Watchmaker: How I'd play Saratoga on Thursday
How can you not love Thursday’s opener at Saratoga? The morning-line price of 5-1 has been hung on a horse trained by a man who for decades has owned this facet of the game.
Oh, wait. We might be talking about Jonathan Sheppard, but this is a jump race.
Never mind.
I mean, come on. Isn’t wagering difficult enough without asking our horses to negotiate not only the usual stuff but also a dozen or so obstacles deliberately put in front of them? The jumpers can be fun to watch, but they aren’t my cup of tea when it comes to betting.
There is, however, a race Thursday at Saratoga that really will be the focal point of my pari-mutuel day. That race is the seventh, a second-level allowance/optional claimer for New York-bred routers on the inner turf course.
Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t be advocating a horse whose last win came 27 months ago and who has since gone 0 for 16. But Abilio is an exception. All during that time, Abilio has run against drastically better company than he faces Thursday. And on many occasions, he was competitive.
In Abilio’s recent return from an eight-month layoff, he showed good speed to upper stretch, again while in with much, much better. He can be expected to move forward simply because he’ll be making his second start off the long layoff. But when you couple that with the fact that Abilio is in the easiest spot he’s seen in literally years, I’m expecting a big effort.
Abilio will be my key in horizontal wagers (Thursday’s seventh begins the late pick 4, but it is also part of a variety of rolling pick threes and doubles) and in a few vertical wagers, too.
Sneaky Kitten doesn’t want to win but loves being on the board while always being well bet, so he could be a drag on exactas, trifectas, and supers. But I hope to compensate for Sneaky Kitten underneath in exotics with Status of Forces, who is 30-1 on the line. I sense that Status of Forces’s recent seasonal debut at Belmont was merely a tightener for a bigger run up here at Saratoga.