The things we do for love. Last Saturday night, after fretting about the possibility of miserable weather all day, I made a last-minute decision to zip up to Gainesville for the NCAA Regional Baseball Tournament game between the Florida Gators and the South Florida Bulls. Showing tender mercy, I did not even encourage Siobhan to attend. A few years ago, she and our eightyish neighbor, Allen Morgan, went to a softball playoff contest with me that was inundated, first by gentle showers, then by a raucous downpour. Seats being very hard to come by, the entire crowd donned ponchos and toughed it out, though Allen and Siobhan clearly thought these irrational doings were the work of maniacs. “Siobhan, let’s go get a couple of drinks,” the old man suggested. “We can come back and pick up Bill when they call it off.” Nobody left, but call it off they did, an hour-and-a-half and several inches of rain later. Allen, alas, long ago departed for that great gentleman’s bar in the sky but Siobhan has been touchy on the subject ever since.
Now, as it happens this time of year, the University’s spacious O’Connell Center, which abuts the baseball field, is home to almost nightly weekend high-school graduations, the onsets of which usually precede the baseball games by about an hour. These baccalaureate nightmares naturally generate enormous crowds of friends and family members eager to certify that their bumpkin nephew George has somehow achieved recognition of some sort of minimal intelligence. This, of course, puts a huge crimp in the parking situation for later-arriving athletic supporters, who must root around the landscape like so many armadillos searching for worms. Having been one of those armadillos in the past and having risked life and undercarriage parking my vehicle in torture chambers not seen since the Spanish Inquisition, I decided to accept the University Athletic Association’s seasonal offer to park in a remote commuter lot and take the shuttle bus to the game. I congratulated myself on this rare genuflection to propriety and joined the madding crowd of elderfolk flocking to the shuttle.
The game itself was either a diamond or a stone, depending on your predilections. If you like a well-pitched contest devoid of runs, you were in your element. If you’d like someone to occasionally hit the ball, well, come back tomorrow. Enhancing the evening was a 38-minute “lightning delay,” which seemed to go on for three times that long. If you are unfamiliar with this stupendously clever invention, the lightning delay is a wildly popular device created by the National Collegiate Athletic Association to lengthen the evening and sell more nachos. A mysterious arbiter sitting on a cloud somewhere in the vicinity of Albania takes a look down, assesses the situation and places a half-hour (at least) hold on a game in Gainesville, Florida. It is an important precondition of the lightning delay that there be absolutely no rain in the vicinity and preferable that the sun is shining, as it was this day. To make things worse, those fools in the concession area ran out of chocolate soft-serve ice-cream. Oh, the inhumanity.
One of the things everyone supposedly loves about baseball is that it has no clock and that a game could conceivably go on for….well….forever. This has not happened yet but one major league game came close. On May 8, 1984, the somnambulent Chicago White Sox beat the dozing Milwaukee Brewers, 7-6, in a glistening 25-inning affair lasting 8 hours and 6 minutes. The concessionaires ran out of everything but alfalfa stalks and the janitors were poking the few remaining fans with brooms at the finish. (There was actually a longer minor league game between the Pawtucket Red Sox and the Rochester Red Wings that went 8 hours and 26 minutes, but who’s counting?)
Between innings, of which there were many, I read the entire newspaper, which is shrinking daily, putzed around with my phone for scores from other lands and occasionally called Siobhan, who could not conceal her glee at being somewhere else. She kept asking me if the bus would still be there when the game was over and I chuckled at her naivete. “They can’t just leave a bunch of granny-people standing by the curb in the dark,” I assured her. Nonetheless, I occasionally peered over the right-field fence to make sure the bus was parked there, waiting.
The game was still tied in the top of the twelfth when Florida got a break. The Bulls’ pitcher, nervous about a runner on first, threw over there once too often, surprising the first-baseman. The spheroid abruptly flew over his head to the grandstand wall. The Gators’ speedy little runner circled second base and headed for third, a decision which looked iffy until the intrepid first-baseman committed his second error on the same play, heaving the ball well over the third-baseman’s head and allowing the runner to score. 2-1, Florida. The long-imprisoned air quickly fled the Bulls’ balloon and the Gators got three more, ending the game just after midnight.
