Rumor Mill

Word around Bay Meadows is that Roman Chapa, a regular on the leader board at Texas and New Mexico tracks, will be bringing his tack to Northern California for a while. While the jockey enjoys the lucrative status of riding first call for Steve Asmussen in Texas, he apparently wants to give NorCal a crack.

Although his arrival is by no means certain, many trainers seem excited by the prospect. If he does show up, I'd expect him to get live mounts.

--Have you read Dan Illman's report [free subscription required} from the Horseplayers Expo in Las Vegas? He is genuinely excited, dare I say giddy, from hanging with our sport's elite touts, scribblers, & talking heads. This is exactly how I feel when I'm lucky enough to get a little access to those on the inside that I so respect. Here is evidence he is the People's Handicapper--a term he coined for himself (that's SO blogger), but deservedly so. I can't imagine the curmudgeony Watchmaker or the staid Crist, or the bispecticled scholar Paulick having this child like zeal that so many of us regular fans do, much less admitting to it. I feel that way every time I get to talk breed with the horsemen on the backstretch whose names I've been reading in the form for ages. Dan is one of us. Even so, I'm sure he has already experienced the flip side of his adoration of Harvey Pack, and will many more times.

Eclipse Voter Swayed by Blog Comments

But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

--John Stuart Mill, from On Liberty

Dan Illman of FormBlog revealed that after considering arguments made in the comments section of his blog, he was convinced The Tin Man is more deserving of the Champion Turf Horse award than is Dan's initial choice of Aragorn.

you guys may have influenced me more than the other way around. At first, I was going to vote for Aragorn over The Tin Man for champion turf horse. After reading the intelligent posts concerning the division, and then going back over the past performances, I flip-flopped to The Tin Man.

That Dan's interaction in this forum made him more confident in his eclipse ballot, and even brought him to a new more defensible conclusion in one instance, is perhaps the greatest reason why discourse is supremely important. In matters of horse racing or politics, J.S. Mill had it right. Discourse is important. The collision of ideas yields truth and we should not stifle this collision.