After breaking the single-season earnings record for a North American stallion for three consecutive years, from 2014-16, Tapit was dethroned from atop the general sires earnings list in 2017. However, the Gainesway resident – whose seasonal record of $19,245,198 remains the standard – still made more history.

In case the first four times he did it didn’t prove that Kitten’s Joy is a transcendent sire of turf runners, the new resident of Hill ‘n’ Dale Farms went ahead and led North America’s stallion ranks by grass earnings for a fifth straight year in 2017.

The difference in earnings between Overanalyze, the leading freshman sire of 2017, and runner-up Violence was $76,122, roughly the winner’s share of a maiden special weight purse at Kentucky Downs.

Distorted Humor has been on an upward trajectory as a broodmare sire in recent years, and he took over the category in 2017.

Hill ‘n’ Dale Farm resident Curlin compiled one of the great résumés by a racehorse, and his flair for winning big races has carried to his time at stud.

Cherokee Rap, who was Illinois’s leading freshman sire and juvenile sire in 2010, died in 2012 at the young age of 11, dealing a major loss to William Stiritz’s Wildwood Farms. But the Bellevue operation has carried on. Not only is Cherokee Rap still posthumously a perennial leading sire in the Land of Lincoln, but Wildwood has two active stallions among the state’s top 10 sires of 2017, including young gun Ghaaleb.

There are good years for stallion operations, and then there are the “three of the state’s top four sires” kind of good years. Swifty Farms in Seymour, Ind., had the latter.

A pair of relocated horses standing their first seasons at Swifty Farms took Indiana’s top two spots by earnings, while a veteran to the state’s sire ranks came in fourth.

It’s not uncommon for a Kentucky stallion to become a regional program’s leading sire by earnings the moment he steps off the trailer to take up residence in that state.

Stroll found himself in that scenario early last year when he arrived at the Iowa State University Horse Farm in Ames, Iowa, after standing the first 11 seasons of his career at Claiborne Farm.

Cowtown Cat moved to Ohio from Florida in time for the 2015 breeding season – meaning his first Buckeye State offspring are juveniles of 2018. Their arrival on the track this year will give Mapleton Thoroughbred Farm much to look forward to, as the stallion keys a strong three-horse roster for the farm.

“I didn’t know how to breed, or at least how everybody else did it at the time,” legendary horseman John Nerud told Daily Racing Form in 2014. “So how did I do it? I owned a piece of the farm, and I bred them and trained them, so if they couldn’t run whose fault was it? I bred like a trainer, and it worked.”