With The Field: Meadowlands Horse Shortage

This week Yonkers Raceway announced the nominated pacers for the Bluechip Matchmaker and George Morton Levy Memorial series’. These six-week long events which culminate in two rich finals on Saturday, April 27 present one of the best earning opportunities for older horses that the game has available.

In the Levy each field of horses get to race for $50,000 for five consecutive weeks. Then the top eight money-earners return for a jackpot of around $450,000 in the final. The Matchmaker offers a $40,000 weekly prize pool for each race and a final that usually ends up in the upper $200,000 range.

All-time money-winning pacer Foiled Again has made a healthy living in the Levy series over the years. The now 9-year-old Ron Burke trainee has banked $963,150 over the last four years racing in the Levy. That represents just over 20 percent of his $4,625,984 career earnings. The son of Dragon Again won the series in 2009 and 2010.

Burke, who has six in the Levy and nine in the Matchmaker, also sends out perennial Levy big money earner Atochia. Also a son of Dragon Again, he has made $536,200 since 2009 in the series. The 2012 winner has earned just above 30% of his career $1,722,092 in the series.

Real Nice, who won the series in 2011 but did not nominate this year, has taken home $579,600 in his four-year Levy career. That sum is about 46% of his $1,245,289 career tally.

But back to the Burke stable.

While it is fun to watch the top older pacers, perhaps there needs to be a limit on the number of horses one stable can nominate to the series. Yonkers Raceway does a great job limiting the number of finalists from one barn to two. Maybe the maximum number of nominations from one barn needs to be five.

This is nothing against Burke, who does an awesome job of juggling the biggest stable on the planet. But in the interest of providing the best possible betting product and most competitive races, the prospects of having a Burke entry in half of the preliminary legs of the each series just doesn’t cut it.

Here’s hoping for an exciting six weeks of racing at Yonkers. The Matchmaker kicks off on Friday, March 22 and the Levy on Saturday, March 23.

While Yonkers will likely be welcoming top drivers Tim Tetrick and Yannick Gingras each weekend for the Matchmaker and Levy series, the Meadowlands is desperately seeking horses to ensure full fields for as many races as possible.

Operator Jeff Gural sent out a “from the heart” plea to the horsemen on Thursday. I have to admit that I’m not sure what these messages accomplish. Very few horsemen are going to alter what is in the best interest of their owners and horses to help the Meadowlands. In a perfect world there would be enough horses to go around for every track to race as much as they want. That is not the case.

Until the time comes when Meadowlands gets alternative gaming options and can lure horses away from the surrounding states, perhaps they need to capitalize on the summer and “dead periods” on the racing calendar.

I would propose a November to mid-March and last week of June until mid-August schedule (racing Thursday to Saturday) for the East Rutherford oval. That would ensure maximum horse population and the best chance of consistently full fields for the number one generator of harness racing handle in North America.

For the record, here is some of what Gural said:

As you know, the first twenty-nine days of the 2013 meet at the Meadowlands have been an overwhelming success.  The public has adapted to the classification system, along with the competitive style of racing full fields, etc. as our handle is up approximately 33%.  Last year we only had two days excluding the Hambletonian and Meadowlands Pace where the handle exceeded $3 Million dollars.  This year we already exceeded $3 Million dollars on thirteen occasions. 

That is the good news.

The bad news is that because all of our income is derived from wagering and horse racing we need to continue to generate handles of over $3 Million dollars every Friday and Saturday.  In order to do that we require full fields and since we are only racing two days beginning next week essentially we need 250 horses each weekend to fill both cards. Last weekend we had twenty-five fewer horses racing over the weekend and as a result our handle declined by $508,000. 

To be blunt, I need the industry to step up and support the Meadowlands which may not be the best business decision for everyone in the short term but, in my opinion, the industry needs a healthy Meadowlands and we deserve the support of the industry. 

The other option would be for us to drastically reduce the stakes program which I think would help increase our overnight purses but would have a very negative impact on the industry because our stakes program is vital to support the breeding industry.  It also serves to attract new customers by showcasing our best horses and creating the kind of excitement we see for our major races.  This will be especially true when we move into the new building. Currently we use 25% of our purse money to fund the stakes program approximately $4,200,000 while our competitors are typically using 10-12%. 

