Weekend GamePlan for May 16, 2020: Picks for Powder Break, Musical Romance, Echo Eddie

Happy Preakness Day, everyone! For old time’s sake, can we get a shout out for tight turns, new shooters, the running of the port-o-potties, and Pimlico dilapidation complaints?

Huh – awfully quiet out there. But that’s Triple Crown season during a global pandemic. Still, America, for better or worse, is “opening up” again, racing included, with Santa Anita, Golden Gate, and Churchill resuming this week. The stakes schedule comes up light for the third Saturday in May, and on a day when we’re supposed to focus on Maryland, three plays from Florida and California will have to do.

Powder Break

The best Thoroughbred racing anywhere in the world Saturday is Got Stormy, who will be an odds-on favorite to win this one-mile, filly-and-mare grass race – provided she runs. Mark Casse told Daily Racing Form’s David Grening this week that if the turf comes up soft, Got Stormy could be scratched.

One need only look two starts back to find Got Stormy failing to come through at a miniscule price – on Feb. 8 she was fourth at 1-5 in the Endeavour Stakes. Granted, that was a low-water mark for Got Stormy, a hangover following an Eclipse-finalist 2019 campaign, and while she was beaten at odds of 11-10 on March 7 in the Kilroe Mile, Got Stormy got much closer to her peak that day.

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But it still wasn’t a performance like her 2019 peak, and I wonder where Got Stormy is psychologically, as much as physically, right now. Pull up all the workouts in her career and you’ll see she’s never consistently breezed as fast as she has this winter and spring, and in the recent workout video, she looks really aggressive. That might mean nothing, but there is a lot of speed in the Powder Break, and if Got Stormy is tapped for a little early foot to get position from post 10, it wouldn’t be shocking to see her hot on the heels of a heated pace.

Under this scenario, Noor Sahara could spring a surprise. She’s certainly drawn in the right place, the rail, to get the ground-saving, covered-up trip she’d need to nail Got Stormy in the late stages, and Noor Sahara showed in her French races she can finish fast. She wasn’t a top-class 3-year-old filly last year, but she was not far from the best of her generation and Lasix could help her in America. Noor Sahara is kind of a tank of a filly, and you can see her leaning up through the course of her workouts this spring. Surely connections didn’t intend to tackle Got Stormy first time out, but because she does, Noor Sahara – even despite Chad Brown doing the training and Irad Ortiz Jr. the piloting – could actually be a fair price.

Musical Romance

Bellera’s best race came in the two-turn, 1 1/8-mile Comely Stakes last November, but the seven-furlong Musical Romance could work out very well for her.

A thicket of front-runners, including three who very much need to be on or near the lead, ensures a strong early and middle pace. Bellera has tactical route speed and need not totally fall out the back door, which typically is a way to lose even fast-paced Gulfstream races. It looks from the long workout pattern like Todd Pletcher, an excellent layoff trainer, had this filly ready to race about mid-April, only with no place to race her, and we can probably expect a sharp performance even with better, longer races in Bellera’s future. The hope is enough bettors gravitate toward Wildwood’s Beauty as the most likely beneficiary of a pace setup that Bellera’s price comes up playable – but that’s no guarantee.

Echo Eddie

Expect Big Sweep, whose filly weight allowance gets her as much as nine pounds from the males here, to be favored in this six-furlong, California-bred dash. Big Sweep definitely performed above par for a first-time-starting California-bred in her maiden win and lone career start, but she managed to go clear from post 1, avoiding any pace pressure, and we have no idea how she’ll respond to a more challenging trip.

Summer Fire is the pick. Summer Fire improved during his 2-year-old season as he learned to stop racing at full speed from the start and wait to make a run from behind the pace. The transformation began in November at Del Mar and took full force in a good maiden win dirt-sprinting there. He has a turf-leaning pedigree and ran fine on grass in his most recent start, but there’s no reason he can’t effectively move back to dirt. I liked the appearance of his last two workouts, and it’s hard to see Summer Fire getting bet too heavily.