The Pizza Man had to get a career-best Beyer Speed Figure to win the Arlington Million, and presto, the amazing 6-year-old did exactly that, getting a 103 and his 15th grass victory. Some horses you can measure by numbers; some horses you only measure by where they finish.

It wasn’t exactly the upset that rocked the world, but when Arabian Queen and her modest résumé defeated British superstar Golden Horn in the Juddmonte International at York on Wednesday, horse trainers of a certain status took the results very much to heart.

Bob Baffert, for his part, hated to see it happen. The sight of a superior 3-year-old colt dumped rudely from atop a hard-earned pedestal cuts close to the heart of the man who shapes the racetrack destiny of American Pharoah.

As far as I know, Barbara Walter and John Nerud – who died this week at the age of 102 – never met and were never pen pals, although nothing about Walter would surprise me. (Or Nerud, for that matter.)

Walter knew Imelda Marcos, she was hit on by Marlon Brando, and at one point in her exceptional life she traveled to Soviet Russia with a group of politically sophisticated young women long before the Iron Curtain turned to lace.

John A. Nerud, the oldest living member of the Thoroughbred racing Hall of Fame and a peerless leader of the sport, died Thursday morning at his home in Old Brookville, N.Y. He was 102.

That is how all of Nerud’s obituaries probably will begin. But like a stone tossed into the middle of a shimmering pond, the ripples flowing from such a simple statement are abundant, reaching every possible shore.

I wrote last week, “I think it very unlikely Honor Code comes close to that 112’’ from the Metropolitan Mile in the Whitney. Actually, Honor Code not only came close; the horse went a point better with a 113 Beyer Speed Figure, a tribute to his inherent talent and Shug McGaughey’s work. Put a line through Honor Code’s Alysheba Stakes at Churchill Downs, and his 2015 figures are 106, 104, 112, and 113. I was wrong about the Met Mile being an outlier. Honor Code has fulfilled every bit of the promise we all saw two years ago.

American Pharoah was one of approximately 23,500 North American Thoroughbred foals of 2012 registered with The Jockey Club. At least, that’s what the organization’s website says, but it also accepted the spelling of “pharoah,” so we’ll use that number with care.

The generation already has produced a Triple Crown winner, which should be enough to satisfy anyone’s definition of a good crop. But history encourages depth, and while American Pharoah has written the story of 2015 in his own terms, there is still work to be done to provide him with the context he deserves.

My first racing experience was at Pimlico, Laurel, Bowie, and Timonium in the late 1970s. King T. Leatherbury had already won 2,000 races by that time.

While I tried to sort through the complexities of Maryland racing at the windows, I watched the Big Three of Leatherbury, Bud Delp, and Dick Dutrow win so often that it was like they were the only three with horses. I quickly noted that they claimed off everybody but each other.

SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. – In a career spanning nearly six decades, King T. Leatherbury has been one of the most consistent and prolific race-winning trainers in the history of the Thoroughbred sport. He is one of only five members of his profession with more than 6,000 victories. Yet until Friday, his feats had gone unrecognized by the Racing Hall of Fame.

What a display – the pandering, the pleading, the willingness to say anything in hopes of making an impossible wish come true.

The presidential candidates’ debates on Fox News had some of that, sure. But the real, sweaty desperation has reached fevered heights in the quest for a much loftier goal: the quest for American Pharoah.

The beseeching began the moment American Pharoah hit the wire in the Haskell Invitational, lighting up Bob Baffert’s phone.

What’s in a name? If anything, the headline Saturday features at America’s two foremost racing sites answer the question in spades, for it is impossible to imagine what Saratoga would be like without the Whitney family any more than thinking that Del Mar would have gotten along just fine without the considerable influence of John C. Mabee.