Revisiting SNS - Saturday

[brianwspencer]

Originally Posted by JJP

The fact that he had in the past, albeit a year ago, was more than several of the others in that race could say. And he was in good form, off two wins so it was not impossible that he could move forward again back to the big fig from a year ago. Just what has Summer Book ever done around two turns? There also was no true definitive speed in the race, and MM figured to be close to the pace.

As far as his two-turn races (just talking numbers here, which are not the end-all of the conversation, but a good starting point), he ran two "0" numbers on TG in the last year, both around two turns (one was the NJC Handicap at Hawthorne, I know off the top of my head). Those two numbers put him ahead of every horse in the race but SNS, Papi Chullo, and Silver Wagon (if you count his sprint races) in the last year. As far as the pure numbers that on paper would have been necessary to win that race, his best was right on target with the other runners in the race, and McCann's Mojave was simply not fast enough on paper to compete against this crew and distance at this time.

The horse ran a heck of a race, not taking that away from him, but after sitting at Gulfstream and arguing for the 40 minutes leading up to the race that Summer Book was a legit contender with anyone who would listen, it was nice to see him run back to one of his better races. I thought he was a much more legit contender than Mccann's Mojave and a more legit contender than 3/4 of the field actually. His better two-turn numbers were several lengths better than Silver Wagon's, and his price was nearly 15x as large....that doesn't make a lot of sense to me.