Weekend GamePlan for Saturday, Aug. 3, 2019: Picks for the Test, De La Rose, and Yellow Ribbon

It’s Whitney Day at Saratoga, where the Grade 1 Test for 3-year-old fillies supports an excellent card, easily the best in North American racing this weekend. I’m really interested in watching the Whitney, but with three obvious players – McKinzie, Thunder Snow, and Preservationist – and not a lot around the margins, squeezing out a couple drops of value feels like extracting blood from a stone. I prefer Preservationist, but not by a lot, and not with confidence, and will leave the Whitney alone, personally.

Saturday also brings Mountaineer Park’s most important card of the season featuring the West Virginia Derby, where Mr. Money, the best and sharpest entrant, projects on a comfortable trip at a very short price. I took both Sky Promise and Kukulkan for multiple test drives in the West Virginia Governor’s Stakes but couldn’t buy either in the end.

Test Stakes

The seven-furlong Test through this lens looks ripe for a price. You’ve got two absolutely committed front-runners in Serengeti Empress and Covfefe, and a favorite, Bellafina, whose reputation always has outpaced her performance. The cut back from routes to an extended sprint, the thinking goes, will unlock Bellafina’s latent talent; I’ll gladly stand against her.

Plenty of players will entertain all these thoughts and land on Royal Charlotte, who should get the right trip and is unbeaten after four starts. I’m seeing a filly who has improved three times already and might not have any upside on the afternoon. She’s a compact model who could hit a wall right at seven furlongs and, visually, hasn’t blown me away.

The filly that really caught my eye in the way she travels and the gears she’s shown in her last two races is Trenchtown Cat, who is an easy straight play for me at anything like her 12-1 morning-line odds. Switched to dirt two back after four turf races to begin her career, Trenchtown Cat has found a main-track home, and her fine second in the Grade 2 Princess Rooney last out came behind a sharp older horse. She worked back a sharp five furlongs and is in line for a lovely Test trip if things break right.

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De La Rose Stakes

Got Stormy should be solidly favored in this $100,000 turf mile for older fillies and mares lacking a 2019 graded stakes win. She’s a nice filly, but Got Stormy was scratched with a physical issue after being entered in the Just a Game Stakes on June 8 at Belmont, and it seems imprudent, at the price, to expect her to bounce all the way back to the career-peak form she showed in the Distaff Turf Mile three months ago. Rock my Love also will take some action following her encouraging North American debut in the Grade 2 Dance Smartly at Woodbine, but she was gifted the easiest of leads in that 1 1/4-mile race and probably wants more than this mile. The capable Capla Temptress also will have her backers.

I’ll hope Stella di Camelot holds at her 4-1 morning-line odds. She raced June 6, worked back at Saratoga on June 19, and has since kept to a steady breeze pattern for Chad Brown and Co., meaning connections have kept this race in mind for close to two months. While Significant Form saved ground winning the Intercontinental, Stella di Camelot was forced wide and briefly stuck behind two horses after straightening for home, delivering a 10.97-second final furlong, fastest in the race. She wound up third, beaten just a neck for a second in a blanket finish, and that seven-furlong, one-turn trip was on the short side for her while this two-turn mile feels ideal. Her strong performance last fall in the $200,000 Pebbles, her American debut, suggest she’s got one more level to hit.

Yellow Ribbon Handicap

Here’s hoping Toinette remains the underappreciated filly she was in 2018, when she beat Rushing Fall with a powerhouse final furlong in the Edgewood and returned from a layoff last fall to deliver a career-best performance in the Autumn Miss. This marks Toinette’s first start in more than eight months but tell me with a straight face trainer that Neil Drysdale can’t have a horse ready to fire fresh. Her six-furlong in-company drill July 21 looked good, and she was under a hammerlock in the July 28 breeze with the same workmate. The presence of popular Vasilika and Grade 1-dropping shipper Beau Recall should ensure a fair price.