Eyes for horse shooting up the rail > good eyes for photo's

If you want to see/hear an announcer make good calls on the wire,tune in to Ed Burgart at Los Alamitos.He is almost better than shuttercam.

I've made my fair share of "on the limb" photo calls... last year's Super Derby Prelude was one I sweated-out for a good two minutes before they posted the winner. I've also bailed on a few, but oh well.

Calling photos is not a macho thing with announcers by any stretch. Not once I have I received, made or heard of a call saying, "Holy ****, did you see that photo I just called?"

I think calling the photo is over-rated from the little to the big races. It's what goes on between the start and the finish which sets-up the photo that, in my opinion, is more important from the announcers perspective. If the listener has no idea who is in the photo, than what good is the photo to begin with? That sort of mentality...

Let's see if this works, but I just took this photo from the booth here at LAD. Notice the massive pool sizes as wagering just opened for our fifth race.



My booth is another 10-15 feet before where those green bushes start inside the rail, so it really makes the outside horse look like he's farther ahead of the inside horse everytime. I think in today's fourth race I was a bit off with this... the outside horse looked like he was home first, but in reality, the inside horse held on.

Well then you made a very stupid call.

God bless it.
Will somebody please slap this guy
upside the head with a frying pan.

When you read the first post and...
Ahhh forget it. YOu dont.

It's why Trevor is the best in the business today. Along with Marshall Cassidy, they are my two favorites ever.

Sure, anyone with any street sense knows Trevor is the best around.

NT

lol I laughed at this

Travis, seeing your photo of LA Downs fine dirt/turf courses reminded me of a curiousity you may or may not know the answer to. Will EVDs turf course, which has been under construction for years, be operational for this upcoming season?

Trevor is the best LOW TAKING MUMBER as the horses load.

And

Imbriale is the best at waiting at least 5 seconds AFTER they break to announce that they have.

Our cup runneth over.

Supposed to be, yes...

i didn't notice that Trevor called the photo, but its not something I care about really, the announcers opinion of the photo.

I'll take any of the announcers on this board before TD anyday. John Imbriale is a god compared to him. I don't get all the fawning over him. The amount of inaccuracies that he comes up with is staggering.

Rocking Rocky Dash overcame some traffic trouble to win today at 12-1!!

:tro: very clever.

amen. who cares? even if he calls it wrong, does it make any difference at all? i never understood the tv announcers who are "afraid" to call it. it's like they're worried they might make someone tear up their ticket.

Oh yeah. I forgot that one. I forgot that nobody is allowed to make a mistake. You have to call over 1000 races a year and you better not make a mistake. I would love to hear all of those that criticize him try to do it once. Then if they get through that one race, let's see how they handle a full card. Not one of those cards with four and five horse fields but full ones. With jockeys wearing the silks of owners that they aren't all that familiar with. It's not as easy as people seem to think it is. I think that's part of why you never see the announcers that are on here criticizing any others. Because they know how hard it is. I bet most of you that criticize them couldn't do it even if you were watching a replay and knew the results already.

dorkin makes far more and bigger mistakes.

I agree with most of this -- though on the other hand, it may need to be cleared up because some people are taking great liberty in their logical leaps.

For myself, I agreed that I was impressed with the fact that he called Gio Ponti. I don't think it makes him a great announcer, and he's probably not even in my top 5 favorites, it was just one thing that stood out to me on that broadcast, the same way it did to CSC. Generally, race callers are reluctant to make a call on anything they could potentially be wrong about -- ie anything less than an obvious head, so that's what made this really stick out was that it was so close and it just hit me as something you didn't hear every day. I also found it interesting that he was so sure of it, when the photo showed it was awfully close.

Doesn't make him the best. Doesn't make him less obnoxious for some of the things he does. Doesn't undo his botched Street Sense call in his second career Breeders' Cup race call. It's not supposed to. It was just a very unexpected, very confident, out of the norm declaration compared to what we're used to hearing during finishes that close.

No more than that.