As was the case with the Kentucky Derby, take the parimutuel element out of play, and it’s almost impossible to look past NYQUIST as the most likely winner once again Saturday. The undefeated juvenile champion has done nothing wrong to this point and has been brilliantly managed during his 3-year-old campaign, with the thought of having plenty left in the tank for another big effort in Baltimore and, should all go as expected Saturday, three weeks down the road in the Belmont.

BALTIMORE – Nyquist, the Kentucky Derby winner, drew post 3 when a field of 11 was assigned their stalls Wednesday night for the 141st Preakness Stakes on Saturday at Pimlico.

Nyquist has won all eight of his starts and will be a prohibitive favorite in the Preakness. Both Mike Watchmaker, Daily Racing Form’s national handicapper, and Keith Feustle, who makes the line at Pimlico, installed Nyquist as the odds-on favorite at 3-5. If that holds, it will mark the fourth time that Nyquist has been odds-on.

Grade 1 winners Ring Weekend and Grand Arch head a salty field of 13 as they make their 2016 debuts in the Grade 2, $250,000 Dixie Stakes for older horses on the turf on Saturday at Pimlico.

The Dixie is the richest of the eight stakes on the undercard of the $1.5 million Preakness Stakes, and immediately precedes the classic on the card. The field for the Preakness was to be drawn later Wednesday evening at Pimlico.

First post for Saturday's 14-race card is 10:30 a.m. Eastern.

Along with a few thousand others, Peter Fluor found himself soaked to the bone last year at Pimlico when the heavens unloaded on Baltimore and turned the Preakness into a regatta. He was there to cheer on American Pharoah and his trainer, Bob Baffert, who just that week had taken into the fold a 2-year-old colt by City Zip owned by Fluor and his partner, K.C. Weiner.

“It was my first Preakness and a great experience watching American Pharoah win,” Fluor said this week. “But I can promise you I’ll be rooting a lot harder for Baffert this year.”

BALTIMORE – As the colt Collected made his way back to the stakes barn at Pimlico on Wednesday morning, his trainer, Bob Baffert, came walking up, trailed by a media throng of exactly one, a journalist who is working on a book on Baffert.

BALTIMORE – As trainer Doug O’Neill puts Nyquist and Land Over Sea through their paces leading up to this weekend’s Preakness and Black-Eyed Susan stakes, he is accompanied on his morning rounds by Jim Jimenez.

Saturday's 141st Preakness Stakes marks the fifth straight year that Maryland’s signature race will be contested without a statebred runner. This reflects problems that the local Thoroughbred industry has faced, but the good news is that state legislators have instituted measures to reverse these fortunes – plus, there have been other developments recently to reward excellence. Better days for Maryland breeders seem to be on the horizon.

BALTIMORE – Jevian Toledo and J.D. Acosta have some things in common. They are from Puerto Rico and attended the Escuela Vocacional Hipica horse racing school there, came to the United States as apprentice riders with little more than a dream of success, and on Saturday will have their first mounts in a Triple Crown race.

Toledo, 21, will ride Awesome Speed in the Preakness for trainer Alan Goldberg. Acosta, 34, will be aboard Abiding Star for Ned Allard. That the horses are longshots makes little difference to Toledo or Acosta, who both said they will be riding to win.

Fellowship arrived in trainer Mark Casse’s Kentucky barn three weeks before entry day for the Kentucky Derby – and, somewhat remarkably, his name was not in the entry box for the first of the spring classics when the deadline rolled around. The preference list to determine the 20-horse field refused to budge with late defections, and the colt remained stuck in 21st, with the same number of points as the final horse into the field but $61,736 behind in the non-restricted stakes earnings tiebreaker.

On Saturday, Fellowship will get his chance in the Preakness.

Last year at this time, officials of Pimlico Race Course were openly discussing the possibility of moving the Preakness Stakes from its traditional Saturday date two weeks after the Kentucky Derby to the next day, a Sunday, generating intense debate over what the move would mean to the Triple Crown.

Those discussions are no longer taking place, said Tim Ritvo, the chief operating officer of The Stronach Group, the parent company of Pimlico and its sister track in Maryland, Laurel Park.