Crist: Fourstardave preview
There’s not much to separate the eight entrants in Saturday’s featured Fourstardave at Saratoga. Everyone routinely runs Beyer Speed Figures between 98 and 101, six of them have won at the Grade 2 level or higher, and most are at their best distance going a mile today.
Grand Arch and Grand Tito would be surprises, but a credible case can be made for the other six. I’ll lean toward three of them – King Kreesa, Jack Milton, and Mshawish.
King Kreesa looks like the lone front-runner in the field and has never been better, running a career-best 105 Beyer in a prep for this at Belmont. If he gets loose, he could be gone. It took the length of the stretch for Wise Dan to run him down in this race two years ago, and there are no Wise Dans in today’s field.
Mshawish and Jack Milton are both trained by Todd Pletcher but run uncoupled here. Mshawish would be a strong favorite on form alone here off his good third in the $6 million Dubai Turf on March 25, but he hasn’t raced since then. So, you have to decide whether you want 7-2 on a horse who’s been off for five months and might not be fully wound up for a return race preceding a Grade 1 fall campaign.
Jack Milton might offer some value at his morning-line odds of 6-1. He turns back from a pair of Grade 1 routes that were a bit too long and tough for him, but he’s a Grade 1 winner going a mile on grass. Don’t be alarmed by the somewhat unusual trainer/jockey combination of Paco Lopez and Pletcher. Lopez is Pletcher’s go-to rider at Monmouth, where the two of them have teamed to win 11 of 39 starts. There’s a bit of a top-jockey shortage at Saratoga today with Irad Ortiz Jr. and Joel Rosario in Chicago for Arlington Million Day.