To be honest, I am not sure there are enough horses for all of the race days that are scheduled at Chester, Pocono, Yonkers, Dover and the Meadowlands.  It would seem at some point it should be addressed as the number of mares bred and yearlings born each year continues to decline significantly.  Common sense would tell you that this has to have an impact and that race days have to start to come down.  The bottom line is we cannot survive without full fields as we get killed when we have six or seven horse races no matter what the quality is.  We struggled to fill the card with short fields the last two weekends and Pocono is not open yet. 

I would rather see the industry support us on a voluntary basis as I think it is in everyone’s best interest that we continue to provide the type of product we have been providing for the last two and a half months.  Hopefully I can count on your support.

Meadowlands Saturday Spot Plays

I’ll be doing Saturday Meadowlands analysis again starting next week but here are some spot plays which caught my eye for this week:

Race 1 – (1) WARRAWEE NEEDY

I know he got caught after setting fast fractions last week, but with a couple of starts under his belt, that won’t happen this time around. I’d accept 4-5 or better on him.

Race 2 – (5) MODERN FAMILY

He was raced a bit more conservatively last week because he simply didn’t need to win the race to make the final. I expect him to be on the lead or sitting right on Quick Deal’s back this week. My target price is 7-5 or higher.

Race 5 – (2) OLDE TIME HOCKEY

Had post 10 in his pari-mutuel debut and the race was over for him once he didn’t leave the gate. The trip was awful behind lackluster cover and he still finished with good pace.

Race 11 – (5) STATESMAN N

New Zealand import kicked home in 25 4/5 in his first U.S. qualifier. He’ll have to drop about four seconds to compete, but he looked like one that could be decent. If the price is at least 5-2 I would take a shot.

Meadowlands boss Jeff Gural tasked with trying to rescue harness racing without the big bucks support of a casino

Attendance has dipped 35% from 37,562 in 1985 to Saturday's 24,521 and live on-track handle has plummeted 62% from $4.4 million to $1,649,385 million.

BY LENNY NESLIN / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

SATURDAY, AUGUST 4, 2012, 6:58 PM

Harness racing executives say the sport is in danger of dying in New Jersey. Jeff Gural stepped up to the challenge with one main goal: make the Meadowlands cool to attract a younger crowd.

Without the help of a casino, the primary source of revenue at most tracks, there are no boundaries for Gural's marketing plan, which so far has included racing ostriches and camels.

Approximately 85% of the track's simulcast customers last year were regular customers over 50 years old. "Unless you replace those old customers with new customers, you have a gloomy future," Gural said.

Through 75 live racing days this year as compared to last, attendance is up 7.2% and the live on-track handle has increased 8.3%. But it's the sport's overall trend that has executives worried.

Since Bill O'Donnell drove Prakas to victory on 1985's record-setting Hambletonian Day, attendance has dipped 35% from 37,562 to Saturday's 24,521 and live on-track handle has plummeted 62% from $4.4 million to $1,649,385 million.

After taking over the reins at the Meadowlands in January, Gural's first order of business was to build a new grandstand. The current one is too big for his audience, he says.

"You have a building that was built to hold 30,000 people that holds 3,000," Gural said. "No one wants to be at an empty restaurant … or building."

The new grandstand, which will feature a sports bar and V.I.P. areas, is expected to be completed by the end of next year and be ready for racing in 2014.

Before Gural took on the endeavor to turn around the Meadowlands, he built Tioga Downs and bought Vernon Downs, two upstate New York tracks that offer alternative gaming.

"The gaming pays the bills," Gural said. "I love the racing, I go when I can, but by and large, the handle is almost insignificant to the whole operation."

But Gural can't resort to alternative gaming to solve his problems at the Meadowlands because Atlantic City owns exclusive rights to gaming under New Jersey's constitution.

Gov. Chris Christie has adamantly stood by his plan to help Atlantic City recover in five years. He said July 19 the Meadowlands plan to add a casino is "simply not going to happen."

Instead of the casino industry giving the racing industry $30 million to increase purses as it did before 2010-11, this year Christie invested that subsidy in a new marketing plan for Atlantic City.

Gural said it would be easy to tell if Atlantic City can recover after only two years, not five.

"It's inconceivable to me that the customers they had are going to come back," Gural said, "because the customers that they're missing are the weekly people who used to get on buses from northern New Jersey, or Brooklyn or Queens or Manhattan and go to Atlantic City. Most people aren't going to go to Atlantic City now; they are going to go to the closest casino. Other people are going to bet over the phone and on the Internet."