It was a wobbly but happy crew of UF fans which gathered at the bus stop, excitedly discussing the events of the evening. The bus I had incorrectly assumed was ours sadly turned out to be the South Florida team vehicle, a fact I had discerned by avidly tapping on the window, demanding admission. When our bus failed to show after twenty minutes, the two-dozen or so fans got to tittering, a little nervous. “I don’t mind staying all night,” one geezer testified, “but I left my tickets for the next game at home.” Worried laughter all around. A few folks sat down on the curb. I thought about what Siobhan said about the lateness of the hour, the irregularity of the finishing time. Still, they couldn’t just abandon us, could they?
Turns out, they could. I flagged down a campus cop who had just been advised of the problem. “We’re looking for that bus now,” he said, reassuringly. I’m sorry, but I couldn’t help it. I told him “It’s about fifty feet long, and white,” extending my arms to indicate the dimensions. Just then, he got a radio report telling him the scheduler had sent the bus home, creating an interesting dilemma. The resourceful policeman eventually summoned a university van big enough to carry the old folks in two installments. He offered me a ride in the back seat of his car, a location with which I am not unfamiliar. Unfortunately, in my logey state I neglected to get a photo, dadgummit. I finally got to bed about one-thirty. That’s right, in the a.m.
Fast-forward two nights later. The Gator softball team is playing Oklahoma in the first game of the finals of the women’s College World Series in Oklahoma City. Nice game, softball, moves right along, seven innings in two hours, two-and-a-half. Usually. This one started at seven and ended at midnight, a 17-inning epic in which four different hurlers each threw over 100 pitches. It was the longest WCWS game ever and it felt like it. The Sooners finally prevailed, 7-5, so there was no joy in Mudville. Florida fans sat by their televisions, stunned, then slowly gathered up their wits and regrets and headed off for their bedrooms. Mercifully, this time there were no bus rides involved.
Now why, you may ask, would any sane person tolerate the slings and arrows of outrageous innings, of significant discomfort, of ongoing frustation with no apparent conclusion? Well, we are baseball and softball fans, you see, and we have an investment in time and emotion. We would toss and turn, unable to sleep not knowing the final verdict, the events which decided the contest. Also, you mentioned a sane person. So how does that apply?
Betting The Belmont
One of the myriad of reasons the Kentucky Derby is the most fascinating horse race extant is that the entire field of 20 is eligible to become Triple Crown winners. By the time the Preakness Stakes rolls around two weeks later, that number has been reduced to one. And when the final jewel in the crown, the Belmont, finally arrives three weeks after that, the number has often been sliced to zero. Like this year. Not only are there no Triple Crown possibilities, but this Belmont contains neither the winner of the Derby, Always Dreaming, nor the Preakness hero, Cloud Computing. All we had left in the way of contenders well-known to the layman was Classic Empire, fourth in Louisville and a close second in Baltimore. Then, just this morning, CE was declared out of the race with an abscess in his right front hoof. So what happened?
What happened was that almost no horse in the Preakness ran his usual race. Always Dreaming, better when chasing the pace, shot to the lead with Classic Empire dogging his steps. Conquest Mo Money, better on the lead, broke slowly from his outside gate and never got into contention. And Classic Empire, who usually prefers to let others run up front, attacked Always Dreaming at the start, afraid the Derby winner would get away from the field. Always Dreaming, who benefited from an inside trip on a fast rail in both the Florida Derby and The Run For The Roses, found the going sloggy in the Preakness and collapsed, beating two horses. Conquest Mo Money finished a scintillating seventh. And Classic Empire, who earned the lead when Always Dreaming started running backwards, was caught just before the wire by Cloud Computing. Ocalan Mark Casse, Empire’s trainer, told the press his trainee’s mind starts to wander when he gets the lead, so maybe he needs a rear-view mirror. More likely, he paid the price for jumping on Always Dreaming from the start. So the big question is, who’s left? Should we cancel the Belmont this year or muddle through with a cast of nonentities? What about all those wacky people with infield reservations and brand-new mud-bogging gear? This year, when betting “the field,” do we get everybody in the race?
The Field
Post positions will be drawn later today. Current odds on the field of 12: (And no, I am not drinking. These unruly columns just refuse to straighten out.)
