There are a couple of things going on here. First, over the course of many, many years, Bruce has never done as well at the Spa as he's done the remainder of the year and in NJ. That's just a simple fact and there are numerous reasons for it. Early on, a majority of his owner were "upstate NY" people and they wanted to race at the Spa. It's their heyday and what they really live for in this game. Some of these guys would rather pick up a check at the Spa than win in NJ. Me, I was always the opposite and let Bruce race our horses where they could win. We play the game aggressively and never really disagreed as to where to classify the horses.
Second, very often many of the horses that Bruce had racing here were coming in from out of town. The West Coast claims from Roddy Valente were often brought here for the Spa meet. Not exclusively because they fit or would be spotted great, but because Roddy loves racing at the Spa. He loves winning at the Spa so by no means are the horses poorly placed. Roddy plays the game as good as any owner in the business. I have the utmost respect for Roddy and how he runs his business.
Bruce also campaigns a lot of NY breds which in the spring/summer/Spa ain't no walk in the rose garden. It's the toughest meet, pretty much in the world. There's also a new dynamic going on here in that Bruce has many more horses than he used to and many more non-NY bred babies than he used to. When an owner had a NY bred and was looking for a trainer, Bruce's name would come up. If it was a non-NY bred, Bruce's name would not always come up. So there are a lot more babies and a lot more horses. Instead of having maybe 60-70, I think he probably has 100. His usual year end number of 25% will be much harder to hit this year -- with many more starts. I would think that Bruce used to average about 400 starts a year with about 100 wins or so. I would think this year already he has closer to 500 starts and there is still another, what, 35%, maybe 40% of the year to go. There is also the factor at play where certain owners want to race horses where they want to race them, not where the trainer suggests they race them. I won't get into details, but sometimes a trainer is hand-cuffed.
Bruce is a top trainer. That said, there are often reasons why numbers change, even drastically. Two years ago Bill Mott was on fire at the Spa, and then at Belmont he started off something like 0 for 18, 1 for 20-something, etc. Horrendous. You had to really look at the horses he was brining over in order to see what was going on. He blew through every condition that virtually every horse in the barn had. Sure, 1 for 20-something wasn't accurate, but Mott was not going to be able to duplicate his Spa #'s. Do Bruce's Spa #'s look pitiful? To some I guess they do. I think there are often meanings behind the numbers.
Eric
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