SARATOGA SPRINGS, N. Y. – Promotions and track giveaways are nice, but if Thoroughbred racing really wants to create new fans, all it has to do – ALL it has to do – is offer a quick backstory to those who didn’t already know it on the two main protagonists in Saturday’s Grade 2 San Diego Handicap at Del Mar. Cue up the race replay above, and press “play.”

First it was David Letterman. Then Jon Stewart, and then Garrison Keillor. How dare they retire. How dare they voluntarily remove their voices from the public square. How empty certain hours have become without them.

Now it’s Steven Crist.

“The reason to retire is to try to avoid embarrassment,” Keillor wrote. “You ought to do it before people are dropping big hints. You want to be the first to come up with the idea. You don’t want to wait until you trip and fall off the stage.”

As a full moon began to set over the Del Mar stables Thursday morning, a superhero in a horse suit was trying to ignore the golden Labrador nosing around his stall.

“Jasper, knock that off or Chrome’ll nail you,” chided Alan Sherman, Jasper’s owner.

On the afternoon of May 5, 1955, R.H. “Red” McDaniel saddled a horse named Aptos in the sixth race at Golden Gate Fields, climbed into his cream-colored Cadillac, and beat a hasty retreat to the nearby San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. When he reached the high point of the span, he pulled his car to a stop, walked without hesitation to the vertiginous rail, and promptly vaulted to his death.

McDaniel was 44 at the time and well on his way to a sixth straight national championship. He left no suicide note behind, only riddles that ranged from gangsters to gastrointestinal ulcers.

The Thoroughbred brand known as California Chrome clambered down the ramp of the Hubbard transport van and lifted his head to the scent of the surrounding horses in their stalls. Raul Rodriguez, his wiry groom, kept a firm hold as the horse let his legs unwind from the two-hour freeway slog from Los Alamitos, 75 miles to the north. It was Wednesday, Barn CC on the Del Mar backstretch, and Art Sherman was ready to rumble.

“Look at that – barn double C,” the trainer said, trailing his chestnut star. “We’ve got everything covered.”

The stock market is near an all-time high, purses on average have never been better, and handle on racing is finally showing stability after years of declines.

These factors should have positively affected the commercial auction market for racing prospects; instead, Fasig-Tipton Kentucky’s yearling sale last Tuesday cast a wet blanket on things. The sale recorded an unusually high 37.5 percent buyback rate, total receipts were down, the average price was down, and the median price declined.

So, what happened?

A case can be made for taking a day off after the ordeal of Del Mar’s opening program. Those who survive Fat Tuesday get a whole year to recover. The Oklahoma Land Rush was one and done.

But at Del Mar, the show goes on. Saturday will come up quickly, even with its 2 p.m. Pacific post time, and for true racing fans, that is when the real Del Mar meet begins.

Before plunging into the seven weeks of the tequila-fueled bacchanal better known as Del Mar, a few psychological ground rules are in order. Specifically, it is important to keep in mind what Del Mar is, and what it is not.

Del Mar is fun, no matter how “fun” is described, because Del Mar allows the mind and body to wander briefly away from the sometimes-oppressive reality of horse racing in metropolitan Los Angeles. This is what Bing Crosby had in mind when he built the place, and the mandate holds today as much as it did in 1937.

For my money, and I would guess I have a lot of company on this, the star of Saturday’s Stars & Stripes Festival program at Belmont Park was Catch a Glimpse. That says a lot about Catch a Glimpse, and her victory in the Belmont Oaks, because there were six graded stakes on this card for horses to shine.

By now, everyone has had a grim, dry laugh over the story of jump jockey Chris Meehan, who was run over by the ambulance that was supposed to remove him safely from an Italian racecourse last weekend.

“My father actually teaches most people in Northern Ireland and England how to drive the ambulance!” Meehan, 22, told the website BelfastLive. “It’s bizarre. You couldn’t make it up.”