Submitted by Marcus Hersh, Jun 1, 2007 12:23

It's unfortunate the writer was denied his chance to ask his buddies "who they liked" on some sunny mythical afternoon at Belmont Park next week. What is fortunate is that every opinionated fan doesn't have space in a newspaper to bellow their ignorance, cloaking it in unecessarily obscure diction (see: aleatory - yes, we know you are more sophisticated than those rubes over at Newsday, or whatever).

Besides costing casual fans who don't support the sport on a week-to-week basis the chance to witness a compelling matchup in the Belmont Stakes, the decision to keep Street Sense out of the race makes perfect sense - unless you live in New York, the fulcrum of the universe. There are no more mile-and-a-half American races that mean anything to a top horse. The Belmont is an aberration. It's a truly significant race only if a horse is going for a Triple Crown. Otherwise, it's merely the third appendage of the Triple Crown franchise, and even less important than the Preakness, because there the Derby winner always will be alive for a Triple Crown.

And why would a trainer give his horse a third highly demanding race in five weeks, thus putting him in a position of trying to recover the next couple months, rather than having more control over where his horse was physically, just to give fans a match-up they'd like to see on Belmont Day? Since the writer obviously has no real knowledge of racing, let him consider a baseball analogy. The Mets have a three-game series with Atlanta in mid-July. They lead the division by 1.5 games. The Mets win the Friday night game 6-4, erasing a 4-2 deficit in the last two innings. All the starters play. They lose the Saturday night game 3-2 in 11 innings. All the starters play, the bullpen is used hard. Now, does Willie Randolph pencil in his everyday lineup for the Sunday afternoon game, treating it as though the first two games of the series never happened, and as though there were nothing more important to think about at the end of the year? Does he have to think, 'Oh, the fans who come to the game are going to be disappointed if I start four bench players and use my second-tier bullpen guys." No, he does not, and he would be mismanaging if he did.

And Carl Nafzger acting in kind is worse than Barbaro breaking down in the Preakness? Please.

Go to Saratoga for the Travers, go to Monmouth for the Breeders' Cup Classic. You'll find Street Sense there trying for a championship because his trainer, the guy who knows the horse best, did what was right for the animal -- and the owner -- in the long term.

- Marcus Hersh
Chicago

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