Steven at Saratoga

This will interest three of you -- tops -- but Steven Crist is blogging the Saratoga horse racing meet. This is very exciting for me, so I'll excerpt a post that I enjoyed. It's a bit less heavy on the racing terminology than most of the others, so that should give you some idea of what you're getting into:

Ms. Meadow runs the horse with the shortest name and the longest morning-line price on the entire Saturday Saratoga card: Zyxt, a 4-year-old gelding listed at 99-1 in the 8th race. She has run seven other similarly-named horses over the last five years: Yaye, Ybbs, Ydy, Ys, Ytyzz, Zyth and now Zyxt. All appear to be homebreds from her Sky Band Farm in Canton, Massachusetts ... Zyxt is the lone winner from 33 starts over the last five years for Ms. Meadow and her band of Scrabble-tile runners. He won his debut at Suffolk Downs last Nov. 6, rallying from 18 lengths off the pace to win a mile-and-70-yard maiden race by 3 1/2 lengths, returning what seems like a rather stingy $8.20. He earned a lowly Beyer Speed Figure of 39 for that effort and will probably be close to 99-1 stretching out to 9.5 furlongs on the turf off a nine-month layoff and presumably meeting tougher company. On the other hand, he's bred for the grass in general and this turf course in particular: Zyxt's dam is Bailrullah, who won the Diana in 1987.

Crist later reported that Zyxt went off at 67-1 in that race, and finished 11th.