Hooves,

Here is the story on all the horses who are running at Delaware and Monmouth that you might have seen in the past running at Belmont park.

This is a money game Hooves. Whether you are an owner, trainer, jockey, agent, whatever. Money is the goal. In the past when a guy who was stabled in the Mid Atlantic or NJ had a nice horse he shipped the horse to NY. Why? Well in some cases it was in part to try and cash a nice bet, but for the most part it was because Ny's purses so heavily outweighed those that were available in NJ or the Mid Atlantic (Maryland or Delaware). Then Delaware got slots and NJ got favorable legislation passed to heavily increase purses. The result was that purses in that neck of the woods got pretty large. Almost as big as NYRA's for the same conditions.

Shipping has never been a fun thing for trainers and its never option number one. Lots of horses don't react to the long van rides favorably and horses always run better when they are sticking to their daily routine. Then NYRA instituted the detention barn last year. The horses have to be in the barn 4 hours before their race. This means that when you ship you have to count on being there at least 4 1/2 hours early because you have to check in at the gate and their is often a line there. So lets say you have a four hour ship from Delaware. You have to leave 5 hours AHEAD of the time you are supposed to be in the test barn.

If you are scheduled to race at lets say 2 o o'clock in the third race, you have to be there by 9:30 to be safe, and you have to leave Delaware at 5 AM which means you have to start loading at 4:30 Am to be safe. Now you have to send a groom with the horse so hes not gonna be available to work all morning. Grooms have more than one horse so you are gonna be short on help. Is it worth it? I mean look at what you have to go through just to race. YOu can ship teh night before if you have a friend who is stabled at NYRA but you still have to send a groom and give him meal money and make sure he gets put up somewhere, money that comes from the trainers pocket and hes still short on help.

Its just not worth it now that the purses are so large in these places. YOU still see shippers for stakes races but it simply no longer makes sense to ship in for a claiming or allowance race when you can avoid that hassle and run at home for good money.
The detention barn is a great step in theory. But its cost us shippers and makes field size smaller. IN addition you may have noted that a lot of NY bred races are being run. The reason why is simple, they always fill up and have large fields.

You may also have noted that higher and mid priced claiming races have much smaller fields or in some cases just dont ever get run because they dont fill up, same as allowance races which on the dirt are as rare as the day is long. Reason is simple, those 1-2 shippers that would show up in the field no longer come and it leaves short fields. 2 year old MSW's have only been run like 6 times combined for fillies and mares since the Belmont meet opened (open condition, not S bred) and once again its because LOTS of out of town trainers used to ship in for these but now they dont bother and Pletcher has had to resort to shipping his very best two year olds down to CD or Monmouth because the races NEVER fill in ny for 2 yo MSW's.

Its not that trainers don't want to run in NY, its that the dtetntion barn has lead to very unrealistic time and help contstraints and simply has made staying home a more viable alternative.