up for that, i noticed at Mountain last March when they opened, SO many horses who last raced at Mountain in december and didnt race in the interim were SUPER live....certain barns had that pattern, they didnt ship to CT or some other place, they just sat around waiting for March. Its a fantastic angle for those of you who plan on dabbling in some Mountain air in March.

I'd love to see you do a writeup on which trainers seemed to have great ITM success with the Dec to March layoff last year.

You're very perceptive. That's the exact focus of the blog.

Not a lot to hang your hat on here. All Tracks Impact Value shows a solid trend up, hovering around 1.00 (no impact) for the past few years.

Mountaineer specific Impact Values are more all over the place and certainly lower than the nationwide values in the past few years. More variability as well, perhaps because of small sample sizes involved.

Ron Tiller
HDW

What you need is numbers for the first month of MTR. There are several tracks (circuits) in the north that don't run during the winter. There are a lot of races where none of the starters have run in 90+ days. You can't compare those races to layoff horse running July.

Thanks for volunteering that data.

Would it be out of line if I asked for between 91 and 180 days?

Thanks. I'm more of a video replay handicapper than a person who looks at 'angles' like this, but there were SO many examples of this it just hit me over the head. I think you get value because handicappers have to at least sort of think "hasnt raced since early December, maybe he or she needs a race". They dont need anything, they're ready to go, especially in sprints and you get value betting the layoff horse as some will toss them out thinking they need one to get fit.

Also, there's very few published works at Mtn, so players must look at the work tab and think "how is a horse going to get fit off one 3F work in 39?" That was also a pattern, very few if any published works.

I have a question if you dont mind...if you show up at Mountaineer at 6am and sit there in the grandstand for 3 hours, will you see a lot of horses working out and they just dont get pubished? Does anyone work out at this place?

Now that Stillclueless has been called "perceptive", look for another 50 threads from 6 years ago to get pulled up. Dear Lord.

Mountainman, it's all about which trainer does the layoff move. Some hit with it, some don't. I can't say which, but everyone seems to be on it these days, so they'll get bet.

Absolutely. And I think my intention here has been misconstrued. The stats I requested aren't really for handicapping purposes or to shape my own theories on comeback horses, but merely to supply context and illustrate a point in my next blog. It's common knowledge that returning runners now win more often than they used to.

The blog will be predicated strictly on mnr results from last march. I've been researching it for several days now.

Many tx, sir. The data falls in line with my expectations.