Brilliant race conditions, competitive fields and a great mix of participants has produced some significant payouts at The Meadowlands the last few weeks.

by Brett Sturman

It’s been quite a couple of weekends for the tote board at The Meadowlands. Going back two Saturdays ago, racing on Jan. 18 tested the tote’s functional limits with the first ever triple dead heat in the track’s history, which then coincided with a string of massive payouts utilizing all available real estate on the board.

Beginning with those races from Jan. 18, win mutuels included horses paying $74.60, $42.60 (82-1 odds as part of the triple dead heat), $150.60, and $95.60 (as part of a $27,861 trifecta). Payouts accelerated even farther from there, as this past weekend produced two winners over $100 on Friday (Jan. 24) and then two more winners over $100 on Saturday (Jan. 25). Also, there was a $90 winner thrown in there along with a few other “smaller” winners varying in between $30 and $60.

The high payouts produced haven’t been entirely by luck. The setup of the races at The Meadowlands is conducive for making the potential of high-priced winners greater than at any other track.

Evenly-matched fields are the obvious reason there are fewer predictable winners, but going a level deeper, what’s driving the parity? I believe it starts with the condition sheet.

The Meadowlands needs a detailed condition sheet in order to help fill races throughout multiple sets of qualifying criteria, but in that process, it also makes it far more challenging to handicap the races. Gone now are the days of having a condition like you’d see at Freehold that says N/W $3,000 L6 with an optional claim of $6,000.

Here is an example from The Meadowlands, using the condition for a recent race that produced the top three finishers with odds of 46-1, 22-1, 92-1. It reads: N/W $7,500 (N/W L2 $8,250) in Last 4 Starts AE: N/W $1,750 P/S in 2024 (Minimum 15 Starts) (Winner of This Class or Higher in Last Start Ineligible – Class Cap N/W $12,500) AE: TM Rating 83.5 (N/W L2 84/2L4 84.5) or Less as of 1/14.

I don’t know when having degrees in data science and statistics became part of the requirements to be a race secretary, but that’s what it looks like is being utilized brilliantly in North Jersey. As mentioned, the patchwork on different conditions creates a real challenge to handicap.

In traditional harness racing, races have been simple to handicap because most horses race against the same horses week in and week out. When you can look at a program and in a field of 10 horses, see that eight of them have raced in the same race three out of the last four weeks, it makes comparison easy. But that’s not the case in many of these conditions at The Meadowlands.

Common recent opponents are rare. Horses are coming into these races from different tracks, off different periods of time, coming off qualifiers, coming off amateur races and the list goes on. Even a listed condition of NW12500L4 can vary greatly from week to week because of all the underlying conditions, so it makes it that much harder to even tell who is truly moving up or moving down in class – it’s impossible to know just by looking at the stated condition. As the fields become more difficult to interpret, the horses odds become more of guesswork and you get some of these higher prices.

The other part of this is the human factor, the drivers and the trainers. Both of those colonies look very different now in the winter months than they will as springtime approaches. What can you say about the group of trainers other than between some longer standing ones and some ones I’ve never heard of until recently – they’re very evenly matched? Unlike during the Championship meet where most of the races are won by a select few, there isn’t a strong lean towards one group of trainers – any of them can win.

Sure, you still have a couple of the bigger and sharper names racing there now, but that’s somewhat offset by racing some of their lower stock against other trainers who are still more than capable. And just as it can be a crapshoot at times handicapping racing in the more complex set of conditions, I’d think the same holds true for trainers when figuring out where to even enter.

Similar holds true with the drivers. The colony at the moment is much different than the Grand Circuit colony, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. If anything, I find this current group is striking the right balance in how people want races to be run.

The rub with the elite drivers in overnight races is that they all follow the same formula with little action. On the opposite end, the issue people have with the amateur races is that it’s the wild west. With these drivers, you get a perfect blend. There are so many races where longer shot horses are forwardly placed, or where drivers aren’t afraid to make an early move against a favorite. Most of the highest-priced payouts over the past couple weeks came where horses were essentially driven without regard for their odds, and you can see the contrast in results to when the most favored horses run the lineup.

At the same time, favorites still win at The Meadowlands, too. Even though last Saturday produced winning horses in separate races that paid $146, $115, $37 and $29, that same card still produced seven winning favorites from 14 races. It shows another balance where the opportunity for high-paying winners is out there, but at the same time enough of the races can still be handicapped to form.

With full fields and similar race conditions again scheduled for this weekend, the recent trends of surprise results should continue.