Elsewhere
Forgive the self-promotion; it’s not every day I can say that you can find me twice on the New York Times web site …
On the City Room blog, I reply to comments left regarding Sunday’s OTB story. Overall, I’m pretty pleased with the exchange, except for one mistake on my part — I realized this morning that commenter El Barto was referring to the amount retained by OTB, not the surcharge on winning bets. Oops! It’s still a fine reply, just to another question.
On the Rail, I write about history and preps, how the races have changed, how tradition may still matter. After I’d already sent this piece off, I read Jay Hovdey’s post on Derby defections, in which he refers to Eskendereya’s “porcelain handling.” I suppose there’s some truth to that, but consider: Last year’s field averaged 6.4 lifetime starts, down a bit from the 7.05 of the 2004 field (the first of the 20-horse Derby era). A light record is just the way of things these days — this year’s likely field averages 6.5 starts — making the 3YO prep season all the more important.
Sounds Familiar
I wonder where the Blood-Horse got this idea?
In the issue of June 7, 1980, The Blood-Horse began a news section titled “Dispatches.†Beginning in this issue that section of the magazine has been renamed “The Wire†and will contain shorter news items, but more analysis and commentary.
On Voters, Politicking, and What Ifs
An interesting comment thread developed on the post “Odd Voter Out,” about broadening the pool of eligible Eclipse Award voters and the propriety and prevalence of voters politicking via their ballots. Regarding the pool, Jennie Rees suggests on her blog opening up voting to broadcasters, an idea current NTWA officer Ed DeRosa supports here, as he does the possibility of including players who wager significant money through US-based outlets. Either or both would freshen up the awards, which, with fewer than 300 voters and many of those attached to legacy media, are in danger of seeming increasingly irrelevant to fans such as the Turk.
As for politicking, it’s part of the process. Commenter tvnewsbadge makes the reasonable assumption that for voters with strong feelings about synthetic surfaces, “personal considerations did influence at least SOME” in this year’s Eclipse voting, an assumption shared by Nick Kling, who wrote of the Horse of the Year tally, “There is no doubt part of the 130-99 vote favoring Rachel Alexandra was tied to the surface issue.” Close readers of the vote totals released last Monday could clearly see an anti-synthetic contingent within several divisions, and it wasn’t outlandish for knowledgeable observers to speculate that the vote for Icon Project as champion older female was no mistake. Jay Hovdey’s take on that little post-Eclipse flap gets it right:
Who cares if someone might have voted for Icon Project anyway? To my mind, given the climate of controvery surrounding synthetic surfaces, there very easily could have been a voter out there who refused to consider any horse without traditional dirt form for one of the traditional main track awards, and Icon Project, a runaway winner of good races at Belmont and Saratoga, was a viable alternative once past Zenyatta and Life Is Sweet.
Exactly, who cares? If voters can’t put forth a surprising selection, politick, or register a protest as a handicapper against a disliked surface or some other issue — all on principle, I would hope, and not as a frivolity — with their ballots, then the awards might as well be based on a points system. Rather than discourage such votes, it would be better to embrace transparency across the voting blocs, as the NTWA does by publishing its members’ ballots. There would be little mystery to rogue votes then and any ensuing debate would probably be pretty lively, and almost certainly, more compelling than the name-calling that accompanies a mix of anonymity and unknown reasoning.
Whether the vote for Icon Project as champion older female was legitimate or a mistake caused by tech troubles, it should have remained as it was submitted. To change the ballot sets a lousy precedent and raises not insignificant questions, as DeRosa brings up in a post on his Big Event Blog:
Will you only be allowed to change your vote if you can corroborate your intention with a vote in another category?
Would we be going through this for any other category or for any other horse or for any other situation other than to make a champion unanimous? What if the vote had been 200-32 instead of 231-1? What if Dosik had voted anyone but Zenyatta as Horse of the Year?
There’s also an unfortunate undertone to the correction, hard to ignore, a sense of the voter being brought into line, his errant vote made to conform with the majority. The retabulation making Zenyatta unanimously a champion, as Rachel Alexandra was in her division, seems not merely an effort to set the historical record straight, but a sly means of granting the equality that was impossible in Horse of the Year voting to the two distaffers and an attempt to assuage those who may have felt embarrassed by the mistaken vote. What if Duke Dosik had entered the name of Rachel Alexandra or another for 2009 Horse of the Year? Would his vote for Icon Project still be an error?
Related: Auditors and steering committee members, note — there may be more Eclipse voting mistakes out there. Bill Christine’s commentary certainly suggests so: “Just because turf writers can read a Racing Form doesn’t mean they’re deft with computers. I struggle with my electronic vote every year, hoping I don’t hit the wrong button at the wrong time, and I know a number of colleagues who are just as klutzy. One of them called me on a Sunday this year, the day before the balloting deadline, to have me walk him through the process. It was the blind leading the blind, from flag fall to finish.”
Live Blogging, Etc.
Although I’ve done a few, I’m not much a fan of live blogs. The form seems too of-the-moment, prone to near-instant staleness, and it’s tricky, keeping up with the flow of whatever happening and doing so quickly and pithily and with some depth. But, I’d been curious for some time about Cover It Live, the live blogging service I used on Monday, and the Eclipse Awards seemed a good spot to experiment. The results were mixed …
On the positive side: Cover It Live has a decent mobile interface, which made it possible to update from the backstage or ballroom, it’s easy to add feeds from services such as Twitter (as well as live video streaming), and photos posted via other services pop up in the stream. The best feature was its handling of comments, which appeared throughout the blog, chat-like. (My thanks to everyone who participated!)
On the negative side: This probably says more about how I prefer to work, but I found Cover It Live made me feel somewhat pressured to be on the blog at all times — updating it, approving comments — and that I was fiddling with the service (and Twitter) on my phone far more than I would have liked. Instead of following connections or observing a scene from the corner, making notes and taking photos all the while that I would later turn into posts, I felt I was doing a lot of tapping without adding a lot of substance. Not good.
Would I use Cover It Live again? As much as I liked the appearance of the comments in the stream and the interactions among visitors, probably not. For a blogger dedicated to being online for the duration of a live blog, I can see it being a nifty tool for fostering chat around an event, but for a blogger who expects to move around at an event and update occasionally, the usual means of posting, augmented by Twitter and a camera, seems more than adequate.
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Jessica Chapel writes and edits in Massachusetts. Railbird is a Thoroughbred horse racing blog published from June 2004 to July 2019. More / Contact
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