Racing-office veterans seem to agree on one thing: It’s past time to starve the beast. A panel of top racing officials discussing field size on Wednesday morning at the Global Symposium on Racing in Tucson, Ariz., were uniformly critical of a practice that has become common in racing offices across the country over the past decade – giving horsemen a smorgasbord of choices for overnight races. “We have to eliminate choice,” said Rick Hammerle, a longtime California racing secretary who is now the racing coordinator at Oaklawn Park in Arkansas and Kentucky Downs. “It’s a definite less-is-more situation, not only in the races, but the race types. If you give a horseman three or four choices to run their horses, you’re giving them way too much choice.” Hammerle, the first speaker on the panel, pointed out that the tracks where he works perennially lead the nation in average field size. “They have one thing in common: they run on one surface,” Hammerle said, acknowledging that both tracks also have very strong purse structures. “What that does is that it eliminates choices. The horses that come to Kentucky Downs aren’t coming to run on dirt, and horses that come to Oaklawn aren’t coming to run on turf.” Field size at U.S. racetracks has been eroding for decades, at the same time that the racing industry has gathered more and more data on the importance of field size for the maximization of handle. The field-size trend has coincided with the rapid decline in the foal crop and number of starts per year, but it’s also been mitigated by the overall contraction of the industry over the past two decades. Field size dropped below 8.0 horses per race for the first time in modern history in 2012, and it has fallen ever since, to 7.50 in 2019 (During the pandemic, when far fewer racetracks were running, field size ticked up to 7.64.). But the racing officials on the panel said there are still ways to reverse that decline. Martin Panza, the outgoing senior vice president of racing operations at the New York Racing Association who moderated the panel, cautioned that he was not trying to single out any one racing office, but he said that too many racetracks are still throwing too many options at the wall in the hopes that only some of it sticks. “If I’m a trainer and I know you are going to offer 30 races every day hoping to fill nine, then I am going to wait until I get the race I want,” Panza said. “We have to start to limit the options that trainers have.” Mike Lakow, the vice president of racing operations at Gulfstream Park in Florida, said that he has started discussions with local horsemen about the racing office’s plans to begin paring the number of races that are written on the overnight, including the elimination of certain categories. “Look, we all went to dinner last night,” Lakow said, motioning to the other racing officials on the panel, “and there were two choices for dessert. It took about two seconds [to decide]. We just have way too many categories, way too many options.” Tom Robbins, the executive vice president of racing and industry relations at Del Mar, said that horsemen have lately become more cognizant of the fact that full fields were in their best long-term interests, even if that means giving up greater opportunities to earn purse money when fields are short. “It’s up to us to educate them that as much as they would like a steady diet of five-horse fields, that’s a disaster for the revenue that’s produced for them as far as purse money,” said Robbins, noting that California tracks do not have the luxury of bolstering purses with casino subsidies, unlike many other tracks. “We have to make them understand that they’re our partners in this. We’re all in this together.”