Sunday, January 15, 2012

Hunter Jak, half bro to Haynesfield: did his trainer and jockey being "small time" make him unplayable?

He ran just fair, but he certainly ran better than 87-1. That was the price on Hunter Jak Saturday, a 3-year-old first-time starter in a maiden special weight at Gulfstream Saturday, who just happens to be Haynesfield's half brother. I have to think not too many people noticed his lineage at that price. He was 4th by 12 3/4 in a nine-horse field, as heavy favorite Ecabroni won in average time.

When you see a first-time starter go off at this kind of price, you can assume the public isn't sure the jockey and the trainer belong in the race, and sure enough, Hunter Jak's connections there were Jose Alvarez and Antonio Sano. These guys did win races in 2011, though: Alvarez scored on 13% of his mounts, with 113 wins in all, and Sano won with 15% of his starters, with 75 wins in all. Earnings per start tell you that they weren't winning in top races, however, as both guys made $2,800 a start, rounding to the nearest hundred. It makes sense that Gulfstream Park maiden special weights would be a struggle then, and both guys have not competed effectively at the current meet in general, with three combined wins, and low winning percentages (3% for Alvarez, 5% for Sano). Continuing the uncanny similarities between the two, both started competing in earnest in 2010 (although Sano was listed as a trainer for one starter before then, ruffling the neatness of the comparison).

Their histories are so close that it's tempting to think Alvarez has essentially been a stable rider for Sano, but trainers and jockeys are almost never that closely tied at the hip, at least not in a small track in America. (For instance, Alvarez competed in more than 500 more races in 2011 than Sano, as you would expect of a jockey.)

Getting back to Hunter Jak: he was a $50,000 yearling buy, with Songandaprayer his sire. Whether he deserved more consideration in the race than the average $50,000 auction buy is an interesting question; it's not like yearling bidders didn't know Hunter Jak's pedigree. I think I could argue that $50,000 purchases by and large shouldn't be going off at 87-1 first out in maiden special weights at Gulfstream, and Haynesfield also was months away from his grade I breakthrough in the Jockey Club Gold Cup (although he had just taken the grade II Suburban) when Hunter Jak sold. When you add sire Songandaprayer into the mix, who is probably better in maiden special weights first out than long-term, and factor in the connections to some degree, there's a lot to take into consideration and come up with a reasonable first-out price for Hunter Jak. That's before even taking a look at him in the paddock, of course, or trying to figure out how he is training. It seems to me that the composite points to less than 87-1, but we don't even know quite how to weight all of the data, let alone collect it all.

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