Lightly raced Good Governance should make good use of opportunity in Red Bank

The trainer Chad Brown seemingly has a horse – a live horse – for every turf-route stakes along the East Coast.

Monday at Saratoga he has the talented Mouillage for the Grade 2 Bernard Baruch, while 220 miles south Brown’s assistant at Monmouth Park will saddle up Good Governance as the most likely winner of the $100,000 Red Bank.

Brown has won the last two Red Bank renewals, with Value Proposition last year and Analyze It in 2020; Good Governance would be his fifth horse to win a turf-route stakes this summer at Monmouth.

While Good Governance never has reached a level as high as that of Analyze It, he shares at least one characteristic with that horse in having required extensive time off during his career. Six-year-old Good Governance, by Kingman, has made only seven starts, running twice in 2019, twice in 2020, once in 2021, and twice this year.

In February, Good Governance won a Tampa Bay Downs allowance race, but he didn’t start again until Aug. 6, when Good Governance used a robust 22.77-second closing quarter-mile to get up by a head in a second-level turf allowance at Saratoga. Good Governance shipped from Monmouth for that start and returned to Brown’s satellite string in New Jersey, working on Aug. 20 and Aug. 27 over the Monmouth dirt track preparing for his return to stakes action. The last time Brown was able to run Good Governance in a second start without a break, he finished a good third in the 2020 Baruch.

He could face one vaguely familiar foe Monday in Winters Back, who went wire to wire in a second-level allowance race in April 2021, a race in which Good Governance finished fourth. Winters Back, a 5-year-old horse, hasn’t started since July 2021, when he was seventh in the Grade 1 United Nations. He is cross-entered in a tougher race Monday, the Bernard Baruch at Saratoga, and trainer Todd Pletcher told Daily Racing Form’s David Grening on Saturday that a decision hadn’t been made on where the horse would start.

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Before his United Nations run, which came over an 11-furlong distance likely farther than Winters Back wants to go, Winters Back had been a solid second going nine furlongs in the Grade 3 Monmouth Cup, where he was beaten by the Brown-trained Devamani. Pletcher has gotten plenty of work into Winters Back, a son of Summer Front, and his stable does fine work with long-layoff returnees. Over the last five years, Pletcher has eight winners from 31 horses who had been off for a year or longer, but only one of those starters returned to action in stakes competition, and that was on dirt.

Nine are entered in the one-mile Red Bank (race 9, post time 4:14 Eastern), and there appears to be plenty of speed, which benefits Good Governance. The other horse that merits real consideration is Mohs, who was second last out in Monmouth’s Oceanport Stakes over 1 1/16 miles on grass, a race won by Kuramata – trained, of course, by Chad Brown.