Meadowlands

Meadowlands general manager Mike Newlin came up with the idea of racing ostriches and camels as a gimmick June 15, something he had done while working at another track. The idea worked, as it got more people to the track, but here lies another problem for Newlin and Gural.

"Our research found that last year, 36% of the customers that came through the turnstiles never bought a program," Newlin said. "That's 36% of your customers that have no idea what they're doing. … It's like going to a restaurant and not getting a menu."

To help solve this problem, Newlin is working to educate customers by offering live programs free with admission. No other tracks that he knows of do this, he says.

"I think the big thing for us that makes us competitive is price," Gural said. "We have free parking, on Fridays we have free admission, free program, a hot dog is $2 or something like that. If you want to go to Madison Square Garden, you're going to buy a ticket for $250, you're going to pay $6 for a hot dog."

Although the prices make harness racing a cheap alternative to mainstream sports, 20-year-old driver and lifelong horseman Harry Landy is worried about the state of the sport and its decline in attendance.

Jeff Gural

"I'm hoping they can figure that out, because it's my career," Landy said. "It gives me a little anxiety that I don't know if [harness racing] is going to happen in 15 years. I worked this hard and I didn't go to college.

"The Meadowlands is doing a fantastic job getting people here, but in the end, if you want to mass-produce a lot of people here you need alternative gaming. It's a necessity during this time. In order for this business to thrive, and for farmers to thrive, you need bigger purses. Bigger purses are more handle at the racetracks. In order to get more handle, you need to get more people here."

Don Larson, a 56-year-old harness racing fan from Robbinsville, N.J., agreed with Landy's sentiments and doesn't think the Meadowlands will survive without a casino for five more years.

"Freehold is in trouble and the Meadowlands is in trouble," Larson said. "The purses have gone way down, while Yonkers has casino gambling and the purses higher. They probably get the better horses. You're going to need casino gambling in the racetrack before you can become successful."

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/more-sports/meadowlands-boss-jeff-gural-tasked-rescue-harness-racing-big-bucks-support-a-casino-article-1.1129144#ixzz22gVSjstp

Harness Racing: Meadowlands

Harness Racing needs better talent

Adding the word new to a title usually is a sign that a revival is going on. Yet anyone who has been able to look at New Meadowlands over the last month or so has to be pained by what they see.

While the gods of racing may have been kind to the Meadowlands in January and February, they have reared an ugly head during the late spring and now early summer.

But the recent fall of the Meadowlands from grace really has nothing to do with the gods at all. It is simply the reality that you can’t trot out understudies for the main attractions and convince the betting public that the stars are in attendance.

Over the past month New Meadowlands has undergone an incredible identity crisis. While the new owners speculated that changing the schedule and just carding races on Friday and Saturdays was all that was necessary to maintain a healthy handle, the opposite has been true.

When the legion of top drivers removed themselves for weekend action out of town, the replacements were put in play. Yes, there were qualified drivers in East Rutherford each and every night that the place was open for business. But they were not the same players that gamblers had come to rely on over the course of the Big M’s glory days.

Make no mistake, betting on harness racing has become a drivers' game, and people who bet large amounts and want to bet with confidence can do so only when they have a driver who makes the right moves in the right situation.

The Meadowlands identity crisis is not driver specific. Credit racing secretary Peter Koch for putting together enough races to hold two complete weekend programs during a very competitive spring-summer season. But what Koch has been left with, no racing secretary would be eager to ask for. He has constantly had to mix and match to group two, three or four different classes into one race just to get 10 horses. While this may meet the minimal standards of competitive racing, too often the fields are unbalanced weak betting propositions.

This time of year has also forced Koch’s hand with Friday programs saturated with trotting races with many for non-winning types.

New Meadowlands management has sought to make racing more fan friendly. When camels and ostriches were paraded on a recent weekend it brought out the best attendance the place had seen in some time. Yet it’s hard to call something successful when the sideshow is more interesting than the main attraction.

And that’s the problem with New Meadowlands. The core of the place, the single entity that made Meadowlands the most exciting racing product and by far the best harness product to wager on, has all but disappeared.

This isn’t about the building or the people working at the place. This is not about the horsemen, or for that matter the drivers who take advantage of opportunities where the highest purses are available.

This is about a schedule that just doesn’t make sense any more.
The best months to wager on harness racing are January, February and March!

