We had a gelding, Mine that Bird, win the Derby, and the second-longest Mutuel price in the Derby’s history. 

The 134^th Preakness went to a filly. Rachel Alexandra. She not only won the Preakness, but the filly derby, the Kentucky Oaks. No filly has ever done that before.  She will pass on running in the Belmont. Her jockey Calvin Borel has a shot at winning all three Triple Crown races on two different horses. That would also be a first.

Let’s take a look at the field for the 141st Belmont Stakes:

10-Brave Victory:

Has the Belmont-upset trainer in his corner, Nick Zito.  Has only two wins at sprint distances to his credit.  Finished third to charitable man in the Peter Pan Stakes in last start.

6- Charitable Man:

Has never lost on dirt. His only defeat has come over a synthetic track.  His workouts have been great for this start.  If he goes the first half-mile in fifty seconds or more He could go wire to wire. He is two for two over the Belmont surface. The One to Beat.

1-Chocolate Candy:

Has been at Belmont training since his run in the Derby. He ran fifth.  Had some nice workouts over the big sandy. Has top jockey Garrett Gomez in the saddle. Should be closing at the finish.

2-Dunkirk:

Had all kinds of trouble in the Derby. Stumbled at the start and again on the backstretch. Has only one win in brief career.  This will be his fifth start. This horse is a question mark to me. Might hit the board.

8-Flying Private:

He had trouble in his last start the Preakness. He’s only been to the winner’s circle once in twelve starts. Nice workout on May 27^th. D. Wayne Lukas is his trainer.

5-Luv Gov:

Has a maiden win to his credit on a sloppy racetrack.

7-Mind That Bird:

Won the Kentucky Derby. With a dream ride by Calvin Borel. He gets his services back in the Belmont. Borel rode Rachel Alexandra to her historic win in the Preakness. The bird finished second in the Preakness. He will have to race closer to the pace in this one. He won’t be able to fall to far back and make that closing rush. Should be running down the stretch.

9-Miner Escape:

Won small Stakes race on the under card on Preakness day. This is Zito’s other starter. Should be up close to the early pace.

3-Mr. Hot Stuff:

He too had trouble in the Kentucky Derby. Bumped and squeezed in the race. Finished a nice third to Pioneerof the Nile in the Santa Anita Derby. Should improve on his Derby performance.

4-Summer Bird:

He only has maiden win under his belt. Picks up Kent Desormeaux for this race.

And now, my selections:

6—Charitable Man

3—Mr. Hot Stuff

1—Chocolate Candy

7—Mine That Bird

 A safe trip to all the horses and jockeys.

 Good luck.

Today, at the old hilltop racecourse Pimlico in Baltimore, is the 134^th Preakness.

Let’s take a look at the field.

Big Drama:

Has won five out of seven starts. Has early speed. Won his last start, at the Swale Stakes, but was disqualified for inference and placed second.

Flying Private:

Finished last in the Derby. Has the right trainer in his corner to win a Triple Crown race, D. Wayne Lukas. Will have to improve a lot to be a factor.

Friesan Fire:

Had a world of trouble in the Kentucky Derby. He grabbed a quarter (hacked off a chunk of his left front hoof with his back hoof), and he was also bumped and squeezed in the race. He finished next to last. Has had a nice workout over the Pimlico racetrack. With a clean getaway, he will be there at the finish. If the track turns up sloppy, this guy can run on it.

General Quarters:

He to had a rough trip in the Derby. He was forced to steady twice. Musket Man has beaten him twice already.

Lov Gov:

Only broke his maiden in last start. Won by six lengths on the sloppy track. Will he be wearing socks like Governor Spitzer?

Take The Points:

The only thing he has going for him is his jockey Prado, two for two on him.

Terrain:

Was beaten by Friesan Fire and Papa Clem in the Louisiana Derby.

Tone it down:

 Ran second in last start over the track.

Mind That Bird:

Won the Derby with powerfully closing move. Was it a fluke? Loses jockey Calvin Borel. He will get the services of Mike Smith. He will have to make his move sooner then in the Derby. The Preakness is a sixteenth of a mile shorter in distance. His performance in the Derby was a monster. Will he be able to duplicate that effort?  Would help if the track came up sloppy.

Musket Man:

Was closing in the stretch in the Derby. He finished third. If he can race closer to the pace in the Preakness he could be a major factor. Has won five of seven starts.

Papa Clem:

Finished a nice fourth in the Derby. He acted up in the post parade in the Derby, and that might hurt his chances a little.

Pioneerof The Nile:

Looked like he was on his way to win the Kentucky Derby past the eight pole but Mind That Bird came up the rail to win the race. Pioneerof The Nile finished second. He showed that he would fight it out not to let other horses pass him. He answered the question that he can run on dirt and an off track. Can stalk the early leaders and then pounce in the stretch.

