Whenever the Hall of Fame trainer Bob Baffert enters a horse in a graded stakes race, I pay attention. When that horse has yet to win a race and, on paper, seems like an overmatched longshot, you can bet that I’ll be watching with extra interest.

There’s no more thankless job in horse racing than the lot of a morning line oddsmaker.

Much like an umpire or a referee in a professional sport, if an oddsmaker does his job well, no one notices. But if something goes awry, count on Twitter going abuzz in a snark-nado.

How this impacts a day at the races is that gamblers have to learn how to employ the morning line into their handicapping and understand its relative importance.