When your sitting back in your rose pink Cadillac

[May 3, 2003] - Athletes become good losers. Why else would our culture push sport so upon its youngsters? Losing happens as an integral part of the daily ground. If you compete formally every day as an athlete, you can come to find winning .550 percent of the time can be make you a great success. And getting use to something less than that order can be a useful trait to inculcate.

This requires that the athlete apply logic to the event. The professional basketball Celtics recently lost a game to Indiana in which they failed to score a single point in an overtime period. Afterwards, their words were more or less to the effect that sometimes the ball don’t fall, we played well we will get them next time. And they did get them next time.

Most but not all Celtics fans have forgotten that desolate overtime quarter since then. Will horseplayers forget how wrong Andrew Beyer was today? I don’t know. But boy can he write a logical line!

Beyer is an essayist par excellence. He works the racetrack beat where you bet your money and you take your chances, where you experience some of the motional and intellectual commitment of the athlete. Beyer’s predictions are masterly ruminations on evidence. Read one and disagree if you like. The problem in this item to solve is which horse today is going to win the Kentucky Derby.

Beyer studies the problem and comes to the conclusion that there are only two truly genuine contenders in this edition of this greatly prestigious event for three-year olds. Ten Most Wanted and Empire Maker have the breeding and performance characteristics most suited, he opines.

While Beyer notes a few with outside chances, he decides based on the evidence that these two are most likely to succeed. He sees the two horses as about equal. And he seems to side with Ten Most Wanted, based on the pre-race prospect that Wood Memorial winner Empire Maker will be a prohibitive favorite, offering a little award but a lot of risk, given the vagaries of a May Saturday mile-and-quarter jaunt for a horse that’s had some shoe problems lately.

Beyer can construct and argument -- he went to Harvard before he went to Suffolk Downs -- and he can cogitate on who’s gonna win like a champ. He invented the Beyer numbers, measures of performance, which delivered the winner [War Emblem] of last year’s Derby, and which could have uncovered the winner today. But Beyer’s bit of scholasticism comes up short today.

We know now that Empire Maker was beaten in the Run for the Roses by a length and three-quarters by gelding Funny Cide, who had lost to Empire Maker by a scant distance in the aforementioned Wood Memorial. The horse was second to today's favorite and had a good spped number to boot, get it? Why not bet it?

Beyer had to write about what was going to happen.Beyer’s logical lapse uncovered more quickly than that of a failed logician of early eras, or stock analysts of the Internet boom, or political or military commentators of the Iraq war.

Horse players learn their analysis can stumble at the gate – and the best of them practice the suppression of euphoria when they win. There but for fortune goes old Stewball.

But I didn’t know that Beyer would lose when I read him, and I dug it. Who knew it was Jose Santos’ day? Who knew it was a gelding’s first turn to win after 74 years? Who would bet on a New York Bred in the Kentucky Derby? When you take on the task of handicapping, you learn you are going to lose some. After the fact, Beyer also gets to write about what happened.

Last update: 5/5/2003; 12:24:13 PM.