Hovdey: Los Alamitos trying to find its place

The offseason in Southern California commences on Monday, the day after Santa Anita Park ends its six-month run, but as breathers go, it’s not much. Three days down is what the circuit gets before launching back into the parimutuel grind Thursday at Los Alamitos, which is barely enough time to get the oil changed, the lawn mowed, and a couple loads of washing hung and dried.

It is safe to say that the California racing calendar is still dealing with the closure of Hollywood Park at the end of 2013. It’s the gift that keeps on giving. The latest agonies were played out in public this week when Santa Anita management essentially purchased two days of racing from Los Alamitos in late September so that it could present several Breeders’ Cup prep stakes at a convenient time. The price was $300,000, which is good to know for down the road.

From July 2-12, Los Alamitos is running the first of its three mini-meets created from the Hollywood Park dates that neither Santa Anita nor Del Mar wanted to run, as well as the abandonment of racing by Fairplex Park. Blink and you miss this one, though, which is exactly why Los Alamitos is pulling out its promotional stops to lure warm bodies to the opening weekend.

“We figure if we can get them out for the first weekend, they might come out for the second,” said Brad McKinzie, general manager of what is being called the Los Alamitos Summer Thoroughbred Festival, which takes almost as long to say as the eight days it will run.

The racing highlight of opening weekend will be next Saturday’s $350,000 Los Alamitos Derby, which was worth $500,000 when it was won last year by Shared Belief. The field is still in flux, but it looks as if Jerry Hollendorfer will try to win it again this year with the up-and-coming Kentuckian.

After the Summer Thoroughbred Festival is in the books, there will be two weeks of Thoroughbred dates at Los Alamitos in September and another three weeks in December. If nothing else, such a small-dose schedule should be a perfect fit for today’s quick-twitch culture of short attention spans and rapid gratification. As a business model, however, it stinks.

“Unfortunately, our dose might be a little too small,” McKinzie said. “I don’t think our customers are quite that quick-twitchy yet.”

To that end, Los Alamitos management has proposed a modest rearrangement of racing dates for 2016 that would allow for two monthlong blocks at the Orange County track rather than the three mini-meets. This would require Santa Anita and Del Mar to make minor adjustments, which is kind of like trying to turn a battleship in a bathtub.

“I think there is a sentiment to get at least one of our meets longer,” said McKinzie. “But if someone has to give something up for someone else to get something, that’s a tough pull in this business right now.

“We’ve only had one post-Hollywood Park year under our belts, and I think we’re all still trying to find our equilibrium,” McKinzie added. “People underestimated how big a shift it was when it closed, because there was so much denial for so long that it would actually happen.

“Now we’re trying to figure out the best foundation to lay down to get us through the next 10 years,” he added. “Up to now, the priority has been ‘what’s best for us?’ instead of ‘what’s best for the business?’ But I think that will change over the next couple of years.”

Apart from its smattering of racing days, Los Alamitos remains the urban glue holding the circuit’s inventory together as a full-time training center. The backstretch capacity has been expanded to around 1,700 stalls, with the population about evenly divided between “daytime” Thoroughbreds competing at the various top-line meets and the mix of Quarter Horses and low-level Thoroughbred claimers who run at Los Alamitos at night.

Another 60 stalls were recently added – in a parking-lot conversion – to accommodate temporary ship-ins for the upcoming meet, although McKinzie predicts that many of them could stick around to train at Los Alamitos and race at Del Mar. Such trainers as Jerry Hollendorfer, Bob Baffert, Doug O’Neill, and Marty Jones have a significant presence at Los Alamitos, and the place is full to the gills, leading to the perception that the place is a money-maker even with meager racing dates.

“That’s a fallacy, that there’s a lot of money to be made as an off-site training center,” McKinzie said. “What we have going for us is that we’re operational as a Quarter Horse racetrack, so a lot of those training expenses we would already incur. The increases in population are incremental but sizeable, and without the nighttime racing picking up the vast share of the expenses, the daytime Thoroughbred deal doesn’t work.”

As far as promoting the product goes, you would think Los Alamitos would have an inside track to get the most famous personality in the sport. After all, Baffert was a Los Alamitos celebrity before he went national 25 years ago with Thoroughbreds, and American Pharoah trained briefly at Los Alamitos before he made his 2-year-old debut. Any shot at a public parade?

“Well, we’re negotiating with Bob right now on an appearance fee for Smokey the Pony,” McKinzie said, referring to American Pharoah’s famous sidekick. “I know Monmouth is after him, but I think we’ve got a decent chance. And we would promote the hell out of Smokey.”