Weekend Warrior for Saturday, April 30: Picks for Elusive Quality, California Chrome, San Francisco Mile
With graded race after graded race on tap for next Saturday, Kentucky Derby Day, not surprisingly, the stakes plate is a little light this Saturday. But even with a sparse schedule, the Weekend Warrior found three stakes plays in the Elusive Quality for turf sprinters at Belmont, the California Chrome for 3-year-olds at Los Alamitos, and the Grade 3 San Francisco Mile on the grass at Golden Gate Fields.
Elusive Quality
Nine of the 10 horses entered for turf in the Elusive Quality, a seven-furlong sprint, are returning from layoffs. The lone exception: Bye Bye Bernie, who ran fifth in the Grade 3 Shakertown at Keeneland on April 9.
My strategy is simple: Back the proven fit horse in Bye Bye Bernie. His price is right at 8-1, and this race isn’t merely a prep for him, which it seems to be for some others.
To win, some of his leading rivals, most notably Green Mask, King Kreesa, and Mosler, must need a race, but that’s not out of the realm of possibility. None of the three has a race this year, and Mosler and King Kreesa haven’t started since early fall.
As for Bye Bye Bernie, he was a rewarding $62,500 claim last year, making more than $210,000, with nearly all of that coming for his current connections. And he really put it together on the grass over the second half of 2015, running a close third in the Kentucky Turf Dash and, one start later, narrowly winning the Grade 2 Nearctic at Woodbine over Summation Time and The Great War.
Those two races were longer-than-usual turf sprints around sweeping turns – just the scenario he gets here.
A hot pace set up his rally in the Shakertown, but he pretty much just passed tired horses in rallying to be fifth. Still, he has every right to benefit from that race while others in the Elusive Quality may be in need of one.
California Chrome
Uncle Lino, most recently third in the Santa Anita Derby, is the most likely winner of this race, going 1 1/16 miles on the Los Alamitos dirt track. But he also seems assured of going off favored, with Kentucky Derby horses such as Exaggerator, Mor Spirit, and Danzing Candy in his company lines.
As good as Uncle Lino has proven to be, I think Malibu Sunset has as much raw talent. A blowout winner of his debut at Fair Grounds, he was taken west after the race, and though he won an allowance at a mile Feb. 28 at Santa Anita, he really wasn’t as dominant as I expected a 1-5 favorite to be.
I doubt that trainer Bob Baffert was entirely satisfied with him either, as he didn’t return him in any of the major Derby preps.
Instead, Baffert gave Malibu Sunset a steady diet of drills at Santa Anita, and in looking at those, it is clear that the horse has really picked up the pace in his training. He comes of two consecutive bullet breezes.
In the California Chrome, I’m expecting to see the Malibu Sunset that got people so excited when he won a maiden race at Fair Grounds, and not the workmanlike winner who went through the motions in winning at Santa Anita in February.
One can only hope that Santa Anita race will linger in the minds of bettors and create a palatable price.
San Francisco Mile
The San Francisco Mile is the deepest stakes on the Saturday slate, drawing 14 horses, including a number of good turf horses from Southern California.
The depth of the field makes the race appealing. First, there are attractive odds on most of the horses in the field, and second, outside draws could make some of the favorites vulnerable. Alert Bay, Bal a Bali, and Gabriel Charles start from posts 11, 12, and 13, and with none of the trio seemingly having the speed to clear, they could get parked out into the first turn, losing valuable ground.
That leaves me inclined to take a chance on Montego Bay, a 12-1 shot stepping up from claimers into stakes company. He is a winner of 4 of 12 on turf and seems to produce his best efforts under young jockey Drayden Van Dyke, who has the mount Saturday.
His last-race Beyer Speed Figure, a 97, suggests he has a fighting chance if the favorites have to take the long way around.