Eclipse Award-winning trainer Brad Cox could have a big day with a host of Grade 1 runners Saturday in New York. On Friday, he had a good night in Iowa, where Cox-trained horses won two $50,000 stakes races and finished second in a third.

Although nobody wins a Derby the first week of January, interest was keen for a pair of 3-year-old stakes last Saturday at Santa Anita and Gulfstream Park, races run under dissimilar conditions.

Aside from both races restricted by age, both at one mile and won by the favorite, comparing the Grade 3 Sham at Santa Anita and $100,000 Mucho Macho Man at Gulfstream Park was apples and oranges.

Learning my journalism at the feet of Larry Quille at Anaheim High School and Don Ferrell at Arizona State, I was trained to avoid the “I” word at all costs.

“It’s not about you,” said Quille, whose early newspaper career was cut short by captivity in a Japanese prison camp during World War II. “What you think is not as important as what you discover in your reporting. Your job is to write it down with accuracy and clarity.”

Saturday was without question the strangest midsummer Thoroughbred-racing Saturday I can recall, and I’m sure many other folks feel the same way.

At one point approaching midafternoon Eastern, the only tracks running were Gulfstream, Woodbine, Thistledown, Arlington, and Prairie Meadows. It felt more like a lost Tuesday than an important Saturday thanks to the cancellation of the cards at Saratoga, Finger Lakes, Laurel, Delaware, Parx, Penn National, Belterra, and Ellis, and, of course, the unprecedented semi-cancellation and mid-program delay at Monmouth.

It has been said that in the face of a near-death experience a person’s life flashes before their eyes. Maybe so, but Victor Espinoza didn’t have enough time to enjoy even a quick memory burst of his three Kentucky Derby victories and Hall of Fame induction last Thursday morning at Del Mar.

Espinoza was on the inside of a three-horse spread gearing down on the clubhouse turn at the end of a half-mile work when a riderless horse suddenly appeared.

The surface was harrowed to perfection. Workers only were allowed on the track. A squad of monitoring veterinarians was on patrol. Strict medication and whip protocols were firmly in place. And still, two racehorses collided and died.

The terrible collision near Del Mar’s three-quarter pole Thursday morning shook the backstretch to its bones. John Sadler, whose 2-year-old Inspiressa missed the freakish accident by a whisker, was still wearing a thousand-yard stare half an hour later at the barn.

For a track that boasts a splashy commercial profile, a million-dollar race, and an opening day to die for, Del Mar lately has been anything but the master of its own fate.

No less of an institution than the U.S. Supreme Court codified the concept of knowing something that otherwise lacks a clear definition to be something when you see it.

At the time over five decades ago, the Supreme Court was wrestling with the question of obscenity, and what it is, exactly. But the court could just as easily have been talking about perhaps the most nebulous and difficult-to-quantify factor in horse racing – class.

After five weeks on the road, Tyler Baze was being swarmed by his three kids in the last few hours he had before getting back on an airplane.

“Just a minute, Princess,” Baze said to 5-year-old Amelia, clamoring for his attention. “Let Daddy finish this phone call, and we’ll water the all the plants together.”

To celebrate the first anniversary of a heart attack that could have been a whole lot worse, Jimmy Jerkens took his repaired ticker out for a thriller of a test drive last Saturday at Belmont Park while watching Preservationist win the historic Suburban by more than four lengths.

Jerkens had to tap the brakes in early July 2018, when chest pains sent him to a cardiologist who immediately went to work inserting stints in a pair of blocked arteries. After a slow, steady recovery, Jerkens has been back to such admirable health and hard work that time seemed to slip away.