3:30 pm: I swear I haven't been hitting the eggnog too hard, but I just couldn't pull the trigger on today's scheduled carryovers at Aqueduct and Hawthorne. I snuck away from the family to peruse the pp's yesterday, just long enough to see that I didn't know enough about Hawthorne to make a serious play and to get totally confused by the Aqueduct races. Maybe it's just holiday rust, but every Aqueduct race looked like a trap or a lottery.
Wrong. Halfway through the Big A sequence, the whole world must be alive for that free money as favorites have won all three races: Living Out a Dream at $5.50 in the 4th, Kamboo Man at $5.60 in the 5th and Moment Sensor at $6.30 in the 6th. If you played -- and enough of you did to turn a $150k carry into a $639k gross pool -- good luck the rest of the way. Either that or three crazy bombs to give us a triple carry into Saturday's card.
Not very likely. Madam Commander just won the 7th as the 7-2 ($9.90) third choice. Hard to believe that all 81 combos in the last two nine-horse fields aren't covered.
As for Hawthorne, I'm glad I didn't invest any more time because today's card was cancelled due to ongoing snow and weather issues in Chicagoland. They'll try again tomorrow to give away a pot that's built through 20 programs to $227k.
--I wrote the Sunday column about the race between Jess Jackson and IEAH Stables for the Eclipse Award as Oustanding Owner, and in the course of researching the history of the award I was surprised to find how seldom the owner of the Horse of the Year has won that statuette. Here's the rundown for the last 30 years, with the handful of dual winners highlighted in yellow:
4:15 pm: Noble Sound, the $2.8 milion Vindication-Serena's Tune colt who won his belated debut last month as a 3-year-old, made it 2-for-2 taking the featured N1x 8th at Aqueduct. No triple-carry; here are the probables heading into the finale:
1-$1,298
2-$3,074
4-$30,499
5-$86,310
6-$9,059
7-$2,553
8-$6,166
9-$3,149
12-$21,577
