COMMENTARY : To Restore Growth, It’s Time to Shrink

When I walked into Laurel Race Course for the first time in four months, a fan intercepted me and offered a warning. “You’re going to wish you’d stayed in Australia,” he said. “You won’t believe what’s happened to the racing here.”

And, indeed, I can’t believe it. Last fall I maintained that I would rather play the horses in Maryland than anywhere else in America. Even though Laurel and Pimlico don’t have the population of top-class horses that tracks in New York and California do, Maryland has regularly offered large fields and competitive races that were entertaining and eminently bettable.

So it is stunning to behold the quality of racing here now. Since Feb. 23, there hasn’t been a single allowance race at Laurel with a field larger than eight horses. And the fields not only are small, they often are uncompetitive. The supposed feature race on Friday drew a field of eight, but four of them were non-contenders who went off at 25-1 or more.

The cheaper races have been even more noticeably affected. Maiden-claiming races at Laurel used to draw overflow fields, and bettors would relish the chance to shoot for big triple payoffs in a wide-open 14-horse race. But now even these cheap events have trouble attracting more than 10 horses.

What’s happened? With both Philadelphia Park and Garden State operating head-on for the first time, the Mid-Atlantic region has one extra track vying to attract the existing thoroughbred population. And that population appears to be shrinking.

The general economic downturn, the weakness of the breeding industry and the reduction in tax benefits for horse ownership surely have discouraged many people from breeding or buying thoroughbreds. Even though purses in Maryland are at a historically high level, and are higher than in neighboring states, owning a thoroughbred here -- especially a cheap one -- still is a losing proposition.

To its credit, the Laurel management recognizes the seriousness of the problem it is facing. “Racing is our product,” said track president Joe De Francis. “You can have good promotion and good packaging, but if you’ve got a lousy product you’re not going to sell it.”

But it remains to be seen whether management will take the steps necessary to deal with the problem.

“Our answer,” De Francis said, “is to embark on an aggressive recruiting campaign, and to apply the marketing techniques to attract horsemen that we’ve used to attract fans. When you compare our purses with New Jersey and Pennsylvania, we have a very good story to tell.”

In other words, he wants to solve Maryland’s horse shortage at the expense of other tracks that are struggling with the same problem. Perhaps the strategy could succeed in the long run, but De Francis had better find a more immediate solution to the horse shortage. And that solution should be obvious.

Maryland has exacerbated its problems by running so many races. Twelve-race programs, once a novelty, have become regular offerings on weekends, and every extra race taxes the available horse population. During the past four weeks, Laurel has put on an average of 56 races per week -- many more than the typical track. Garden State, by contrast, offers 50 a week. Santa Anita prospers with 45 a week. Maryland should do the following:

-- Run 10 live races a day, five days a week -- period.

-- Offer more simulcasts instead of more live races to accommodate bettors’ desire for more action.

-- Cancel plans for a six-day-a-week racing schedule at Pimlico this spring.

There are surely people in the Laurel management who will look only at the bottom line and protest that fewer races will mean less revenue. But the decline in the quality of the daily racing product is going to alienate the tracks’ best customers and create problems much more serious than a temporary decline in handle.

Maryland could learn a lesson from the example of New York. Belmont Park’s cards, especially in midsummer, became so tedious, with so many small fields and odds-on favorites, that many of its most hard-core gamblers were driven away. And they haven’t come back.

A professional bettor at Laurel told me the other day: “I’m thinking of moving to Las Vegas. The racing here has gotten so bad, with so many small fields, that there just aren’t many decent betting opportunities any more.” Another professional, who may be one of Maryland’s biggest bettors, echoed this sentiment. “This is torture,” he said.

Complaints like these haven’t been heard often in the state since the late Frank De Francis bought Laurel and revitalized the sport, but they will intensify until Joe De Francis does what is necessary: Cut down on the quantity of races in Maryland in order to bolster their quality.