IT’S TIME to recognize that what Chad Brown is doing in this Saratoga meet is akin to Tiger Woods in the 2000 U.S. Open.
Said U.S. Open, Woods won by 15 strokes and was the only player under par. He was so dialed in that he was, in effect, playing against himself.
The same can be said about Brown, who through 34 days of racing (deadline for this column is before racing starts for the final week) has 34 wins. This is disgusting in the most admirable way. Averaging one win per day? I remember when 18 wins was enough to be leading trainer.
Making matters even more dispiriting for those in his wake is the margin between him and second place. Brown is the equivalent of 31 lengths ahead of his competition. The past few years it’s been a two-horse race between him and Todd Pletcher, but Pletcher couldn’t even keep up this year. He’s not even winning at 20 percent. His 16 percent is, by his standards, a bummer on a cosmic order of magnitude.
But a closer examination of the numbers shows exactly how Brown has been able to amass such a lead. It all comes down to the grass.
Here’s the big picture. As of Monday, Brown had 34 wins through 34 days of racing. That was one more win the second place jockey. His win percentage is 25 percent. One out of every four starters wins a race.
Brown has 79 starters (as of this writing) for 21 wins, 16 seconds, and 13 thirds on the grass.
In second place, Bill Mott has 46 starters and six wins on the turf.
Brown has $2.18 million in turf earnings. Mott has $705,438 in turf earnings.
Switching over to dirt, Pletcher has the most starters with 74, but is tied for wins with 13. Yes, Brown is that other 13.
Pletcher is still the king of two-year-olds, at least in terms of starters. He’s had 30 starters and four wins, which puts him just behind Steve Asmussen’s five wins from 20 babies.
What’s more shocking? Brown’s winning clip or Pletcher’s poor batting average?
Part of Brown’s ability to win so many races is the sheer number of starters he has. He’s brought 135 horses over to the track. Pletcher is in second with 109, then it drops to 82 from New York’s Rudy Rodriguez.
By sheer numbers, Brown has the advantage. If you have more darts to throw, you’ll hit more bull’s eyes. Brown, on average, brings 3.9 horses over to the track in the afternoons. It’s like he said, “[Saratoga’s] my home track.”
And ever since he came onto the scene in 2008 and has since amassed more and more wins and more and more earnings, Saratoga has become his territory. It’s almost like getting beat at Saratoga is somehow personal, so he’s bringing out all the athletes to beat his competition into submission. All the other trainers have all but tapped out yet he’s still trying to snap off their limbs.
If this were high school, he’d be accused of running up the score. But it’s not. This is big-time horse racing. This is a thermo-nuclear beat down.
I’d love to be a fly on the wall for the staff meeting ahead of Saratoga. You know that even down to the hoof pick everything is in order, the attention to detail nano in scope so that the 2018 Saratoga got reclaimed. Because last year it was Pletcher who had taken back the crown, 40-39 (!).
The year before that, Brown won 40-31. Forty! A win per day.
What we’re witnessing here, this stretch of the past few years, is something we’ve never seen before on this scale at Saratoga.
There was a time that wins in the upper teens to low 20s was something once thought as other-worldly. And he’s had several turf horses rained off the turf. There are more wins that got scratched because of weather. To think that Brown has set so high a standard that anything short of 30 wins for him would be seen as a disappointment.
The comparison would be like seeing Roger Federer have to gut out a win in five sets and have to truly work for it. To see the Woods of old grind out a tournament for the win was somehow below his class.
We’re so used to and enamored by dominance, that the struggle—that life-affirming ethos—is, in a sense, a chink in the armor.
For now, seeing what Brown, and also Pletcher, are doing at Saratoga is once in a lifetime. You have to sit back and bask in it and take for what it is:
Greatness illustrated.
Brendan O’Meara is a freelance writer and author of Six Weeks in Saratoga. Follow him on Twitter @BrendanOMeara
