Just got back from a pre-season Rangers’ game, and in some good if insignificant NY sports news, the Blueshirts beat the hated Islanders 5-2. But please, please, please don’t ask me about the Mets. Please.
So I’m just dipping a toe into Saturday’s races. Things that caught my eye:
In the fourth race, Todd Pletcher’s $2.5 million two-year-old The Leopard returns in an ungraded stakes after finishing a disappointing fifth in the Belmont Futurity two weeks ago. At Saratoga he ran two good races at five and six furlongs respectively, then tired when stretching out to seven furlongs at Belmont. In this race, he’s moving from dirt to turf and going a mile and a sixteenth. Not the only grass virgin in the race, he’ll be joined by David Donk’s He Ain’t Easy, who broke his maiden at Saratoga.
Race 7, the ungraded Dynamic Lisa, brings back one of my nightmares from Saratoga: Kent Desormeaux bringing home Latitude Forty at something like 25-1 in the Yaddo, after I’d talked myself out of betting her, costing me the win bet and the $250 exacta. No, I’m still not over it. She’s 6-1 on the morning line.
The Grade I Flower Bowl is a hell of a race: Grade I winners My Typhoon (The Diana), Wait a While (last year’s Yellow Ribbon and American Oaks, along with this year’s Gr. II Ballston Spa), Alexander Tango (Garden City), Royal Highness (Beverly D). Argentina was second by less than a length to My Typhoon in the Diana, and Graham Motion’s Rosinka ran a great race, hanging on to win despite bobbling in the stretch in the Grade III Glens Falls Handicap on closing day at Saratoga. Fun, fun, fun! Coverage of the race in The Blood-Horse and also here, by Jason Shandler. Superfecta also notes it.
More Saturday on the blockbuster day on Sunday.
