It was the ninth race at Mahoning Valley on Nov. 4, the betting opportunity of the 21st century, a maiden filly with an overwhelming Beyer Speed Figure edge going off at 110-1. As Andrew Beyer wrote me a few days after the race, “Under the circumstances, 110 to 1 was a bit of an overlay.”

Anyone who wants to know what it is like to be a foreign national arrested by U.S. immigration officials for overstaying a working visa in these perilous times of border sensitivity need only give Paul Eddery a call. He spent nearly two months in an El Paso, Texas, detention center last spring before he was repatriated to his native Ireland.

“You can call it detention if you want,” Eddery said this week from Newmarket, where he now is an assistant to trainer Rae Guest. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s nothing but a posh word for prison.”

If you didn’t know what it was, you could drive past the North County Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the Pacific Coast Highway at the north end of the town of Carlsbad and never give it a second glance. After all, from the road, it looks like nothing more than a black marble representation of the map of California.

There are people in racetrack management who stay up late trying to come up with names for their races. Then, the next day at work, they pick one out of a hat, or at least that’s how it appears.

The significant stakes races of the weekend are named for four men, each famous in his own right. If they are not readily identifiable by the racing public, that is understandable. They’ve all been gone long enough to require at least a refresher course on what they did to deserve their names on a trophy.

Beyer Speed Figures have undergone relatively few changes during the 23 years that they have been part of Daily Racing Form. Rooted in logic and mathematics, the calculations behind the numbers have stood the test of time.

The players are almost certainly going to focus on Palace (two Grade 1 stakes wins last year) and Stallwalkin’ Dude in the Frank J. De Francis Memorial Dash on Saturday at Laurel Park. Certainly, the historical Beyer Speed Figures are there for the two New York horses, with a combined nine triple-digit Beyers when looking at their last 10 races each. I can’t argue with the logic, but I don’t know if the form and similar off-the-pace styles will travel. If they do, it is as easy as it looks. If they do not, anything is possible.

Veterans Day is that most hypocritical of American holidays. The gap between the laudatory praise heaped upon former soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines and the reality of their treatment at the hands of an unwieldy government bureaucracy is vast. It does not help that 99 percent of the American public is barely brushed anymore by direct involvement with the military experience (owning a check-cashing shop outside an Army base does not count).

Eddie Gregson could have waited until the morning after the 1982 Kentucky Derby to announce that the victorious Gato Del Sol would not be running in the Preakness. Instead, he dropped the bomb on ABC and Jim McKay in the midst of the winner’s-stand celebration, which went over about as happily as a certain noise in church.

Before we get to this Saturday’s stakes, let’s review a few of the Breeders’ Cup Beyer Speed Figure highlights beyond the 120 that American Pharoah got in the Classic.

The most bizarre thing about last weekend’s Breeders’ Cup was that nothing bizarre happened.

Thirteen races with big fields over two days usually produce some wacky results – a couple of winners who still make no sense after the race is over, some 40-1 shots clunking up to complete gigantic trifectas and superfectas, mystifying no-shows by big names. There was a stretch a few years ago when you could have turned a profit by betting every single entrant in every Cup race because the winners’ payoffs added up to more than $300.