Litfin: How I'd play Belmont for Sunday, Sept. 28

The Sunday card has a maiden-maiden-maiden start in which all three morning-line favorites are less than imposing. I may take a mix-and-match approach, trying to work around Battle Red (1st, 2-1), Persuasive Devil (2nd, 2-1) and Buy Or Steal (3rd, 5-2) in multirace exotics.

In the opener, Battle Red has already been beaten as the choice in each of his three starts. A Lot, Delta Outlaw, and River of Dreams are second-time starters eligible to improve enough to contend. I’ll wait to see the betting action on Prima Storm before deciding where Christophe Clement’s first-timer fits in the scheme of things.

In race 2, Persuasive Devil looks logical enough after three in-the-money finishes, but all of those races were sprints on wet tracks at progressively shorter odds. How he will handle the stretch-out to a mile is an unknown, as it is for everyone else except for Midnight Nick, who faltered badly in a turf route last out.

I’m thinking Bellamy Way, Ostrolenka, and Unauthorized are the likeliest to jump up off their debuts. However, for individual-race betting, I need to get a look at Bellamy Way, who has been away seven weeks; the same goes for Unauthorized, who hasn’t run since July 3.

Race 3 is one of those “lesser of evils” maiden-claiming turf sprints in which Buy Or Steal has been gone nearly seven months since unveiled at Gulfstream, and the best last-out Beyer Speed Figure belongs to Mini Muffin, a 6-year-old mare who is 0 for 22.

Flapper Girl puts blinkers on and switches to turf for Mike Hushion, who has won with 39 percent of his second-out maidens over the past two seasons. She’s breaking from the No. 1 hole, and with the rails having come down yesterday, it’s conceivable that she will wind up on the lead along the fresh ground; I’m interested at anything near the 6-1 morning-line quote.

Not much in the way of strong opinions through the middle portion of the program, but planning to focus a late pick four play around Chad Brown’s threesome of Lady Eli, Partisan Politics, and Tammy the Torpedo in the Miss Grillo (race 7), and his duo of Offering Plan and Startup Nation in the Pilgrim (race 9). In the Pilgrim, I also will use Face the Music, a Phipps Stable homebred who was a more authoritative maiden graduate than indicated by the narrow margin of victory on Travers Day.