Mark Cramer
C & X Report

From a C&X reader:
Hemingway’s Key has competed in four graded stakes and finished 11th, 8th, 6th, and 8th (sounds like my kind of horse as I am fond of slow horses like that fluky thing that won the Derby last year). Despite his awful performances this year, Hemingway’s Key intrigues me a great deal because of his trainer’s persistence, and what looks like an improving pattern for a still lightly raced horse. If you take away his race this year on a wet track and his race on polytrack then you are left with only two bad races this year instead of four. How’s that for creative handicapping? It’s convoluted I know, but that is the way that I think. How many times have you seen bettors perplexed after some longshot that didn't figure wins a big race? Nick Zito has done this before and won big races at long odds with young horses and it is not inconceivable that his horse can run big and beat most, or maybe all of them, to the wire. Even though Birdstone had some back class at age two, he had not run much faster than Hemingway’s Key before he won the Belmont Stakes. I do not expect Hemingway’s Key to win. At 10-1 he is not a win play, but at the expected 40-1 I have no problems playing a win ticket along with exacta place tickets underneath Barbaro and Brother Derek. My trifecta and superfecta plays will have Barbaro and Brother Derek on top of Greeley’s Legacy and Hemingway’s Key. Mitch

Mark comments:
I have published this reader commentary (no he's not Nick Zito's lawyer) minutes after I heard a report on the BBC that the Cuban government is sending 20,000 photocopied pages of Ernest Hemingway documents to the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. Not often that I get two bulletins on Hemingway in one day. And yesterday I went to the race track where Hemingway used to go in the 1920s!
If this is the first post you are reading, be sure to check back to the previous post, which represents my own analysis, admittedly less creative than Mitch's.