Weekend Winners Club

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Monday, May 13. Churchill Downs. The annual running of the Derby is complete even if the bickering is not over yet. We posted an article covering all of that last week and we all know who really won, so this is about the final results as a whole and what predictions we had beforehand.
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Since there was some chaos and the real winner was taken down, we’ll include the top 6 in our final analysis. Wagers and purse money both include the top 5 that cross the wire after DQ’s, minus any who were disqualified. So here’s the list:
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Maximum Security
Country House
Code of Honor
Tacitus
Improbable
Game Winner
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In that list are the real top 5 finishers and the post DQ top 5 finishers, in the correct running order. In other words, the exotics that should have paid out, and the exotics that did pay starting with #2. What did we say about these horses in our predictions, and most notably, The Grid?
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The Grid lists the top two finishers as having the top two LP and Stamina ratings, in that order. No doubt the best indicators for horses running their longest career race. So the Grid would have easily given you the winning exacta had the stewards not issued the bs DQ. They owe you an apology for that.
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The next four in the bunch were all in the top 10 of at least 2 categories Stamina, LP, and Power. 3 of these top 6, including Maximum Security, were also top 5 in EP and Speed. So it’s not like any of the top 6 runners were any surprise if using the Grid.
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In the full form Kentucky Derby Grid, 4 of them were ranked top 5 overall, with Code of Honor ranked 7 and Country House 11. Ironically, Country House was the only one not qualified under the critical criteria to be Derby champ, but we already discussed his merits above as a dangerous contender and will do so again below, and the fact is he was not the real winner.
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The next most relevant ranking has to be our own Derby Dozen, which had only one of these not in our top 6 after scratches, and even that one was still in the top 12, after you cross out the horses that didn’t race, which is only fair. It’s all about those who actually run the race.
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That’s right, except for show horse Code of Honor at # 12, all of the top 6 finishers were ranked in our top 6. Yes we did even have Country House in the top 6.That’s kind of amazing if you think about it. It didn’t surprise me since we’ve had similar results for the past five years in those rankings, but there is always one or two not in our top 5.
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In another article we highlighted the importance of jockeys and trainers. Specifically it underscored the short list of trainers and jockeys that had actually won the Kentucky Derby before. The list of jockeys was only two, and both of them finished in the top six. The others are highly ranked national jockeys that were top ten in earning beforehand.
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The list of trainers wasn’t that much larger but due to mainly the Baffert trio and Pletcher duo they covered a third of the field. Out of the top six finishers, all were prior Derby winners except for two of them that were well qualified horsemen.
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The first was (real) winner Jason Servis, who we had erroneously listed as a prior winner because his brother John with the same first initial has won before, and we didn’t realize it was a different man until seeing him on Derby day interviews. The second was Bill Mott, who has won just about every other big race and is a hall of fame trainer.
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Another of our most popular annual articles called Major Prep Winners in the Baffert Era (starting 1997) showed the importance of finishing in the money, particularly in the top 2, of the final Prep race. Sure enough, 4 of these top 6 were top 2 in a Big 5 major prep, and the other 2 both finished 3rd in a Big 5. Maximum Security won his final prep, the Florida Derby.
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The bottom line is that the Grid had the horses very well rated, as did our Derby Dozen and other analyses, and none of that is new. It happens like that every year now and in almost every big race that we over analyze beforehand. The major problem we had this year was the stewards who erroneously decided to take the winner down along with your hard earned money.
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You can see without their intervention, that everything went almost exactly as it should have, and if using our information here, you would have won at least one or two great exotic bets. Considering how high we’ve been on Country House all year you should have had something on him at 65-1. Now we move on to the Preakness Stakes and plan to kick ass on that again.

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