Mike Brunker Horse racing editor • Profile • E-mail

BALTIMORE - The public handicapping of thoroughbred horse races is best suited to those with thick contrarian streaks and even thicker hides. But at the risk of my membership card in this most iconoclastic of fraternities, I believe that Barbaro will win the Preakness Stakes on Saturday and head to New York with his perfect record intact and a run at history on his schedule.

My absence from the contrarian party will hardly be felt, as plenty of other experts already are doing cannonballs off the Barbaro bandwagon, including NBCSports.com contributor John Pricci. And they’re making persuasive cases why they think that Barbaro will taste defeat for the first time at Pimlico. 

I’ll concede their point that betting Barbaro to win the race is a bad idea (more on that later) and acknowledge that the colt is unlikely to win the Preakness as easily as he did the Kentucky Derby, but for once I’m going to trust my “deceitful eyes,” as John puts it, over handicapping theory.

The naysayers have put forth a handful of reasons why they believe Barbaro can be beaten. Chief among them are:

• He will "bounce" — or regress — after running the best race of his career in the Derby.
• After being given long breaks between his races during the spring, he is vulnerable because he is now forced to run on just two weeks rest.
• Brother Derek and Sweetnorthernsaint both had terrible racing luck in the 20-horse Derby and are much more likely to get trouble-free trips around the Pimlico oval with only nine horses entered in the 1 3/16-mile Preakness.

While any or all of the three may occur, I’m not persuaded that they will be enough to defeat Barbaro.

The existence of what used to be called the “bounce theory” is now generally accepted as handicapping wisdom. The simplified version is that when horses put forth a top effort, they react physically and don’t run as well in their next race.

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Sharp handicappers cash tickets all the time by spotting those horses and betting against them, so why should the Preakness be any different?

The first thing to realize is that while the bounce is apparently statistically valid, it does not happen in every instance, even when a horse steps up and runs the biggest race of his career, as Barbaro did in earning a Beyer Speed Figure of 111 in the Derby.

Logic would suggest that one factor mitigating the bounce in those instances is the ease with which a horse achieves a lifetime best. If that’s accurate — and I believe it is — then Barbaro is a good candidate to avoid the bounce in Baltimore. After all, he ran the fastest quarter mile in the Derby — 24.34 seconds — since Secretariat in 1973 and did it on his own, without feeling jockey Edgar Prado’s whip during the stretch run.

The argument that Barbaro will bounce in the Preakness is usually tied to the fact that Barbaro will be rushing back to race in just two weeks after having all his prior races spaced a month or more apart by trainer Michael Matz.

I thought that the light schedule argument had been put to rest after Barbaro became the first horse in 50 years to win the Derby off a layoff of five weeks or more. But apparently it just slipped into a new set of sheep’s clothing for the Preakness.

While it’s certainly true that Barbaro is going to be running off the shortest rest he’s ever had between races, so too are Brother Derek and Sweetnorthernsaint. So why is it any worse for Barbaro than for the horses that appear to be his main rivals?

If anything, he is probably the freshest horse of the trio with just three races in 138 days compared to four for Brother Derek and five for Sweetnorthernsaint.

Also encouraging is the fact that Matz “blew out” the colt Friday morning — or worked him quickly over a short distance — to set him on edge for the race. That’s not typically a maneuver a trainer would use on a horse that wasn’t doing well.

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