The 2023 Louisiana Derby: The Kentucky Derby Prep’s Contenders, Odds, And Bets You Should Make
This weekend, the hundred-point Kentucky Derby races are upon us, chief among them the Grade 2 Louisiana Derby way down home at America’s paying-est track, the Fair Grounds, and in the upland South the eponymous “Jeff Ruby Steaks” stakes (steaks=stakes, get it?) at Kentucky's Turfway Park. For those three-year-olds whose connections desire an appearance at the 2023 Kentucky Derby, these are among the obligatory preps, and it’s a golden chance for players with the long view to watch those ‘past performances’ get made. The post time for the $1-million Kentucky Derby prep is 6:42 p.m. Eastern.
Brad Cox’s Instant Coffee leads the pack in the morning line at 2-1, followed not so closely by Kenny McPeek’s Sun Thunder at 5-1, who is quite closely trailed in probability by Todd Pletcher’s Kingsbarns at 6-1, to name the top three in the 12-horse field. But after Kingsbarns, in what we might describe as the middle of the pack, the oddsmakers make it tighter still, with Disarm and Tapit’s Conquest both at 10-1, followed by no less than four contenders at 12-1, Shopper’s Revenge, Curly Jack, Cagliostro and Denington. It’s these horses we’ll all be playing, but before we start blazing a betting trail down through that thicket of talent, herewith, a quick look at post positions, jocks, and trainers:
(Post Position, Horse, Morning Line, Jockey, Trainer)
1) Shopper's Revenge, 12-1, Ricardo Santana, Steve Asmussen
2) Instant Coffee, 2-1, Luis Saez, Brad Cox
3) Curly Jack, 12-1, Edgar Morales, Tom Amoss
4) Sun Thunder, 5-1, Brian Hernandez, Jr., Ken McPeek
5) Disarm, 10-1, Joel Rosario, Steve Asmussen
6) Kingsbarns, 6-1, Flavien Prat, Todd Pletcher
7) Cagliostro, 12-1, Cristian Torres, Cherie DeVaux
8) Single Ruler, 15-1, David Cohen, Keith Desormeaux
9) Tapit's Conquest, 10-1, Manny Franco, Brad Cox
10) Denington, 12-1, Junior Alvarado, Ken McPeek
11) Jace's Road, 20-1, Florent Geroux, Brad Cox
12) Baseline Beater, 20-1, Corey Lanerie, Neil Pessin
(Source: Fair Grounds, 3/25/2023)
It will help the beleaguered player here to remember that these are all very green, extremely young horses. Yes, Instant Coffee and his trainer Cox are the flavor of the moment down in Louisiana, but anything can happen in a Kentucky Derby prep, and often does. The fact is this: Nobody in the country, very much including their closest connections such as jockeys and trainers, really knows who these colts are at this point.
That remains the salient point of the road to the Kentucky Derby. From the Louisiana Derby out west to the Santa Anita and up to New York for the Woodward, the spring Derby preps are about the introduction of this year’s class to the public, and about the introduction of the public to the class. We don’t know who they are yet, and none of their trainers or jockeys know how they will handle this, the stiffest competition they have faced in their lives.
That registered, there are ways to bet it, and paths to explore down through the thickets of these fields. There’s a reason it’s a hundred-point win on the road to the Kentucky Derby, not least because the track’s owner is Churchill Downs. The race itself has come to mean a lot in the distillation of talent that swirls around the Derby qualifications — Travers winner and Belmont and Preakness placer Epicenter is the most impressive recent Louisiana Derby victor, now retired to stud.
In building exotics, there is a trig to parsing whom to love, but there is a math of equal importance in deciding whom not to love, and with these young horses, often that comes down to workouts. It’s square in the middle of today’s Louisiana peloton that these sorts of questions come into sharper focus — in other words, below Kingsbarns in order of probability to win, as in: Jace’s Road, at 12-1, is Brad-Cox trained and, like his stablemate Instant Coffee, has been based at the Fair Grounds, but he’s likeable here for his win in the Gun Runner last December. By contrast, it’s not thought that Cagliostro really has the brass to step up to this level of competition, and neither does the 10-1 Disarm, of whom it’s not certain that he can handle the distance — having only really shorter races under his girth.