Rachel Alexander:

She has just one bad race in her career. Her first start. Has won five Stakes in a row. She has Calvin Boerl as here jockey. He gets off his winning Derby mount Mind that Bird; that’s a first. Borel stated that she is the best horse he’s ever ridden. The filly is looking to make history. No winner of the Kentucky Oaks has won the Preakness .The last filly to win the Preakness was Nellie Morse in 1924. Her speed figures are much better then the colts.  Is she the second coming of the great filly Ruffian?  We will see. She can handle an off track; she won for fun on one. She’s the one to beat.

And now my selections:

# 9---  Pioneerof The Nile

# 13—Rachel Alexandra

# 5---  Friesan Fire

# 2---  Mind That Bird

Good luck to all the horses and their jockeys.

See you at the windows.

Here are some things I’ve learned since becoming a father:

—The Queens Zoo is a wholesome and inexpensive place to take two boys, ages 1 and 3, on weekends. Also: It is fine for boys that age to ride the merry-go-round outside the zoo even if the operators run it overly fast and even if their horses are the up-and-down kind, as long as their father stands between the horses and holds the backs of their shirts.

—They can sleep through all kinds of ambient noise at night—clatterings from the adjacent area behind the bakery and laundry and Chinese restaurant; overenthusiastic conversations between in-their-cups parent-friends in the “living room” outside their door—if there’s also a fan running.

—They will try to run into the water again and again at Rockaway Beach, as if they know how to swim, even if the waves are rough and the water is zero degrees.

—They will eat grilled octopus and taramasalata and fried smelt, crunchy heads and all, if said foods are handed to them without ceremony.

—They will eat the gravel at the Beer Garden unless someone intervenes.

—If at least one uncle lives less than a block away, everyone wins.

—The Q66 is fun.

This information is useful to me. It is not much work to keep track of. And it will never seem burdensome to me to review it, even after the information has stopped being useful, because it will evoke specific thoughts about my specific boys, whom I find to be endlessly amusing and fantastic.

But I would tend to hesitate before inflicting this information on other people in anything other than small doses. It just stands to reason: For people I know in circumstances different than mine—they don’t have young children, say, or they have children but don’t happen to live in a part of Northwest Queens in which carp roe dip is widely available—my hard-won knowledge is useless. (Vaguely interesting, maybe, insofar as it tells them something about what my family and I are up to, but useless all the same.)

And for people in circumstances similar to mine—people familiar with the ways of small, horse-and-cow-obsessed omnivores who really, really like pulling the stop cord when it’s time to get off the bus to play soccer in Jackson Heights—it’s all old news anyway.

That’s the weird thing about the subject of parenting. The non-parents shouldn’t really be expected to care what some parent has to say about it, and the parents, who’ve already done it all, should care even less.

And yet. The fathering memoir, as demonstrated by the regularity with which they’ve been pumped out recently by publishers, is a highly gainful commercial genre. The authors don’t have to know anything about anything—that’s kind of the gag—and,  as with reality TV, the source material is cheap and plentiful. Also, there’s always an audience.

Apparently, the market for these books—parents who will pay their own money to read about a stranger’s journey of self-discovery through parenting—is more than robust enough to make up for the rest of us.

THIS, SURELY, was the calculation of the publisher of Home Game, a series of Slate articles by Vanity Fair contributing editor and Bloomberg columnist Michael Lewis that have been bundled into book form as an “Accidental Guide to Fatherhood.” (Just in time, naturally, for Father’s Day.)

Given the limitations of the form, Lewis—an effortlessly prolific writer and storyteller—does well.

In part, he succeeds by cheating: The first part of the book is less about child-rearing than it is about Paris, where Mr. Lewis and his wife, the former MTV News reporter Tabitha Soren, and their infant daughter set up shop in an effort to fulfill a wish to live abroad before multiple childbirths permanently foreclose the opportunity for them to do so. So, see, it’s about their experiences with their baby daughter, Quinn, but really, the joke is on the French.

Like, for example, when they sign Quinn up for a mysterious water-acclimatization program called Bébé L’Eau, only to find that the “class” consists of a dozen unhygienic Frenchmen, with their unhygienic kids, in an oversize Jacuzzi, led by a buffoonish instructor “in a snorkel and a mask and not much else.”

(“It is no accident that Jacques Cousteau was French. The French know how to find categories ignored by the rest of the world and colonize them. Here at Bébé L’Eau was another example: baby dunking.” Etc.)