Irish War Cry……….5-1
Tapwrit……………….6-1
Lookin at Lee……….8-1
Epicharis……………..8-1
Gormley…………….15-1
Senior Invstmnt….15-1
Patch…………………20-1
Twisted Tom……..20-1
Multiplier………….30-1
Meantime…………30-1
J Boys Echo……….30-1
Hollywd Hndsm..40-1
Irish War Cry, who had great betting support in the Kentucky Derby, was last seen breaking left from the gate, forcing others to the inside and thoroughly disrupting the start. He was not competitive in the race. That said, the Belmont may be more to his liking. Irish War Cry has a high cruising speed like his prominent sire, Curlin, who had a tendency to wear down opponents with a steady grind down the stretch. As a sire, Curlin has produced Palace Malice, the Belmont winner in 2012.
Tapwrit, a Todd Pletcher trainee, finished a respectable 6th in Kentucky after winning the Tampa Bay Derby by 4 1/2 lengths. He was clobbered by Irish War Cry’s gate antics but kept on running. His father, Tapit, has led the North American sire list three times and is represented by recent Belmont winners Tonalist in 2014 and Creator last year. Jose Ortiz gets the mount.
Lookin at Lee, a plodder who closed along the rail to finish second in the Derby, dropped back to 4th in the slightly shorter Preakness. He is the type of horse people like to bet on in the 1 1/2-mile Belmont for obvious reasons, but this race is more often won by horses running closer to the pace. If you’re looking for a ray of hope, Lookin at Lee is trained by steady Steve Asmussen who won this race last year with Creator and was fourth twice in two other tries. Will be running at the end and could certainly get a piece.
Epicharis, barely nipped at the wire in the UAE Derby, has been tootling around the world in search of success. His home base is Japan, where he was undefeated in four starts before running second in Dubai to Thunder Snow. You remember Thunder Snow. He was the horse who broke from the gate in Louisville and promptly started doing the Macarena. Epicharis is a hard-trying fellow but a mile-and-a-half is a long way to go for a horse who was caught by the likes of Thunder Snow at a shorter distance.
Patch, the one-eyed horse, is back for another go, this time with the redoubtable John Velazquez aboard. He drew the 20 post in the Derby and wound up 14th, not much to recommend him, but his sire, Union Rags, won the Belmont and his mother is a daughter of stamina sire A.P. Indy. Well enough rested. We expect big improvement here.
Senior Investment, not a Derby horse, jumped up to be third in the Preakness at 30-1. He is trained by the veteran Kenny McPeek, who has a tendency to be overoptimistic about his charges’ chances. Sometimes, optimism pays. McPeek trained the highest paying Belmont winner in history, 70-1 Sarava, in 2002. Senior Investment may be a horse for this course. He likes to sit mid-pack and come on late. There’s plenty of late in the Belmont.
Gormley, something of a disappointment in Kentucky but a smashing winner of the Santa Anita Derby, will get blinkers for the first time in the Belmont. Sometimes this is a clever move, other times an act of desperation. Trainer John Shireffs is still trying to figure out how to get a couple of decent starts in a row from this horse. Proceed at your own risk.
J Boys Echo, another one bounced around early in the Derby shenanigans, is one of several closers who hope to capitalize on a fast pace in the Belmont. He did beat Preakness winner Cloud Computing in the Gotham Stakes, easily his best start, but seems up against it here. Trained by Dale Romans, a Belmont maiden in eight starts, though four times third. Third would be a very good result this time.
Meantime, off a mere four starts, seems up against it in this one, though he impressed with a nice second in the 1 1/8-mile Peter Pan. Tab for later. We would probably ignore Twisted Tom completely if he were not trained by magician Chad Brown, who won the Preakness with Cloud Computing. We are ignoring Multiplier completely, he being from a sprint family. And we’re not even talking about Hollywood Handsome.
So, who wins? It’s a crapshoot. The distance of the Belmont changes everything, but it’s preferable to stay with a colt who runs near the front as your winner. The pace should not be unusually fast so horses running from the back of the back will not get the help they need. Stick with a logical low-odds contender to win and throw a competent longshot into your trifecta. You’ll get decent odds whatever you do. The bettors aren’t loading up on any horse in this one.
What’s Going On?
Your Flying Pie is out a day early because Siobhan and Bill are flying to someplace called National Harbor, Maryland, so the little woman can deliver an oration to some high muckety-mucks of the American College of Veterinary Internal Medicine. Many of them won’t understand a word but we do this for the advancement of Science, so what the hell. We’ll be back at the regular time next week to discuss we haven’t the slightest idea what. Keep those cards and letters comin’ in.
That’s all, folks….
