Donna Barton

[Silver Charm]

Does anynody know what she mumbled just as Super Saver was being loaded. Something about him being wet or looking like he lost weight.

Battaglia was raving about how good the horse looked in the saddling area and from a TV appearance he did look good.

For those who say SS bounced I guess he did but do not blame it on pace. The 2nd and 4th palce runners were there the whole way and hung in.

Anyway no excuses from me.

Congrats to Baffert. I really like this guy I see now and there could not a better nor more memorably visible personality for the sport.

[tucker]

they asked Donna \"how the horses looked going into the gate.\"  Her two comments were that Dublin (I believe) was a little wet and that Super Saver had lost weight since the Derby.

[MO]

She said \"Super Saver looks a little drawn\"

[TreadHead]

Certainly would have been nice to know prior instead of all these Haskin-esque \"he looks better than ever\" comments.

[Michael D.]

One could use the pace or two weeks as an excuse here, but I\'m not sure I will. If SS had been sluggish early on, that would have been a sign that something was wrong. SS ran just fine for the opening mile. The problem came when he was challenged by two solid horses after running an honest mile.

SS looks like a \'1\' or \'2\' type that is going to have trouble when not getting a dream trip or when facing top company. I was hoping for better.

LAL didn\'t really look that great either. Beating JB 3/4 and YT a length and 3/4 isn\'t good enough in the bigger picture. He was wide, sure, but he\'s either gonna be wide or get checked out of the race, so you really can\'t give him that ground credit.

Could be wrong though. Pletcher is famous for triple crown flops that come back and run well in August, and LAL was coming off a brutal Ky Derby. A return to more reasonable race schedules might be the difference, but the first two legs of the triple crown were not great races.

[Silver Charm]

DRF had 8,000 reporters at Pimlico and NOBODY noticed SS was a little drawn?? WTF!!

Only Donna B as the horses are seconds away from being sprung do we get a \"I\'m not so sure\" opinion AFTER all bets are in.

MikeD I agree. SS ran way too bad. Maybe the worst a Derby winner has run in a long time at Pimlico. And this coming off a small forward condition move. He won the Derby fair and square with a good draw at a track he likes on a wet surface he likes. But yesterday he looked like the horse who was 4th at Tampa.

[MonmouthGuy]

I was thinking the same thing.  Did a Lexis-Nexis search after the race and did not find one comment during Preakness week regarding SS not holding his weight.  I\'m normally not a black helicopter guy, but with the entire racing world having decended on Pimlico looking for an angle, it is hard to believe that such an important observation was missed by everyone except Barton.

[Silver Charm]

Sometimes I wonder if these guys when on the road are not texting these Blogs and Reports from Rachels or Scores.

We are observing Lookin at Lucky and Ywanna Twist and we seeing a  glowing in the flesh or perfectly sculpted specimen.

[Leamas57]

I had heard second-hand hours before the race that SS had lost over 100lbs. I had made my bets keying the horse underneath but not that far underneath. Frankly, I didn\'t know what to do with the info.

Leamas.

[Boscar Obarra]

I caught that comment real time, and wondered how she knew that. From memory?  Notes ? That\'s a pretty good memory if that\'s what it was.

 SS Made a decent appearance in the pp ,but something like weight would be a relative thing and has to be compared to what you saw previously.

 There was talk for a long time about reporting weight here(I think they do it in Hong Kong).

[sighthound]

Barton is a horsewoman.  The word still has meaning.

[Silver Charm]

Not sure what that means but if she is talking nonsense somebody needs to sit her down and make some sense of this.

Only 15 minutes before Mike Battaglia was nearly wetting his pants over how great SS looked and how obvious it was the moment he step from the plane he knew he was the Boss of Pimlico. Now all of this SCREAMS top effort and yet the horse ran the worst race of his career. And before we bring up 3rd race in 5 weeks tell that to Afleet Alex.

And let me remind you this the last thing the betting public and the viewing public heard before someone said \"And Their Off\".

The Derby Winner and Betting Favorite Looks like he has lost weight since the Derby.

Look I only bet half of what I wanted so I only lost half of what I could. Learning that this horse had been knocked out or spent by the Derby concerns me when I had not heard it anywhere else.

Maybe she needs to explain herself and somebody needs to explain why SS ran so bad. And don\'t give me a shoe or the throat surgery is next baloney. This was the WORST I have seen a Derby winner run in maybe ever and the only person now who looks like she knew something was Donna Barton......

[mjellish]

The horse bounced.  Or it\'s possible that he didn\'t like the Pimlico strip.

In my opinion, it\'s also entirely possible that SS doesn\'t want to run a classic distance but happens to love Churchill, got a dream trip over a sloppy track that he relished, and was very, very lucky to win a very slow derby.

With any luck we\'ll find out the truth in late summer/fall.  As of right now I plan to play heavily against this horse at any distance over 1 1/8th unless he\'s at Churchill or the track comes up wet.

[nyc1347]

weve had very nice horses dating back to 2003 who were able to run negative 1s thru negative 4s and still bounce, or forge and win these big races coming from derby to preakness day.  They were freak horses who were running against mostly average higher level horses.  If eske was in perfect shape for these races i could pretty much guarantee we wouldve seen a similar situation again.. seems to be at least one horse a year to do that.  

This year we did not have that.  Super Saver is a much slower horse that ran 2 top efforts back to back with the last one being a new one and only had 14 days off to recover.. it was clearly a bounce.  If he ran a negative 4 like RA did last year and bounced 4 points he wouldve been right in the mix.  Hes just not THAT kind of horse though.

[Rich Curtis]

MJellish,

Why not have Remy make the Derby winner a quit number to the Preakness 1/16 pole so we\'ll know what kind of effort he put in before the subtracted distance did him in?