DRF Plus handicapping reports for Saturday, May 30
Download DRF Plus handicapping reports for Saturday's races, including DRF Bets GamePlan, the Positive ROI Report, and Key Race Report.
DRF StaffMay 29, 2015
Download DRF Plus handicapping reports for Saturday's races, including DRF Bets GamePlan, the Positive ROI Report, and Key Race Report.
DRF handicapper Mike Watchmaker provides his best plays for Saturday's program at Belmont Park.
While his three Belmont Stakes starters were the focal point of his Friday morning, trainer Todd Pletcher had several other horses put in workouts for upcoming stakes engagements.
Wicked Strong lived up to his name in a five-furlong workout Friday that went in 58.82 seconds in preparation for the Grade 1 Metropolitan Handicap at Belmont Park on June 6.
Before American Pharoah arrived in trainer Bob Baffert's barn in 2014, equine professionals at Stockplace Farm, Vinery, Taylor Made, and the McKathans' training center gave the Triple Crown hopeful his earliest care and most basic lessons, in the process becoming the first to see that glimmer of promise.
Northwest racing lost an old friend Thursday when Lindy Aliment, a popular official for parts of six decades, died at his home in Renton, Wash. He was 87.
Beginning in 1987, when Jack Van Berg took Alysheba to the brink of winning the Triple Crown, I have been to Belmont Park for 10 tries and left there with a fistful of programs worth considerably less than they might have been. So here we go again.
Longshots have prevailed in the first three stakes races of the meeting at Emerald Downs, and horseplayers will face another difficult handicapping assignment Sunday when they try to decipher the $50,000 Seattle Handicap for 3-year-old fillies.
In 20 years, will we be talking about the A.P. Indy male line, as we do now, or the male line of his most prominent current son, Pulpit? Pulpit’s son Tapit led the American sire list last year with a record total and is more than $2 million clear at the top of the list again this year. Pulpit’s grandson California Chrome, by Lucky Pulpit, captured two classics and Horse of the Year honors in 2014 and has earned a good chance to extend a new branch of the Pulpit male line. And just last week, another good son of Pulpit, Sky Mesa, hit the headlines again when Sky Treasure won the Grade 2 Nassau Stakes on May 23 at Woodbine.
Trainer Todd Pletcher still has decisions to make – most notably who will ride his horses in the June 6 Belmont Stakes – but on Friday, he seemed pretty certain that he would run three horses against Kentucky Derby and Preakness winner American Pharoah in the “Test of the Champion” at Belmont Park.