I saw the Blood-Horse article and yeah, I get all that, I know there is no such thing as a free lunch. Frankly, from what I've read, a lot of the people that comment on the BH know two things about horses--one end bites and the other end kicks only their not always sure which end does which.
I was wondering if anyone was at Los Al Sunday and might have seen him on the track. When a multiple stakes winner--who also is a graded stakes winner--is offered for a tag while still age three, you'd have to wonder about soundness. What I think, is that Baffert knows that in so. CA, the horse is a tweener. The two main sprint objectives coming up are the BC Sprint and the Malibu and this horse would probably get nothing in either one of those spots. Any sprint stake, in which the horse is eligible, will probably have at least one horse or two in that would be very tough for Toews On Ice to beat so he's running for second or third and given the probable race shape, maybe not even that. Since classified allowance races are a thing of the past--and he's gone through his conditions--Baffert needs to move the horse some way or another and he was trying to gauge the horse's worth by putting him in for that tag. Unless Evans thought he was going to get for less than the claim price--you'd think he'd have had him vetted-- I'm not sure why he just didm't claim him? I'm pretty sure that Pegram and Crew are out on his purchase price so that was another reason that he went in that spot. I think on a different circuit, the horse could be a top horse, if campaigned right. I do think that someone who does the TUP-EMD circuit--Frank Lucarelli or Joe Toye for example--could have a lot of fun with this horse. He's got some class and I think he can go a mile. We already know he can sprint.