The Index
Each name in the record opens onto every charted start it made at Plainridge: the post position drawn, the finishing position, the winning time, the closing odds, and the driver who held the lines on that particular afternoon, together with the stable that had sent the horse out to race.
The index runs across the pages below, grouped by first letter and ordered inside each group by charted starts, so the stalwarts of the meeting sit at the head. A horse with a single charted start appears on its own race day page even where it has no record page.
What earns a horse a page
A page opens here on evidence rather than achievement. Two charted starts, one win, or a single recorded winning time is enough, which is why 1,124 of the 2,864 names in the record carry one. The rest raced too seldom for the surviving paperwork to describe them fairly at all.
Most of these horses were passing through. 650 appear in a single season, 317 in two, and only 42 in four or more. That fits a regional meeting where a stable ships in for a condition that suits its horse, takes what the purse offers, and moves on again once the class no longer does.
The seasons are uneven. Charted starts survive from 2001 through 2005, again from 2007 to 2011, then for 2013 and 2014. Nothing at all comes through from 2006 or from 2012, and each absence is a gap in the surviving paperwork rather than a season in which the track itself sat out.
A winning time survives for 1,104 of them. The fastest mile anywhere in the index is 1:52.4, while the median sits back at 1:58.4, and the distance between those two figures is the honest working range of a five-eighths-mile oval, which asks one more turn of a horse than a half-miler does.
1,124 records across 22 pages, from 2,864 names in the record and 3,950 charted starts. 294 have at least one win.
The limits of the horse record
The busiest horse in the record is Nancy Starbuck, with 17 charted starts across 2002 to 2004 and no win among them. That is worth saying plainly. An index assembled from whatever survived is not a highlights reel, and the horses that appear most often here are simply the ones that turned up to race most often.
Winning is not the only outcome these charts record. 294 of the horses listed won at least once here, another 278 were placed without ever winning, and 552 finished outside the first three on every start they made. A record built from complete charts has to carry all three of those groups equally.
Every figure here is bounded by one track. A horse that raced widely across New England will have starts, wins and a faster mile in documents this record never touches, and none of that shows from this side. What the index describes is what happened at Plainridge on the surviving days.
Each entry carries enough to judge whether the full record is worth opening: the charted starts, the wins, the best surviving mile and the seasons in which that horse appeared. The starts figure is the one that orders a page, because it is the only column present for every single horse.
The three indexes read together. A horse page names the driver and the trainer engaged for each start, and both of those names open a record of their own, so one afternoon can be followed from the horse, to the driver who held the lines, to the stable that sent it out.
Questions about the horse index
How many horses are in this index?
1,124 of the 2,864 horses that appear anywhere in the record have a page. A horse earns one once it has two charted starts, a win, or a recorded winning time — a single unplaced start leaves too little to read.
Why do some horses not have a page?
Because one line in one chart is not a record. Those horses still appear in the race day they ran on; they simply do not carry a page of their own.
What is on a horse page?
Every charted start attributed to that horse: the date, the race, the post position, the finishing position and beaten margin, the time, the closing odds, and the driver and trainer engaged. Where a best mile survives it is given with the date it was set.
How many of these horses won a race here?
294. Across the whole index the charts hold 3,950 starts, so most horses in the list raced without winning — which is what a real meeting looks like rather than a highlights reel.
Is this a horse's full career record?
No. It is the record of what this one track's surviving documents show. A horse that raced widely will have starts elsewhere that are outside this record entirely.