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Originally Posted by classhandicapper
IMO, there's nothing in Hoppy's record to indicate he's not as good now as on his better days.
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It used to take horses like California Chrome, Shared Belief, Gunner Runner, Arrogate, Lea, Beholder, and Effinex to put Hoppertunity in his place.
Now all it takes is horses ascending from the allowance ranks like Top Of The Game, Seeking The Soul, Giant Expectations, and Backyard Haven...
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His 97 at 12F was off a layoff in a very big win where he wasn't all out and his last race was too short for him.
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I should hope not. Both the runner up and the show horse are claiming horses. The latter just ran unplaced in a $12.5K on Sunday at Santa Anita (the former was unplaced for $62.5 the same day).
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This was his 3rd race off a layoff and he was probably aimed for this. He was running 101s against BETTER horses late last year even though he's probably at his best going 10F or 12F now.
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If he's better now at 12 furlongs than middle distances it is most likely because he gets class relief. He won top races like the Clark, the Rebel, the San Antonio (2x), and the San Pasqual in his earlier days between 8.5-9 furlongs but couldn't make a dent at 10 furlongs until he caught a weak 5-horse field at Belmont.
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War Story is a pretty good racehorse with several races to support a triple digit figure and he took the same path into this year's event as last year's win.
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War Story had never put together back to back triple digit Beyers until his last pair, which as I already commented featured a drop off a several points followed by a 7-week layoff. I wouldn't expect 3 straight triple digit Beyers under those conditions.
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Had they finished 3rd and 4th that would be one thing, but when they run 1-2 and look pretty good doing it, I'm not buying that they ran at the lower end of the possibilities.
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But it wasn't "lower end", it was their average race...
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The 3yos are tougher, BUT the general trend is for them to be getting faster not to be going sideways or backwards. If you don't build in some expected improvement you are bound to underestimate them over time.
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Horses that are rushed into the classics like Hofburg and Tenfold, often come undone and never really progress (see Pavel) afterwards. Hopefully, that won't prove to be the case.
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12F races are at 2 turns. IMO, you have to at least consider breaking them out from the rest of the day, but if the races come up a little slow and you come into the analysis with a "slow bias", you'll take them at face value and make them slow. From his comments, I believe Beyer believes that US horses can't run 12F anymore. So he probably comes into the analysis with a bias that leads him to the conclusion that these races are slower than they actually are.
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I don't think there are a lot of adjustments that can be made to speed/performance figures which will make a raw time between 2:28 to 2:30 for 12 furlongs fast...
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I don't think it's an accident that several horses came out of American Pharoah's Belmont and jumped up next time.
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A big reason might be because, as Beyer believes, US horses can't run 12 furlongs anymore.
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It would not surprise me if several of these 3yos do also. They aren't world beaters but they aren't as slow as he has them.
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Gronkowski certainly has some appeal going forward. The rest are probably fried for one reason or another (e.g, trainer, campaign).
