Like many other people, I’m having serious second thoughts about the popular current concept of clustering a bunch of stakes on a single race card to create a big event day. I originally embraced the idea. I mean, who wouldn’t want more Breeders’ Cup-like racing cards? But it hasn’t taken long to see that no matter how hard various racetracks try, these big event cards just can’t satisfactorily emulate the Breeders’ Cup because these days aren’t the Breeders’ Cup no matter how hard they try to be. The Breeders’ Cup truly is our year-end championship, and it has no competition in that regard. Conversely, big event days at various tracks often wind up competing with and crashing into each other. And this doesn’t even begin to address the matter of how big event days loaded with stakes races have the unavoidable effect of sucking much of the air out of the rest of a given track’s racing program. I don’t think the big event day concept should go away. But as an avid racing fan and horseplayer, I wish it would be reined in somewhat. I certainly understand why the New York Racing Association wanted to make a big event day out of Belmont Stakes Day. The Belmont Stakes always has been at the mercy of what happens in the first two legs of the Triple Crown. Sometimes you get chicken salad at the Belmont, as we did this year with American Pharoah. Other times, you get chicken you-know-what at the Belmont when the Kentucky Derby winner, Preakness winner, or both don’t show up. So I understand why – and generally agree with – moves were made to make Belmont Stakes Day an event that can stand all on its own no matter what hand the Belmont Stakes itself is dealt. And I always will agree with moving the Met Mile to Belmont Day from its traditional spot on Memorial Day. The Met Mile is a race that deserves to be seen by as many people as possible, and moving it to Belmont Stakes Day ensures that. However, I don’t see why as many as eight other stakes had to be moved to Belmont Day to the resulting detriment of the rest of Belmont’s stakes racing schedule and to the detriment of at least one longstanding New York stakes race. From a stakes perspective, the Belmont spring-summer meet essentially has been reduced to a three-day affair – the Saturday in early May when, for some reason, four stakes races were clustered on the same card, Belmont Stakes Day, and Stars and Stripes Day this Saturday. The stakes offerings at Belmont on as big a holiday weekend as Memorial Day were embarrassing by New York racing standards, and there have been plenty of other weak weekends as well because stakes are no longer dispersed evenly throughout the meet. The move to Belmont Stakes Day of the Acorn, a Grade 1 event for 3-year-old fillies at a mile, not surprisingly had a devastating impact on Saturday’s Mother Goose, a Grade 1 event for 3-year-old fillies at 1 1/16 miles run only three weeks later. The Mother Goose has long been one of THE great races for 3-year-old fillies. This Mother Goose attracted a field of 10, and only one of these 10 previously had won so much as one Grade 3 stakes race. This is the Mother Goose we’re talking about here. The Acorn should be run early in the Belmont spring meet. Being at a mile, it’s not a natural competitor for the nine-furlong Kentucky Oaks anyway. This issue also impacts the Belmont fall “championship” meet, which in stakes terms, basically has become a two-day meet – Breeders’ Cup preview day and the day they run the Champagne and Frizette. Yes, I know we have a handful of New York-bred showcase days to help round things out. But while those days are very entertaining, please don’t pass them off as an actual substitute for a healthy, smartly dispersed graded stakes schedule. And now, plenty of folks are worried the same thing will happen at Saratoga. The daily stakes schedule at Saratoga does look pretty lean in the middle of this upcoming meet. For what it’s worth, although I’ve only used NYRA tracks to make a case, they are far from alone. Many other tracks also have adopted the big event day approach. The difference is some of those other tracks only have a handful of graded stakes races to work with, if that. So it actually might make more sense for them to go the big event day route. Given this climate, we had better savor what we can when we can, and the stakes action this upcoming weekend looks tremendous at this point. Belmont has six graded stakes races on its Saturday card (geez, couldn’t one or two of them have been held back to help bolster the last two weeks of the meet, which don’t have any graded stakes?), and some are coming up huge. Cross-sectional rivalries between Divisidero and Bolo in the Belmont Derby and Lady Eli and Spanish Queen in the Belmont Oaks couldn’t be more appealing. And we get Tonalist in the Suburban and Breeders’ Cup Juvenile winner Texas Red coming back in the Dwyer. Also on Saturday, the immensely promising Kentuckian goes in the Los Alamitos Derby. On Sunday, champion Main Sequence makes his first start since Dubai in the United Nations at Monmouth; we get maybe the strongest sprint race of the year so far in the Smile at Gulfstream with champion Work All Week and Alsvid; and the Queen’s Plate at Woodbine, too. Good stuff. Saturday notes ** The Gold Cup at Santa Anita was an exciting race, but it and the Cornhusker run at Prairie Meadows on Saturday night drove home yet again how shallow the handicap division is right now. Hard Aces and Hoppertunity were a nose apart in the Grade 1 Gold Cup. But even if they are now both Grade 1 winners, let’s be real. They are, at heart, really Grade 2 horses at best. Favored Golden Lad was put in an all-out drive midway on the far turn of the Cornhusker, and he finally did grind down the longshot Ecleto Red in the late stages. Ecleto Red is just the sort of hard-hitting, loves-to-win gelding you can’t help but like, but he did run for a $7,500 tag less than a year ago. ** Every time Masochistic wins, which he did again with total authority in the Grade 1 Triple Bend, it just makes what happened in his notorious “loss” in his debut in March of last year all the more egregious. That “loss,” by the way, was the only time Masochistic has lost going one turn. ** I’m not going to take the form of the Mother Goose too seriously at this point. Include Betty, who was the only graded stakes winner in the field – she won the Grade 3 Fantasy in April – rallied from last and won by open lengths, and no one ever can take this Grade 1 score away from her. But this Mother Goose was the definition of a race that fell apart, and Include Betty capitalized on the total pace meltdown. ** I always thought Departing would be successful on turf (I actually wrote about it in this space a few times when he was 3), and he won the Grade 2 Firecracker in only his second attempt on the surface. That said, this Firecracker was not a strong or strongly run race, and Departing would be best served by aiming low for now.