Josh’s race yesterday got scratched down and he ended up on the chalk for a very paltry $3.30 winner while Caleb regained the clear lead with a nice 4-1 on his pick. Unfortunately for Mark, his race was cancelled so we’ll give him a redo at some point.

Caleb @CalebWVU

Race 8 – #9 Pine Valley: Honestly, my best bet of the day at Saratoga today would be to go find something else to spend money on. Another day washed off the turf, it was nearly impossible to come up with a play before seeing scratches in the turf events. I tepidly landed on Pine Valley in the 8th race. I actually don’t mind Mark’s pick in here, although JJ and Morley have been a -ROI play for the last year so I looked elsewhere. Pine Valley has been running decent races at Parx, mostly at a two turn mile setting paces that were too fast for the level. There doesn’t seem to be much early speed in this race beyond Magical Ways, and his form has taken a nosedive after the barn change. I think Pine Valley could control things up front, and he seems likely to benefit from a cutback. I’m anticipating things come up sloppy by this point of the card, and he is proven to at least handle an off track as evidenced by his race two back.

Josh @CherryDrank

Race 2 – #3 Teresa: I share Caleb’s sentiment that this is a very tough day to try and play and might be more of a spot play type of day if anything. My play today will be the #3 Teresa in what looks to be a very bad group of maidens in the second race. The clockers think this one has been improving in each of her past three works and against a bad group of maidens I’ll be looking at using both the first time starters. There’s not much to go one this one as this is the first foal to race for this dam and Oscar Barrera is not typically a trainer that wins first time out, in fact he is 0-11 per Brisnet. My opinion is really that the horses with starts are not for me so we’ll try the longer priced FTS.

Mark @Two_Turns

Race 8 – #4 With Known Name: Low level N2L’s have some of the highest variance and therefore largest payouts in horse racing as you get tons of races like this one with horses who have proven they’re quite camera shy. With Known Name is the most lightly raced in here by far and we still don’t know what he might be. He ran OK as a 2yr old in the Maker barn, was claimed by the very sharp Morley/Flying P combo and they took a major class hike to run in the Sleepy Hollow. He ran up the track that day, has been off almost 9 months, gets Lasix for the first time and has since been gelded while getting the leg up from Morley’s go to jock in Castellano. My take on the situation is that he showed a lot in the morning, so they took a shot, something went wrong, and it just took a long time to get him right and here he’s returning to an appropriate level. I like the cutback for him to a one turn race and the 7/29 work is very sharp over what is normally a very deep Oklahoma track. I would expect him to be much more aggressively handled here and hope he has some upside verse a very suspect group.