COMMENTARY : New York Tracks Are on a Downhill Course

For nearly two decades the main focus of my gambling life has been the midsummer racing in New York. The thoroughbred competition at Belmont Park and Saratoga was the best in America, and Saratoga has a charm and ambience unique in the world. Playing the horses there has been not only a constant challenge, but also a source of excitement and delight.

Yet when the Saratoga season came to an end last year, I felt a sense of relief more than disappointment. I had grown weary and bored with New York racing, and my sentiments were hardly unique. Many of my peers there feel the same disillusionment and disgruntlement with the game.

From the standpoint of serious bettors as well as casual fans, New York racing has been changing steadily for the worse. The quality of the day-to-day competition has deteriorated noticeably. And the racetracks themselves are all wrong for the crowds that they draw.

When a bettor opened the Daily Racing Form to the New York past performances, he used to find an abundance of top-class horses in the better races and a great depth of competition in the claiming events.

The basis of New York’s quality used to be the great stables like those of Ogden Phipps, Greentree, C.V. Whitney, Calumet Farm, etc. But with the notable exception of the Phipps family, most of these patrician stables either have cut down or abandoned their operations. New York no longer automatically gets the cream of the thoroughbred crop, and so its top-class races often draw small or uncompetitive fields.

In July 1988, Belmont carded 24 open races with purses of $40,000 or more, and the size of the fields averaged fewer than seven horses. When New York horseplayers talk about their “quality racing,” they do so with a sneer, because “quality racing” has come to mean a five-horse field with a 2-to-5 favorite.

Even so, the frequent boredom of the top-class races is less troubling than what has happened to the claiming game in New York.

Middle- and high-priced claiming races constitute the meat of most racing cards, but these are the very races that all New York bettors say matter-of-factly are dominated by the “juice trainers” -- i.e., the ones whose success is based on pharmacology more than horsemanship.

Not only do concerns about the Juice Factor make betting a chancy proposition, but it seemingly has discouraged owners from getting involved in the game at this level, or else encouraged them to send their horses to other tracks. Good high-priced claiming races are few and far between now. Belmont’s cards are dominated by races for maidens and for New York-breds. During the week of June 21, 18 of the 54 races at Belmont were for maidens -- and mostly bad maidens.

There are plenty of other theories for the decline in the quality of the New York sport. Too many bad New York-breds populate the stable areas. New York’s stewards allow trainers to scratch horses almost any time they want, frequently decimating what otherwise would have been decent racing programs. The racing secretary’s office doesn’t make aggressive efforts to fill the races that produce five- and six-horse fields.

Indeed, indifference and complacency seem to characterize the entire management of the New York Racing Association, which is assured of so much wagering from off-track betting that the quality of its product apparently doesn’t matter terribly much.

The deficiencies of the New York game are most evident at Belmont, for the nature of the track seems to magnify them. This grand racetrack was built to accommodate crowds of 50,000, but it was an anachronism the day it opened because off-track betting was luring away so many customers.

Now the weekday crowds of 11,000 or so rattle around the cavernous plant. There is little of the vitality that characterizes even the humblest racetrack. The time between races at Belmont often seems interminable. I spent all of last July there. I have never felt such a sense of tedium while playing the horses.

At Saratoga nobody rattles around. The track that used to accommodate crowds of 10,000 has become so justifiably popular that last year it had the highest average daily attendance in America: 34,943.

It is such a marvelous place that people are willing to suffer lines at the betting windows, lines at the concession stands, lines at the bathrooms. But what really has made Saratoga test everybody’s patience in recent years is (I theorize) the Greenhouse Effect.

The upstate New York community used to offer a respite from oppressive summer heat. In recent years, though, Saratoga has been oppressively hot, and when it hasn’t been hot, it’s been wet. Waiting in lines at betting windows, concession stands and bathrooms gets a little harder to endure when it’s 95 degrees and you’re getting ready to watch a five-horse field run through a quagmire.

So goodbye Belmont, goodbye Saratoga, goodbye New York. California, here I come. I will spend the summer at Del Mar. Conceivably this will be a case where the turf looks greener on the other side of the fence, but I don’t think so. When the ocean breezes are wafting across the Del Mar grandstand, I do not expect to be racked by nostalgia for sloppy tracks, for “juice trainers” and for five-horse fields.