A lot is made of the works coming up to the Derby but you have to take what you read with a grain of salt sometimes. Things are not always what they seem.

People can evaluate works in many different ways. One cannot just look at a final time of a drill and say it is good or bad. They may be able to say it was fast, or slow, but that is not to say it was what was intended.

Workouts are used for different reasons at this time of the year. A runner that is already battle tested doesn't need to be pushed or punished in the morning but just needs some tinkering.

Consider what Jeff Mullins said about a recent 4-furlong work of :50 for his star I Want Revenge.

Mullins: "He needed to do enough to keep himself safe because he's been tearing the barn down. We had to let him do a little something today."

Of course, not much is needed for this son of Stephen Got Even. All the horse has done is to win two Graded races this year, the last overcoming a horrible trip.

A pair of brothers in California were a perfect example of the different ways of working a horse. Mel Stute, who has trained Breeders' Cup winners and Preakness hero Snow Chief, puts his runners through the wringer every day. He asks for speed and when his horses work fast, it is just the order of the day. When his horses work slowly, then it may indicate they are not right or have limited talent.

His brother Warren now deceased was just the opposite. Warren was famous for working his runners a mile in 1:40 and change and not asking for any speed at all. So, when you would see a Warren Stute horse post a bullet drill or a 2nd or 3rd best of the morning work, you had better wake up and smell the coffee.

I once interviewed Warren about this situation and he just said that Mel gets them to work faster. Mel on the other hand indicated to me that he likes to train like he trained when he was a young athlete. If he was pushed in training, it showed on game day. And that is the way he works with his horses.

Several years go Smarty Jones worked fast and some people didn't know he had an exercise rider on him that weighed about 155 pounds, or about 30 more pounds than he would have on him Derby Day.

Take a guy like Charlie Whittingham, who was arguably the best trainer ever, and he seldom worked his horses fast. He seldom had his horses geared up at first asking. But there was madness to the method. Almost in every case with a Whittingham horse, the runner would have 2 or 3 works between races with a 3-furlong blowout 2 days before a race saying the runner was primed in a 'go go' pattern. Whittingham's student Neil Drysdale also trains his horses slow, but he asks for speed in the last furlong of a work and the horse is usually dead fit by race day.

So when looking at Derby horses prepping for the big race next week try to read in between the lines. Don't get caught up by some talking heads that will attempt to pigeon hole a certain work without really knowing the intention behind the execution.