Justify should be Horse of the Year.

Accelerate should be Horse of the Year.

Justify should be Horse of the Year because since 1936 no Triple Crown winner has ever not been Horse of the Year.

Accelerate should be Horse of the Year because since 1950 (Noor was robbed!) no older horse with a similarly stellar record has ever not been Horse of the Year.

The Bob Baffert sweep of Saturday’s Grade 1 Los Alamitos CashCall Futurity, with the immensely promising Improbable, and the Grade 1 Starlet, with Triple Crown winner American Pharoah’s half-sister Chasing Yesterday, brought the curtain down on our major late-season 2-year-old stakes.

When taken as a whole, these post-Breeders’ Cup Stakes paint an interesting picture. Let’s take a look at the fillies first.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. – When horseplayers open the past performances for Saturday’s Grade 1 Starlet at Los Alamitos, the last-out third from Vibrance in the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Fillies will understandably garner attention, having come in the classiest race for 2-year-old fillies on dirt all year.

That is not the only basis for that race to command respect, however. So, too, did it impress me from a trip perspective, with Vibrance managing her third-place finish despite some challenges that aren’t noted in the comments of her past performances or in the chart itself.

Monster Man was a 3-year-old son of Unbridled’s Song with two wins from 10 starts after mixing it up with some of the best young grass horses in the West for trainer Scott Hansen and owner Gary Broad. As December of 2017 dawned, he was being prepared at San Luis Rey Downs for what promised to be a profitable 4-year-old campaign.

There is always at least a little debate when the American Graded Stakes Committee makes changes in the rankings of graded and listed stakes races in the U.S. And I admit I find this to be an interesting topic because I find the grading of stakes races to be a worthwhile, if inherently imperfect, pursuit.

But the marquee revisions for 2019 announced on Friday by the AGSC seem more controversial than usual. Even provocative. Let’s take a look.

Once the final race is run Sunday afternoon at Del Mar, California racing’s most recognizable voice will fall silent until next July, when Trevor Denman returns from the tranquility of his southeastern Minnesota farm.

Meanwhile, California’s second most familiar race caller has been silenced, now that Michael Wrona has been replaced as Santa Anita Park announcer by Frank Mirahmadi.

Journalists are not supposed to get too close to the people they cover. With Gary Stevens, though, a writer was bound to get his elbows scraped and knees scuffed, with a handful of heartbreaks along the way.

It should have been plain from the start, on that day in October of 1985 at Arcadia Methodist Hospital, when Stevens lay stretched out and broken up in a private room, with merciful painkillers allowing for a brief bedside visit.

In late October of 2009 at Santa Anita Park, trainer Gary Stevens was saddling the 6-year-old mare Higher Incentive for a Saturday afternoon race with the help of valet Manny Avila. Without warning, the filly next door backed into the heavy wooden partition separating the stalls. The base gave way and the partition fell, briefly pinning Avila and spooking Higher Incentive, who shied into Stevens and banged him against the opposite barrier.

It was just a simple little five-acre hillside fire, the kind that pops up in north San Diego County more often than you’d think, fueled by dry grass and a grove of old palms. But it was enough to send flashbacks of terrifying anxiety through the local Bonsall community, where just 11 months earlier a finger of the fearsome Lilac conflagration tore through the San Luis Rey Downs training center, killing 46 horses and displacing a vital segment of the Southern California Thoroughbred community.

So much for a quiet Sunday.

If future-book wagering on the Kentucky Derby in Las Vegas weren’t virtually extinct, you could be certain that the current favorite for the 2019 Derby would be Game Winner.

As well he should be. And yes, that would be the case even after the sensational debut Saturday at Del Mar by Bob Baffert barnmate Coliseum, who delivered a performance that sparked enormous buzz in the American racing community.