Sunday, July 05, 2009

Belmont Attendance vs. Handle

I have always been an avid newspaper reader and one habit I can't seem to break is reading baseball box scores and NYRA daily attendance and handle figures. Luckily my local paper still prints both in the Sports section.

Regarding yesterdays Holiday Belmont crowd, over at Left at the Gate it was noted that "The crowd of 7,667 wagered almost $1,378,300 into the mutuel pool. With the benefit of one extra race, that's some $20,000 more than was bet on Rachel Alexandra day the Saturday before, when the crowd was announced as being 13,352."

A closer look reveals that the Belmont card on the 4th also drew more in both Intra-State wagering and Inter-state Wagering than on Rachel Alexandra Day. Here are all the figures:

Saturday June 27th (feature race: Mother Goose Stakes featuring Rachel Alexandra):
  1. Attendance: 13,352
  2. On-Track Handle: 1,357,534
  3. Intra-State: 2,657,212
  4. Inter-State: 8,361,822
Saturday July 4th (Feature race: Grade 1 Prioress Stakes):
  1. Attendance: 7,667
  2. On-Track Handle: 1,378,296
  3. Intra-State: 2,969,277
  4. Inter-State: 9,564,986
Yesterday's card also featured two Grade II stakes races (The Dwyer and The Suburban), so maybe a full racing card with varied betting possibilities brings in better handle than a card featuring a Star filly in a walk-over race. Also, I am always suspect of any NYRA released attendance figure on a Spinner Giveaway day.

4 comments:

dana said...

what does Spinner mean in your last sentence, someone used the term over at my blog on a similar post and I wasn't sure what it meant.

SaratogaSpa said...

A "Spinner" pays multiple admissions for the specific purpose of getting more than one giveway item. The term spinner comes from going through the turnstiles multiple times ie "spinning the turnstiles".

dana said...

ah ha, got it. thx!

Alan Mann said...

Thanks for the link. I was there for the Mother Goose, and I'm highly skeptical of the announced attendance that day. A crowd of that size would generally cause a noticeable strain on services in the backyard, and I didn't notice anything the least bit unusual there, nor on any of the three levels in the grandstand.