The money’s better than the horses

The Indiana foal crop has risen the last several years because purse money being thrown at Indiana-breds during the long Indiana Grand race meeting often exceeds the quality of horses chasing it. And there is no better example than the two $75,000 races that start Wednesday’s 11-race card at Indiana Grand.

The races – the first for fillies, the second for colts and geldings – are restricted, according to race conditions, “to registered Indiana-bred progeny of donated stallions that sold at the ITOBA live auction or the RNA Internet auction.” That is about three layers of restriction greater than a race open to mere Indiana-breds, and according to the Indiana Thoroughbred Owners and Breeders Association website, there are only 33 horses – 11 fillies, 22 colts and geldings – eligible to the two races this year.

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For the connections of the fillies, it is like the service technician forgot to close the front of the ATM. There are seven entrants in the race, and they are highly unlikely to have any shot at being competitive for a purse like this again.

A filly named Tikini was claimed out of her last race, a $5,000 non-winners-of-two, surely with the intent of starting in this race, the ITOBA Stallion Season Fillies. She’s 4-1 on the morning line and has a decent chance to wire the field in this one-mile race.

The 4-5 morning-line favorite is Rockin Cityweekend. She comes out of the best races, Indiana-bred first-level allowance races, and has the top set of Beyer Speed Figures, but Rockin Cityweekend’s two tries around two turns suggest she’s much better off sprinting. Just the opposite seems true for her Wednesday rival Show Me Indy, who came with a career-best performance last out in her two-turn debut.

There’s much more depth and quality in race 2, the colts-and-geldings division, and the 4-5 morning-line favorite, Daddy Justice, looks formidable. Daddy Justice, an established Indiana-bred stakes performer, hasn’t won any of his three two-turn races, but he’s been second or third in all of them and in the last two was passing horses in the stretch. This is a softer bunch than in either of those starts, and Daddy Justice will whiz past and win if he merely holds his current form and stays out of trouble.

And for second, the logical horse looks good, too: Sky Pilot was sixth last out in the $150,000 Governor’s Stakes, a race in which Daddy Justice finished third, a little less than two lengths in front of Sky Pilot. Post 10 hurt Sky Pilot’s cause in the Governor’s, and he’s drawn on the rail Wednesday.

While that alone probably won’t close the whole gap on Daddy Justice, Sky Pilot on paper has only Lucky Newton to fight for the place spot. Lucky Newton, though, seems to want no part of two turns, and interested bettors might search elsewhere for a trifecta filler to extract perhaps an ounce of value out of what looks like a chalky affair.