Quote:
Originally Posted by classhandicapper
I'll tell you my view on Mind You Biscuits going in but you'll have to trust that I'm not red boarding and fos. If you don't, I can always post my bet on the race so you can see who I did bet.
IMO, Mind Your Biscuits is a Grade 1 caliber sprinter. The thing is, Grade 1 caliber sprints in general are not as high quality as Grade 1 caliber routes. There are exceptions, but that's the generality. They are lower quality races and even the purses reflect that.
MYB ran well in the Met Mile, but it was not a very high quality edition of it. Bee Jersey was a solid up and coming horse, but he was a Grade 3 winner at that point. The rest of that field was mostly the same type of sprint caliber stakes horses as MYB. In fact, I bet MYB in the race and thought he was best that day, but I didn't think it was strong Grade 1 race or the typical historic Met.
The Whitney this year was similarly not as strong as the typical Whitney. Diversify is a solid and fast Grade 1 horse. He basically put away all the chasers and MYB and Discreet Lover picked up the pieces within a 1/2 length of each other. Discreet Lover is a nice horse, but he's not a real Grade 1 horse.
In the Lukas Classic he looked great and put up a nice 108 Beyer figure that made him the fastest horse going in off last race Beyer. But he didn't beat anyone there.
So my view of MYB was/is that's he's a terrific horse. I would love to own him. He can be competitive with the right trip in the right field, but he's not going to beat legitimate Grade 1 caliber routers in a race like the BC Classic barring a lot of good fortune. One or more of the real Grade 1 routers was likely to show and be too good for him so he was very unlikely to run back to a 108 in a field like that.
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First of all MYB is the rare type of horse who is just as good a sprinter as at a distance. Even his trainer thinks that he is better at a distance. Had he duplicated his last figure he would have placed highly in the Classic. Are you presuming that he knew that he was competing in a higher class race and just quit in deference to his superiors? The main value of speed figures is that in predicting whether a horse can withstand a rise in class if he maintains his form. His loss in the Classic mos wast likely explained with his running a big top in his last after a long campaign and it's no big surprise that he bounced. His very poor finish cannot be explained by the rise in class as even a G2 winner would have finished better in the Classic if he was in form, unless there is some mysterious force which makes a slightly lower class horse not even try in a higher class race. His performance is a classic example (pun intended) of a horse that bounced utterly after a big new top after getting better and better figures. This is a common pattern seen in this these situations and the research backs it. Just look at the Thoro-Graph figure patterns. Biscuits would have run poorly if he ran in an allowance race that day.
There are 2 reasons why horses run poorly in higher class races. One is that they are running a much faster early pace, which was wasn't the case with MYB, or they have just gone off form for the reasons explained above. No need to invoke some mysterious force that horses know their place in some pecking order (not based on speed) and suddenly lose all their ability when going up in class. In addition, as cj has pointed out, his TFUS figure may have not been good enough to win anyway on figure handicapping alone.
