Weak Field Makes This Pick Difficult

Although some voters are inexplicably wrestling with the idea of casting their votes for the filly Azeri for 2002 horse of the year, by and large the latest Eclipse awards ballot is one of the easiest to fill out in years. The exception is the older-horse division on dirt. This is one of the weakest groups of horses in some time, and voters couldn’t be faulted if they just passed.

You know you might be in trouble when two of the candidates -- Hal’s Hope and Left Bank -- have died. Left Bank could win in a partly sentimental vote. Before colic did him in, he was a versatile runner, winning at sprint distances as well as nine furlongs, but his record, like the other contenders, is skimpy for a champion. Left Bank ran only four times, winning three, and didn’t start after Aug. 3.

Left Bank had only one Grade I win, but of the 12 horses listed -- theoretically, voters also can consider others -- only Street Cry won more than one Grade I. He won two, the Dubai World Cup on his home track in March and the Stephen Foster Handicap at Churchill Downs in June, and then Left Bank beat him in the Whitney Handicap at Saratoga in August. That, too, was Street Cry’s last race of the year.

The organizations that run the Eclipse program -- the Daily Racing Form, the National Turf Writers Assn. and the National Thoroughbred Racing Assn. -- were obviously hard-pressed to find enough horses to fill two pages of past performances. Mizzen Mast is there, a win in the Strub in February his only start of the year. Tenpins is listed, even though he was badly beaten in his only Grade I start.

There are several horses -- Kudos, Milwaukee Brew, Mongoose, Sky Jack and the unfortunate Hal’s Hope -- who were one-shot Grade I wonders, and early in the year at that. Evening Attire won the most stakes, four, but the Jockey Club Gold Cup was his only Grade I victory and he was badly beaten in the Breeders’ Cup Classic. It would have cost Lido Palace’s owners an outlandish $800,000 to run in the Classic. Outside the big show, he posted a record that was no better nor no worse than any of them.

In a year with not much staying power and relatively little consistency, the Classic winner is capable of sneaking in. A vote for Volponi would not be ridiculous, but the Classic winner, at 43-1, was no more than a hard-trying loser before he got to Arlington Park. Volponi will receive some votes, but his lasting achievement will be triggering a longshot pick six that exposed three computer rogues before they made off with $3 million.

Fourteen times since 1971, the horse-of-the-year winner has come out of the older-horse division, including Forego and Cigar more than once. There’s no one remotely close to their league this year. Kurt Hoover, the perceptive telecaster, has suggested that voters consider Orientate, the cinch sprint champion, for a dual award.

Voting for a sprinter, in what is traditionally routers’ territory, is heresy for many of the electorate, but Orientate is not an outrageous alternative. From April to October, at distances of seven furlongs or less, the colt won six dirt races at five different tracks, capped by the Breeders’ Cup Sprint at Arlington. He won on dry tracks as well as wet. When he ran around two turns, early in the year, it was a different game and Orientate was overmatched. But so were many of the year’s horses that did nothing else.