Weekend GamePlan for Nov. 30, 2019: Picks for Hollywood Derby, Jimmy Durante, and Discovery Stakes

Now that’s more like it.

After several fallow weekends following the Breeders’ Cup on Nov. 1 and Nov. 2, there’s robust North American stakes action this Saturday. Del Mar has its turf festival with several playable races, Aqueduct chimes in with a multi-stakes card, and Churchill’s all-2-year-old program has star potential scattered across the afternoon.

In the Churchill stakes, the Golden Rod has a relatively short, uninspiring field, and while I don’t see Tiz the Law as a slam dunk in the Kentucky Jockey Club, there was no one that stood out as a more appealing alternative.

Hollywood Derby

Thirteen horses in a nine-furlong Grade 1 was too rich for me to pass, but wow, this is a tough race. The Chad Brown shipper that interested me, Valid Point, was withdrawn from this race earlier in the week, and I can’t get behind the two he starts, Digital Age and Standard Deviation. Digital Age had the worse trip of that pair in the Hill Prince and might have a step forward in him, but at base, I’m not sure how much quality he possesses. Standard Deviation is more one-paced and might need at least 10 furlongs to be most effective.

As for the SoCal entrants, there are a bunch of them separated by not much at all. Mo Forza was the one who really stepped up in his most recent start, scoring a sharp win in the Twilight Derby on the Breeders’ Cup undercard, but let’s keep in mind how the Santa Anita turf favored forward positions and inside trips during the two-day BC stand when assessing Mo Forza’s performance there.

For this race, I’ll side with the Twilight Derby runner-up Succeedandsurpass, who is 12-1 on the morning line and might even drift higher than that because he’s drawn poorly in post 13. The Karakontie corollary states: Pass short-priced horses with bad posts, but don’t shirk a longshot because of one. (Karakontie won the BC Mile at boxcar odds from post 14 – I wasn’t the only one to pass on him because of the draw.) Succeedandsurpass came nicely up the rail to win his maiden over the Del Mar course making his second U.S. start, beating Mo Forza in that race. He finished well Sept. 27, but was unable to catch a horse that got the jump, and was game enough for second last time at Santa Anita after doing more chasing than ideal. The hope is he finds a way to save at least a little ground, sits mid-pack behind a decent pace, and jumps to a new level over what might be his preferred course making just his fifth start since being imported from Ireland.

Discovery Stakes

I was looking forward to playing against Tax in the Oklahoma Derby, but Tax was scratched from that race. Tax hasn’t been out since he couldn’t do much in the Travers despite getting on the best part of an outside-biased Saratoga surface. While he comes back here following a three-month freshening, the strong lean is that Tax, who never was all that exceptional, doesn’t hit his Jim Dandy peak (even there, runner-up Tacitus, who is no Gun Runner himself, had trouble). He’s 2-1 on the morning line and seems likely to attract enough attention to create value on several others in this late-season 3-year-old race.

Performer is the 8-5 morning-line favorite here, and while I like him better than Tax, his Saratoga win was bias-aided and his last-out Belmont win came on the lead in a race coded speed favoring. It’s too short a price to take on a stakes-debuting colt who has potential but isn’t faster than several others.

Carlos L. is the latest Panamanian find by former jockey Rene Douglas, who has shown an eye for talent and who unearthed the excellent Private Zone for this same ownership group. Take the Panama form for what it is, but the colt clearly seems to have performed better over longer distances, and his last outing there in May was a Group 1 score by a huge margin. He ran into subsequent BC Dirt Mile winner Spun to Run in a hot Parx stakes making his U.S. debut and performed encouragingly. He gets Lasix and the added ground he needs in this 1 1/8-mile race, and will be an appealing price.

Jimmy Durante

It’s foolish to expect odds as high as 7-2 on Princesa Caroline in the Jimmy Durante, but the field is so bulky and unbeaten Alms will take enough support that she just might make it up to what I’d consider a fair-odds range.

Lady Eli’s little sister, Princesa Caroline must not have wowed anyone in the morning to go off at a price as high as 9-2 in her career debut, but she definitely ran like a future star. The top two in that Belmont maiden race pulled a mile clear of the third horse, and Princesa Caroline was hand-ridden through the final half-furlong after getting the better of Laughable. She changed leads like an old professional and got down low, really focused, when it came time to do her job. She’s talented enough that Chad Brown wanted to run her in the BC Juvenile Fillies Turf, but Princesa Caroline lacked the credentials to make that field. This is an appealing alternative spot for her stakes debut.