Mr. Lewis does the standard parent-book set pieces competently, too. Back in America, after the birth of his second daughter, Dixie, he describes his attempt—at first disingenuous, then less so—to “validate” his first daughter’s feelings of sibling jealousy:

“I was stumped. I couldn’t think of what to say next. All I could think of was: Of course you hate Dixie. She has taken Mama away. I’d hate her, too, if I were you. Truth is, a tiny part of me was proud that she saw the situation for what it was, a violation of her property rights. It boded well for her future in the free market.”

There is also drama.

Mr. Lewis presents a harrowing description of his wife in the throes of postpartum panic disorder after the birth of their third, final child, and only boy, Walker.

Later, he bonds with the 11-week-old Walker, who comes down with a serious virus, by barricading both of them in a hospital room to guard against the predations of bill collectors and curious interns and bored nurses.

It’s a nice book, full of nicely told stories, the least interesting of which deal with the actual moments of birth. (What else can anyone say about this? Mom in more pain than expected, Dad charmingly useless, push, push, baby.)

But that’s kind of the thing: It’s just the subject matter. You can really like Mr. Lewis—I do—and still get the impression that he really labored to make this book into something that’s worth the effort for people not named Michael Lewis to purchase and read.

FROM THE consumer point of view, Home Game is a considerably cheaper commodity than his other books, like Liar’s Poker and Moneyball and The Blind Side, and even his forgettable-but-important-seeming-at-the-time book about the guy who founded Netscape. They were all reported documents that were great first and foremost because of his extraordinary access to something that his readers wouldn’t otherwise have had a clue about.

Home Game, by definition, is not that sort of undertaking. It is merely something that Michael Lewis was able to put together as he was going about his business at home.

Near the end of the book, after Mr. Lewis sees to it that he and Tabitha will never have any more children, he writes about trying to decide whether the time had come to stop writing about Quinn, Dixie and Walker.

“Like dreams, these fatherhood moments are easily forgotten and no doubt also a lot more interesting to the teller than to anyone else. But when they’re forgotten, their lessons, such as they are, are lost. The vacuum winds up being filled by experts on child rearing, and books on fatherhood, and social counselors and psychiatrists—the outside world has a lot to tell you about how to be a father and how to raise your children, and its advice no doubt serves some purpose.”

No doubt.

Josh Benson is political editor of The Observer. He can be reached at jbenson@observer.com

On Saturday afternoon shortly after 6 o’clock the starter will spring the latch to send the field of 20 on their way in the 135th Kentucky Derby.

One majestic thoroughbred will take several thousand racing fans on a ride of a lifetime en route to winning the Kentucky Derby!

Let’s take a closer look at the contenders.

#11—Chocolate Candy: Ran third to Pioneer of the Nile. He’s an improving colt. Mike Smith is in the saddle. He knows how to win the big one. Will be a nice price on Derby day. Use in exotics.

#19—Desert Party: One of two colts from the Godolphin stable. Was beaten by stable-mate Regal Ransom in the UAE Derby.  Has had some good works at Churchill Downs. Regal Ransom should make sure of a good early pace in the race.

#15—Dunkirk: Lost his jockey Garret Gomez when he went to ride Pioneer of the Nile. Will have Edgar Prado in the saddle. With no racing as a two-year old, he’ll have to be a super horse to win this race, but this colt can hit the board. He will be heard from down the road, in other big races.

#6—Friesan Fire: Has done nothing but win. He will be coming off a seven-week layoff. Has been training well. The question about him going a mile and a quarter will be answered. He has never run farther then a mile and a sixteenth.

#13—I Want Revenge: Has been beaten by Pioneer of the Nile on the West Coast but has turned into a monster when shipped to the East Coast to run on dirt. In my 37 years of following horses, I have never seen a performance like the one he put together in the Wood Memorial. Will he be able to put together three great performances in a row? I Want Revenge and Pioneer of the Nile could become one of the great rivalries in racing.

#3—Mr. Hot Stuff: Is an improving colt? Will be closing in the lane. He’s a full brother to Colonel John. Use in exotics.

#7—Papa Clem: Ran a good race in first dirt start. Should be in the early mix. Has finished first or second in four races around two turns.

#16—Pioneer of the Nile: This colt has been my top pick since the beginning of my reports. Has not lost a race since he’s been taken over by Bob Baffert.  He’s won four stakes races.  I think Nile will run that same kind of race I Want Revenge ran in his first race on dirt. The Derby should set up perfectly for him. He will get a good pace to close into. He’s the type of colt that has a refuse-to-lose attitude. Garret Gomez is sticking.

And now, my selections:

 #16—Pioneer of the Nile

#13—I Want Revenge

#11—Chocolate Candy

#15—Dunkirk

 Good luck and safe trips to all the horses and jockeys.

 See you at the windows.