Good Samaritan, one of the best 3 year old Turf colts, in a season of very good turf colts, defeated Always Dreaming and the other main Track colts in the Jim Dandy. We might have a real shift in this division starting right now! It wasn’t close!
By the end of the season, as Tapwrit and Irish War Cry and others mature, this group could be a “horse of a different color” by Breeders’ Cup time… This is starting to get real interesting…
July 30, 2017 Handicapped for: FAST / FIRM The Haskell at Monmouth Race #12 2 BATTLE OF MID (m) 78.3* Starting to get very good, in sync. MCCRAKEN ( ) 78.0* Early leader of pack, hitting stride, a threat. TIMELINE (p) 77.8 Coming of age, off New Life TOP, hard to repeat 1 IRISH WAR CRY ( ) 77.8 Company up front, makes this a little tough. GIRVIN ( ) 77.5 Chance to show his stuff, better than KD… PRACTICAL JOK (p) 76.8 Still not hitting Grade 1 figs. HENCE ( ) 75.0 Rank outsider to me… To my eye, Battle of Midway is about to run the kind of race that will impress. With a form cycle that shows incremental improvement, with him always getting good enough to “class-up” to any competion. Hisreturn to the races after his very decent KD, was a beautiful and easy effort that should set him up to “explode” today. While I am also really interested to see if McCraken will fulfill the early promise of his races in the G-2 race of Nov 26-2016 at Churchill and then is magnificent race at Tampa Bay Downs on Feb 11-2017. These were both high class effort and the kind of figs we would associate with a potential champion. He’s had some mis-steps, but this would vault him and this class way up. This is easily the most interesting Haskell from a handicapping perspective as 6 of these 7 runners have some reasonable chance to win… and I argue with anyone who sees it differently… This is a good one!