During that period wagering at the Meadowlands was solid primarily because the racing was good, the drivers were consistent and the horses competed at a high level.

Fast forward to the last two months and the Meadowlands has lost its regular driving colony on too many predictable occasions. The horse population has sought far better options at Pocono, Yonkers and Harrah’s Philadelphia as those three slot-infused tracks offer more classes and a higher purse structure. And the Meadowlands handle has diminished, proving that even the dumbest of gamblers knows when his favorite drivers are missing in action.

Perhaps there is no greater example to the power the sport’s top drivers are wielding these days than the switch made a few days back moving the Titan Cup from June 30 (Saturday) to June 29. The move was requested by some of the sport’s leading catch drivers who wanted to maintain the mounts behind the sports elite trotters but couldn’t be in two places at the same time. That’s right, a scheduling conflict arose because the Titan Cup at the Meadowlands was carded on the same night as Mohegan Sun at Pocono’s stakes extravaganza. Pocono will host the $500,000 Ben Franklin, the $350,000 Hempt and the $300,000 Lynch on June 30.
Fortunately for the drivers, all of the participants in the Titan Cup had to agree to the move and apparently they did so.

Harness racing is never going to be what it once was. Perhaps the Meadowlands, without the infusion of significant slot machine dollars, will also never return to its glory days. But, that doesn’t mean a true rebirth of the Meadowlands can’t take shape in a different form.

It may be a little early for date requests for 2013, but if I were calling the shots in East Rutherford, I would make every attempt to card a majority of the racing dates in January, February and March and perhaps utilize July and August only for major stakes races.

Since no slot money is forthcoming and the only way Meadowlands can make it as a racetrack is through its handle, why would anyone want to repeat what has happened this season?

What has become apparent to me and I’m guessing the others who have refused to wager on the Meadowlands when it becomes “Tioga South,” is the new face of racing in East Rutherford looks nothing at all like the old one.

I think the sport can accept a shortened Meadowlands season as long as it means the best horses and best drivers will be on display. Anything less will put an end forever to the identity of the best betting product the sport has showcased in the last 36 years.

Harness Racing: George Brennan banned from Meadowlands track

George Brennan

NorthJersey.com Article

BY JOHN BRENNAN

Prominent harness racing driver George  Brennan has been banned from the  Meadowlands Racetrack due to a comment in  a recent newspaper article that was taken as  an endorsement of cheating by track  operator Jeff Gural. Brennan, 45, who won the prestigious  Hambletonian and Hambletonian Oaks races  at the Meadowlands Racetrack last summer,  confirmed Monday in a phone interview as  “100 percent true” a story on New Zealand- based industry website harnesslink.com  citing the comments as a reason for the ban. In a New York Times article last week,  Brennan was supportive of Lou Pena, a  controversial trainer who last month was  suspended in New York state for allegedly  doping horses in almost 700 different races Since 2010. 

Meadowlands Racetrack

Pena and Brennan were the dominant trainer  and driver, respectively, at Yonkers Raceway  last year in Brennan’s first full season at that  track — with Brennan often driving Pena’s  horses. Brennan said of Pena, “They’re throwing this  guy to the wolves when the primary objective  in this game is to win races. Obviously,  someone is out to get him.” Gural said Monday, “I was very offended by  [Brennan’s] remarks about the Pena  suspension in the Times. It seemed he was  saying it is all right to cheat because the  object is to win and this is not my philosophy o r the impression I want my customers to  have. While I agree the rules are confusing  and should be uniform, there is no room for  Mr. Brennan’s views on this subject.” Meadowlands Racing Secretary Peter Koch  called Brennan after the article appeared,  according to Brennan, and informed him of  the ban. Brennan said in the harnesslink.com Story that when he asked Koch to elaborate,  he was simply told, “I’m just the messenger.” Pena was banned in December from the  Meadowlands track by Gural, who in court  documents at the time referred to “no less  than 15 infractions” by various horse racing  boards alleging improper conduct by Pena. 

Jeff Gural

Gural, a real estate executive who first began  racing horses at the 36-year-old  Meadowlands track in its first year of  operation, took over the reins from the New  Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority in  December. Improving the public perception of a sport  that has had its share of racing scandals over  the years has been cited as a priority by  Gural. Plans are under way to build a new, s maller grandstand at the site of the current  backstretch. Gural hopes that will help turn  the track back into a profitable business,  after the state lost millions annually there  due to the sport’s declining popularity.