Early pick five carryover of $265K will not be easy to take down
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Even if Hall of Fame trainer Bill Mott has a good day at Keeneland, and he might, it will come too late for horseplayers chasing an early pick five carryover into Wednesday’s program.
With a 23-1, a 50-1, and a 10-1 winning three of the first five races Sunday, no one proved deft enough to hit the first pick five on the card, and $265,934 from that pool rolls over to the pick five spanning Wednesday’s first five races.
Good luck with that.
You won’t find many more challenging sequences, and it is difficult getting traction in even one of these five contests.
Race 1, a $10,000 starter-allowance sprint for older fillies and mares, drew a field of 8. The three Daily Racing Form handicappers all picked a different horse on top – Mazoku, Samarita, and Ella Frances – and four others could reasonably be assigned contender status. Ella Frances’s appeal comes from the fact she made her first 15 starts on turf and synthetic surfaces before a switch to dirt this summer produced a massive form jump. She’s 10-1 on the morning line – and far from a solid threat.
Race 2? Have at it. A full field of $20,000 maiden claimers in a race that on paper came up strong for the class level. Wesley Ward won Sunday with a debuting maiden claimer and has another one here, Idiosyncrasies, who has worked well enough to contend. Ward bred and owns the horse, in addition to training him, and also owns the sire, Iqbaal. You can bet this horse at least is entered where he belongs.
Race 3, a $40,000 conditioned claiming dirt sprint, drew a field of seven unappealing options. There’s nearly nothing positive emanating from any of these horses, and while Sound Doctrine has a chance to get loose on the lead, he also stands a chance of bouncing three weeks after a career best.
Race 4, an open $16,000 claimer, is like a version of race 3 with a bigger field, a dozen to be exact. Vulcan, 10-1 on the line, and Lykan, a 30-1 chance on the line, earned the most tepid of top billings.
You come to race 5, see it’s a maiden special weight turf route, and imagine you’d find more clarity than in the first four. Incorrect. This field came up about as modest as imaginable for a Keeneland race at this level, and the two most likely winners, Enchant and Feeling Beachy, need scratches to draw in from the also-eligible list.
Mott’s first interesting entrant, Cooper Street, makes his third career start in race 6, a dirt-route maiden special weight. His Saratoga sprint debut was unusual, to say the least, with Cooper Street showing early speed before dropping back precipitously into the turn, looking like he might even be eased, but suddenly finding upper-stretch stride to finish with good energy.
None of that speed came forth in his second start, a Churchill route, but Cooper Street, a brother to the good horse Jefferson Street, made a sustained rally from the back and turned in an eye-catching gallop-out.
Mott in Race 8, a first-level turf route allowance, sends out Thornbury, who returned, a five-race maiden, from a five-month layoff at Kentucky Downs and looked like he’d figured out the game, running off to an easy win.
Getting back to that pool of free money in the early pick five – nothing easy about that.
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