Trainer Chris Candies has not started a horse on the Louisiana Champions Day card at his home track of Fair Grounds in close to a decade, but he’ll be firing half of his stable at the rich program on Saturday.

Candies will send out four horses on the card of 11 stakes, with Twilight Ross set for the $150,000 Classic. High Toned goes in the $100,000 Turf, and Southern Invasion and Grand Minit are on deck for the $50,000 Starter.

“We’re running half the barn,” said Candies, who has eight horses in training at Fair Grounds.

Jockey Brian Hernandez Jr. will have to make a judgment call on how to ration Homerun Berti’s energy following the start of Friday’s eighth race at Fair Grounds.

“He can show speed if you want him to, and he can also take back and sit off it,” said Steve Margolis, who trains Homerun Berti. “We’ll let him get out of the gate, have Brian ride after the break. Sometimes, you can’t really handicap until they break.”

Jockey Tyler Baze and his agent, Vic Stauffer, have parted company, both said earlier this week.

Stauffer, 51, said on Wednesday that he will no longer work as an agent, and will focus on announcing at Hollywood Park and television work as a commentator on TVG.

“I’m going to take some time off,” he said. “I said to Tyler, if it wasn’t for him. I would have moved away earlier. He was everything I envisioned when I started this, with his incredible work ethic and upbeat attitude and all the talent.”

INGLEWOOD, Calif. – True Way of Grace won the Barretts Debutante at Fairplex Park in September, but her education is progressing slowly, trainer Alexis Barba insists.

After losing two stakes over 1 1/16 miles at Hollywood Park in the last two months, True Way of Grace starts over that distance for the third time in Saturday’s $300,000 Hollywood Starlet for 2-year-old fillies. This time, she will wear blinkers, which Barba hopes will help the filly improve on a second-place finish in the Sharp Cat Stakes on Nov. 7, her most recent start.

OZONE PARK, N.Y. –For nearly three weeks, trainer David Donk has had to play the role of spectator rather than participant when it comes to racing. A quarantine placed on his Belmont Park barn – a result of a case of equine herpesvirus contracted by one of trainer Chris Englehart’s horses – meant that Donk had to train after regular training hours and he could not run horses from Nov. 20 though Wednesday.

The Grade 3, $800,000 Sunland Park Derby will be conducted over a brand new racing surface when it highlights the New Mexico track’s 77-date meet that opens Friday. Sunland will feature both Thoroughbreds and Quarter Horses during its season, which runs through April 19.

The slots-rich track, which is located just over the border from El Paso, Texas, resurfaced its track during the off season. In addition to putting up a new outside rail around the one-mile oval, eight inches of surface material was removed and replaced.

INGLEWOOD, Calif. – Already this year, trainer Marty Jones has won seven sprint stakes on turf with four horses, including the four-time stakes winner Unzip Me, who was third against males in the Breeders’ Cup Turf Sprint at Churchill Downs last month.

Jones has an improving turf sprinter to follow in Blue Jay Attack, who starts in a first-level allowance race over six furlongs on turf at Hollywood Park on Friday.

INGLEWOOD, Calif. – Considering the logistics, the offer may not have been the most appealing at the time.

In late summer, trainer Mike Puype contacted jockey David Flores, asking him to drive from Del Mar to Hollywood Park, about 120 miles, to work an unraced filly named Turbulent Descent. For Flores, that would consume his whole morning, but there was something in the way Puype talked that said the journey would be worth it.

ETOBICOKE, Ontario - For the second straight year, Woodbine Racetrack has shown a sharp increase in all-source handle for the live Thoroughbred meeting which wound up last Sunday.

The all-sources total for the 167-day meet was $393,507,233, an increase of 8.9 percent over the $361,435,208 wagered on the same number of programs in 2009. The daily average handle of $2,356,331, up from $2,164,283 last year.

The 2009 total, in turn, represented a 7 percent hike over the previous year’s meeting.

Bad starts prevented Flying Fig from winning two seven-figure futurities at Los Alamitos earlier this year.

The filly’s last chance for glory in such a race arrives in Friday’s Los Alamitos Two Million Futurity, the track’s richest race, and one that trainer Dennis Ekins thinks she can win – with a better start.

“She’s run just brilliantly on the end,” he said Wednesday morning. “She’s got to get away clean. If she can do that, she can be very competitive.”