Baby it's cold outside

This can be the toughest time of year to handicap-- conditions can change in minutes with a downpour or snow shower and previosu track biases, on which you have based your handicapping, lose their validity. The most important tjing to do is pay attention to what is happening. If I am doing my picks upstairs in the palatial Dave Bianconi TV Studio, it is possible that we had a cameraman call in sick. But it is more likely that we have crappy conditions.

So, as I pointed out in my October Public Confessions column in Harness Eye, this time of the year the weather changes rapidly and a lot of horses seem to improve. My theory has always been that a lot of horses get worse, and the others are just more consistent, but that doesn’t matter. Can you think of a good cold-weather horse? Going back to Michgan Mack and the Mapes family in the mid seventies, there have been dozens that I have cashed tickets on regularly in winter, but recently I got caught not paying attention to my history at Northfield. It was a very cool night, but we were still in soccer season, so I was not even thinking about my cold weather horses. I sure as heck was thinking about them after Slide Lock won at 11.90-1. It had been a 70-degree day and the temp had dropped down into the 40s (officially posted at 50 before the sun went down) when the John Brown-trainee went to post in miserable form. Several regulars on the Northfield apron were heckling me for not putting him on my ticket and I did not understand why. After he blew by the field, they started reminding me he was a cold-weather horse. When I got home that night, I checked my bet-back book, and sure enough, there was Slide Lock, with a notation “cold-weather horse.” I did not do my history homework, and while it did not cost me anything except an on-air winner (I did not bet the race), it could have been a pretty decent hit. I forgot my history and I was doomed. Exacta, with the third choice second, was $238.60, and the tri, with the favorite third, was $908. Ouch.

So pay attention and the go cash