I can't seem to dial up the link, darn it, but I should have known that your comment had a context.

I anticipate that we'll renew this mutual forehead-smacking when Harper returns from the DH next month. When is having too much talent a problem? When you are the Washington Nationals.

I know! Ramos is like some magic porcelain figurine in human form.

It has to be the Washington Nationals, or, if not, the Montreal Expos—a team I loved with a love so enduring, desperate, and dumb that I embraced the franchise no matter how often it was taunted by Fate and abused by the dark lords of Major League Baseball.

Probably a good decision ...

I was there. As lucky as the guy was that a horse didn't kill him, he was even luckier that the bettors didn't. (Truly: When security pulled him through the back halls of the grandstand towards Pimlico's racetrack jail, people threw anything they could grab at him. Beers, programs, sandwiches, even!)

Go Nats!!

We can all appreciate the power of some wood.

Have you read "Laughing in the Hills," by Bill Barich? It's essentially a memoir of a summer spent trying to make a living as a bettor at Golden Gate Fields. Barich's descriptions of both the social culture of everyday horseracing—not at the blueblood level, that is to say—and the lonely cogitations of the…

Well, this brings back unpleasant memories. Pro tip: take the LIRR from Penn Station to Belmont. After the races walk out the track's back gate, turn left, and in about 10 minutes you'll find Koenig's restaurant in the friendly village of Floral Park. Hoist and drain a few steins, have some sauerbraten, then take a…

Probably, but victories in marquee races are what sells horse semen. (And, even if you outlawed the drugs right now—and trainers, who we know to be gentlemen and ladies of great integrity when it comes to these matters, honored those drug bans—it would take god knows how many generations of foals to breed out the…

I don't think there's much evidence to support this comment. Thoroughbred trainers and owners—the ones I know, at least—don't race their horses out of spite; and the connections of past Triple Crown-denying winners usually express regret. The size of the Belmont field has more to do with the race's $1.5 million purse,…

There is truth to that, but the reason for light training regimens is that today's thoroughbreds are more fragile. They are overwhelmingly bred with speed, rather than stamina, foremost in mind. And, more importantly, drugs permitted by racing authorities today have allowed infirmities to be passed on from generation…

Still pissed about Touch Gold, eh?

More to the point of Principal Skinner's—oops: Armand Tanzarian's—implied question: no winner of the Triple Crown ran against fields composed, by rule, solely of horses that ran in all three races. So Chrome's owner's gripe is simply bitterness, begrudgery, and crap.

I'm probably late to this debate, but the "Points" system for entry into the Derby—purely a marketing tool, used to gin up TV ratings for prep races—was introduced in 2012 to replace a system whereby the Derby was open to the top 20 lifetime earners in stakes races. And the point of both systems is simply to keep the…

The Chrome saga is now another kind of rags-to-riches story: the "everyman hero" owner turned into an "entitled asshole" in record time.

My mother: "In his mouth?! He doesn't know where that frisbee has been!"

Funny thing: Magnusson couldn't find a publisher for his "Ceremonial Locking of the Chastity Belt" portrait series. Several galleries, however, are considering images from his "Shoppin' Hijabs with Dad" project.

Why'd she change it? "Iggy Amethyst" is pretty catchy.