Midnight Jamboree looms large in Friday feature

ARCADIA, Calif. – Some racehorses mature early, like the juvenile fillies running Friday in race 2, the first 2-year-old race of the Santa Anita season.

Other horses take longer to come around, like the giant 5-year-old mare favored in the featured seventh race. Even her trainer is awestruck by Midnight Jamboree.

“You’ve got to see her to believe her,” Bill Spawr said. “She’s huge. She’s over 17 hands.”

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Midnight Jamboree also is relatively fast. And if she reproduces the 83 Beyer Speed Figure she earned finishing second last out, Midnight Jamboree will win the one-mile starter allowance and extend an impressive Spawr streak.

Over the past nine months, Spawr has started 14 favorites resulting in 11 wins and 3 seconds.

“I’d be surprised if I blew the streak” Friday, Spawr said.

Bettors would be surprised too. Midnight Jamboree towers over the field, literally and figuratively.

Her rivals in the $20,000 claiming starter are front-runner She’s a Dime, comebacker Diva in Charge, Paige Runner, and True Mischief.

If Midnight Jamboree repeats her last start, a second by a nose in a $32,000 claiming starter allowance, she will be tough to beat.

Spawr does not expect her to run the same race. He believes she will run better.

“Although she’s 5, to me she’s only 3, because mentally she’s still figuring it out,” he said. “She’s figuring it out now, and since that race she’s come along perfect.”

Midnight Jamboree, a 4-year-old when she finally made her debut, has been a long-term project since the 2017 yearling sale at Keeneland, where she was purchased by Spawr adviser Jon Lindo.

“We thought she’d bring over $100,000,” Spawr said. “We didn’t think we were going to buy her; we just went in to watch her sell.

“Her size was a problem,” Spawr said, and the Midnight Lute filly went for only $30,000. When her sibling Dr. Dorr later won the Grade 2 Californian, it looked like a steal. But Midnight Jamboree, bred by Bob Baffert and Madeline Auerbach, was slow to develop.

“We knew she had ability, but it was a problem putting her body and her brain together,” Spawr said.

She finished ninth and 10th in her first two starts, then the light bulb went on in a $20,000 maiden-claiming race in summer 2020. She finished sixth, but could have won except for a bad stumble at the break.

Midnight Jamboree has not looked back since. She won a maiden-claiming race in fall, a low-level restricted claiming race two races later, and last out ran the best race of her career, finishing more than eight lengths clear of third.

Spawr, whose two-year record with favorites is a gawdy 20 for 32, is due for a Kentucky Oaks Day win with a runner by Midnight Lute. Spawr developed Midnight Bisou, a daughter of Midnight Lute, from unraced maiden to Grade 1 winner of the Santa Anita Oaks. After she finished third in the 2018 Kentucky Oaks, Midnight Bisou was transferred to Steve Asmussen.

The second race Friday, for California-bred 2-year-old fillies, is topped by fast-working Drizella, a Luis Mendez trainee by first-crop sire Stanford. Her main rival in the 4 1/2-furlong race is Miss Shady, a Stay Thirsty filly who has worked well for trainer Jeff Bonde.