The Haskell Stakes: Odds, Best Bets, And Why Nobody Can Truly Make Out What Arabian Knight Or Mage Will Do
Monmouth's $1-million Haskell this afternoon is a deceptively important race, meaning that it will be a more challenging duel for its top runners than their connections, not to mention a ton of players, initially imagined. Yes, the Haskell can still be regarded as a 'prep' — but just barely. When we begin to tease out what it means that Kentucky Derby winner Mage is not just not the favorite but a co-second favorite — which is to say, that one athlete is held in higher initial esteem than he and one other is cheek-by-jowl with him — then we have to know that this running will hold some surprises.
The race is a strongbox. In it lie all sorts of keys to the rest of the season, not least the Travers, which looks to feature Mage and his fellow Triple Crown-race victors.
The last really fine thing we saw the Derby winner do was to come from sixth at the mile at Churchill and fight off Two Phil's, a performance that was both gritty and delightful. Despite that, there was a whiff of a hangover feeling that he squeaked out that victory, so the race didn't manage to put an end to the questions about him. It did the opposite. Mage is doing well and his connections certainly seem happy to be where they are in the season, and like many of the owners and trainers in the Jim Dandy, they are hell-bent for the Travers, but there is a larger need out in the racing community for this particular Derby-winning colt to restate his qualifications.
For its part, the Haskell field just will not be declaring itself until Monmouth's starters slam the gate open. But before we wade into Tapit Trice, Geaux Rocket Ride, Extra Anejo, and the looming favorite-by-a-hair Arabian Knight and his robust mode of attack on the track, first, a refresher on the post positions and odds.
1) Geaux Rocket Ride, 9-2
2) Awesome Strong, 30-1
3) Salute the Stars, 8-1
4) Mage, 3-1
5) Tapit Trice, 3-1
6) Howgreatisnate, 20-1
7) Extra Anejo, 5-1
8) Arabian Knight, 5-2
Because no race horse can be held responsible for the shenanigans got up to by any humans, it's not Arabian Knight's fault that he's raced just twice in his life. It's axiomatic that, when trainers suffer bans, as Bob Baffert spectacularly did in 2021 only to have it even more spectacularly extended three weeks ago through 2024, the horses in his charge will undergo great changes of routine, as in the last couple of years, when Baffert shifted his runners to Tim Yakteen so that they could race. Arabian Knight came along at a difficult time for Baffert, when he thought his Churchill ban was at its natural end, and amid the trainer's bumptious back-and-forth with Churchill over the positive test results for betamethasone registered in the former Derby winner Medina Spirit's blood samples.
At the same time, Arabian Knight's obviously towering athleticism and talent are out there, on full display in his two races — the January victory of five-plus lengths was in the slop, no less. The colt is fit and then some. And all can be as it very much seems with him, namely, that nothing and nobody can get in the way of Arabian Knight, on a track, doing exactly what he wants to do when he wants to do it. He's shown that he is by definition ready to run — the diametric opposite of Tapit Trice, who is infamous for having to be coaxed and cajoled to unlock his skills, a reluctance that accounted for his third-place run in Kentucky Derby, in fact.
Instead, the question for Arabian Knight lies in that razor thin half-point morning-line margin that he holds over his two second-favorites, and in that tiny half-point spread is a question about his mind, or put more specifically, about his maturity. Horses grow at different rates and put together their tool-kits for their racing lives in different ways. It's also true that real grinding competition in a real race is a school very much in and of itself — equine athletes don’t receive the lessons from that blazing chaos in any other way. Which is why we look so closely at horses, such as Arabian Knight, who have endured long layoffs. In this young colt’s case — emphasis on the adjective young — it's not just that Arabian Night has raced two times in his life. It's also that it has been six months since he has raced at all.
The money — in the form of the morning line — is saying right now that when Arabian Night steps out onto Monmouth’s primarily sand-and-loam 'dirt' that he will flick that 'got-to-run' switch in his mind all by himself and be rearing to go, no holds barred, status quo ante, all that. We'll see what the money at the track has to say about that proposition later in the day. But suffice it to say, even if a player plans to use Arabian Knight prominently, up top, on his or her tickets, it's well worth that player's while to reserve a little shard of doubt about this adolescent colt who's only done this a couple of times before, which is an eternity ago, in horse time. We know that he has a mighty racing instinct. What we don’t know is whether that instinct is at his command today.
We can all hope mightily for a fine demonstration of puissance from the favorite. Less diplomatically put, on one or two of those tickets, just for a bit of a hedge and not a little fun, you might want to box that boy.
As for the roles yet to be played by Extra Anejo and Geaux Rocket Ride, the respectable gentlemen competitors down in what we might call the second tier of Monmouth's oddsmakers' estimation — meaning, beyond the probabilities of the top three, but above the probabilities of the 8-1 outlier Salute the Stars. Extra Anejo has got some trackside buzz going; Geaux Rocket Ride a tad less, although the (slight) difference between them in the morning line would have you think it was the other way around. It's like this: Though they are very different athletes, with very different connections, there doesn’t seem to be a hell of a lot of difference between their abilities.
Except: That trackside buzz. The reason for it being focused more strongly on Asmussen's Extra Anejo is that the colt is hot, period. His speed figure is on a stark upward spike. We can’t say what that means when confronted with the powers of an Arabian Knight in a million dollar Haskell, but we can fairly say that Extra Anejo wants to matter.
And sometimes, as in a lot of other endeavors, wanting to matter can change a horse race.
