Early pick 4 play at Tampa manageable

The weather at Tampa Bay Downs on Wednesday? Hot. High temperature forecast to approach 90 degrees. The card at Tampa Bay Downs? Not quite as hot. Nine races, and the biggest purse among them is the $20,000 on offer in race 4, a maiden special weight sprint, the card’s only non-claiming contest. But they don’t have to give away heaps of purse money for a bettor to make a little money, and the early 50-cent pick four, spanning races 2 through 5, looks playable on a modest budget.

Races 3 and 5 tilt toward inscrutable, but it might be possible to narrow a play in races 2 and 4.

Race 4, the maiden sprint, is carded at six furlongs and restricted to 3-year-olds. A couple key DRF Formulator stats make 2-1 morning-line favorite Onward, a tricky horse with some talent, difficult to read.

A $600,000 auction purchase by Street Sense, Onward debuted with a solid fourth behind victorious Tap It to Win (who won again last Saturday at Gulfstream) and ran his best race when he disputed the pace and held second of 11 in a seven-furlong Aqueduct maiden special weight Nov. 9. A month later, Onward went slightly backward in another New York maiden start, this one at a mile, and his 3-year-old debut, March 14 at Gulfstream, saw him deliver easily his worst performance.

Trainer Christophe Clement makes two key moves with Onward, sending him to Tampa and racing him for the first time in blinkers. Clement’s record with dirt-sprint maiden special weight starters at Tampa is remarkable: five wins from his last six starters. Only one of those winners was an odds-on favorite and the one loser was a first-time starter prepping for turf-route racing.

The first-time blinkers move, though: The last five years, blinkers on with dirt-sprint maidens, Clement is 8-0-0-2, and all but two of those starters went off at 6-1 or lower.

Onward has been posting Payson Park bullet drills since his only race this year, and at his 2019 best wins this.

Drawn on the rail is first-time starter Branco Maria, whose trainer, Mike Stidham, has an unusual record with debuting horses at Tampa, where he’s run a winter string for three seasons. Stidham has won with two of the five Tampa first-time starters that ran in dirt-sprint maiden special weight races – good, but a small sample. The unusual thing: During the same period, Stidham has sent out 19 first-time starters in maiden special route races. Only one of those horses won.

Branco Maria, by Candy Ride, should be used, as should Falkirk, who finished encouragingly in his lone start, a key-race maiden sprint in September at Churchill. One of those three – Onward, Branco Maria, or Falkirk – should win.

Race 2 might be narrowed even further. This conditioned-claiming sprint is carded at six furlongs and filled with early-speed types that would prefer a half-furlong shorter. Feisty Chi Chi turns back from a competitive showing in a higher-priced route race and should be rolling past tiring pace horses in the homestretch. He’s a pick four single.

Numbers 1, 5, 6, 7, and 10 are the principals in race 4, a $16,000 maiden-claiming turf route, while race 5 demands a ticket casting the widest net affordable. With luck, something green will emerge when it’s pulled up.