Fair Grounds handicapping roundup: Week of Jan. 11

Flying blind on the turf

During the four-day race week spanning Jan. 1-5, there were 14 races carded for turf, and despite there being no more than a passing shower during the period, only two of those races were actually run on turf.

I wrote a news story last week (www.drf.com/news/premium/fair-grounds-problems-still-exist-turf-course) outlining the turf-course situation. Bottom line: The far turn on the grass course is not drying out like it should, and there’s no guarantee that the situation is going to improve. From a handicapping perspective, that is making things really tricky.

Sure, we have main-track-only entrants now, and in non-maiden races, at least, one can get a general sense of who seems likely to stay in a race rained from turf to dirt. But that’s not something that will be known with certainty until – at best – scratches are announced a few hours before first post. And it’s stating the obvious to note the difficulty of attempting to handicap races without knowing who is actually running.

The situation is making the formulation of advance betting strategies somewhat worthless: What’s the point of putting together a bunch of pick four plays the night before a card when you know there’s a strong chance the races you actually get aren’t going to look a lot like the races you see on paper? And since these off-the-turf days haven’t been tied directly to rain, we can’t really be sure when they’re even coming.

In December, it was the Fair Grounds mega-winners – like Tom Amoss, Bret Calhoun, and, to some extent, Larry Jones – who were making hay with dirt horses entered in turf races, be they main-track-only or in the main body of the field. But lately, the field of trainers winning off-the-turf races has expanded. Calhoun was the only trainer during the last racing week with more than one off-grass win.

Getting phat

I’m not sure anyone in the Midwest comes up with more sharp starter-allowance horses over the course of a year than Amoss. Clearly, that’s a corollary to claiming good horses, and the Amoss barn excels at that, hitting at a 40 percent clip with its last 40 such runners. The starter horses, though, flow regularly into this outfit, the most recent example being Phat Day.

A 7-year-old by Five Star Day who cost just $5,500 as a yearling, Phat Day fell all the way down to $5,000 claiming in April 2012, which is surely one reason Amoss and his main claiming client, Maggi Moss, took the horse for $14,000 in October at Indiana Downs. Phat Day has since won three in a row, all in starter-allowance company, and the last two on class hikes.

He was main-track-only in race 2 on Jan. 3 and totally dominated the horse I thought would be favored, the back-classy My Star Runner, winning by almost five lengths while running 5 1/2 furlongs in 1:03.50, the fastest clocking at the distance over the last three years. His 95 Beyer Speed Figure from that race was a career best.

And the thing about the Amoss starters is that when they get good, they tend to stay at their peak for several starts.

Maker starting slowly

This is trainer Mike Maker’s fourth straight season with a Fair Grounds string (Joe Sharp, who is married to Rosie Napravnik, runs it). His first winter was solid (61-10-14-9, 16 percent wins, $1.23 return on investment), his second in New Orleans better (45-9-11-5, 20 percent wins, $1.80 ROI), and Maker’s 2012-13 Fair Grounds meet was awesome.

Last season, the Maker stable went 75-24-18-8, pairing a 32 percent win rate with a $2.47 ROI. The ROI was especially surprising given the popularity of the barn with bettors and the presence of leading rider Napravnik on many of the runners.

I expected more of the same in 2013-14, but the Maker barn has been notably slow so far this meet. Through Jan. 5, the stable was just 31-4-7-3 with a paltry $0.76 ROI, and things did not improve in the second race Jan. 9, when the first-claimed, class-hiked Emerald Crescent (the kind of runner who was winning consistently last season) was off the board after taking steady, serious betting action.