Handicapper's Corner: 2026 Whitney Stakes (G1)

 

 Graveyard of Champions: Looking past the obvious in the Whitney Stakes

By: The Turk, ThoroFan Handicapper  

Welcome, Friends. My primary focus in horse racing is Turf Handicapping and Exacta Bet Construction. That said, I handicapped Dirt racing for the better part of 35 years before I settled on Turf as my niche.  

This year I've been rather quiet with my blog, not that I'm quitting; I'll never truly give up my love of the races and blogging, but every few years I take a pause.  Whenever I return to racing from these "handicapper holidays," I return a bit rusty, but with a renewed sense of enjoyment.  I'm currently on one of these handicapper holidays, but the good people at The Thorofan asked me to share my thoughts on a very loaded Whitney field, and how could I refuse?    

Loaded.  Career Earnings:  Magnitude: $9.6 MM.  White Abarrio: $8.6 MM.  Sovereignty: $6.3 MM. Nitrogen: $2.7 M.  Baeza: $2.2 MM.  Antiquarian and Tiztastic each other: $1.2 MM.  Only one horse in the field below one million in career earnings, 4 YO Forged Steel, sits at $0.4 MM.  

This isn't the sort of race that requires a lot of hand-wringing as a handicapper.  Multiple potential winners exist in this field.  Only one question comes to mind when I look at this field:  Can I find value compelling enough to bet? 

I'm not the sort of horse player that plays for "action"; I no-bet many more races than I actually bet.  What sort of horse player are you?  If you do this long enough, if you invest enough of your hard-earned investment capital into this sport, you have to be able to answer that question.  We've seen so many good players die off, age out, or simply jump to other sports books.  It's a craft; please work at it and think about your strengths and weaknesses. I tend to get a bit nerdy with my analysis, but there are many ways to go about picking winners. 

As I said, I'm a bit rusty, but this race as I will explain (if it is not obvious) is less handicapping and more bet construction.  Win bets with a few horses down the tote board might be worth the investment.  Exacta bets? I would have liked to see a few more 8-to-10-to-1 closers to couple with a speed horse, but you have to work with what you got.  Let's build a base handicap first and then jump to bet construction.

Let's get after it!

First, some videos of interest.

While it was a smaller field, and the track was off a bit, The Stephen Foster G1 might be a good example of how The Whitney will unfold:  Magnitude was hustled out of the gate and took the rail.  White Abbario pressed.  Sovereignty and Baeza laid back and came late, but Magnitude really impressed with a late turn of foot.  

27 June 2026:  CD:  The Stephen Foster Handicap G1;  1 1/8 Miles on Dirt slop.  

4 July 2026: SAR: The Suburban G2; 1 1/4 Miles on Fast Dirt.

5 June 2026: SAR: The Ogden Phipps G1 (F); 1 1/8 Miles on Fast Dirt

I built this chart to try and capture current form on these big Beyers (Dirt Starts only).  The mean is denoted by the vertical tick line, and circles in green are the last three races, and circles in red are older efforts.  I can't say I'm a fan of the idea that Nitrogen is entered here. She clearly loves Saratoga, 3 for 3 with three Graded Stakes wins, two Grade 1s,  including the prestigious Alabama.  Still, these are pretty deep waters for her.  Ortiz jumps off for Magnitude and Velazquez is up. 

This next chart visualizes the Timeform US Early to Late Pace figures.  It's important to combine this with the eye test, with Magnitude's late speed in The Stephen Foster just as up to the task as the others.  What throws off a horse like Magnitude?  Winning by 9  in the Risen Star and Iowa Derby doesn't help.  Coasting.  Sovereignty cracking to White Abarrio in the Oaklawn Handicap and getting toasted by Baeza up the stretch in the Stephen Foster belies his late speed impregnability.  

Numbers/Figs + Eye Test + Running Lines/Call Positions is the proper way to interpret these athletes.  

If I had to guess, I'd say the track will be Fast by post time, but some heavy rains are possible Friday.  Check here for track condition/scratches and changes.  For as inefficient as I think of NYS government, NYRA is a pretty well-run website.  

I'm really much more interested as a fan of the sport than as a horseplayer.   If you look at my chart above, you'll see the morning lines add up to 131%.   Two things drive the excess. The first is takeout: New York win pools hold back roughly 16%, so even the final odds on the board will sum to about 119%, not 100%. Pari-mutuel odds are computed after the track's cut comes out of the pool, so they can never sum to 100% by construction. The second is that the linemaker adds cushion on top: he's projecting how the money will fall, and rounding to standard increments (nobody posts 7.3-1), which pushes the total higher still.

If the Turk had more people and access to streaming API data, he'd auto-populate that chart with a column that compared the Adjusted Morning Line to the Fair Odds to the Actual Betting Odds.  Until the powers that be in horse racing stop overcharging for data streams, that won't happen, and it's not worth the effort to do for the blog, but I absolutely do it at the track.  I literally just sit there right up until post, comparing my fair line to betting odds.  That's what you need to do to find value!

Worth noting, Tiztastic at 1.0% and Forged Steel at 2.0% imply 100-1 and 48-1. In a field this small, with no first-time starters and every runner graded-stakes placed, almost nothing is truly a 1% chance. A bad trip for three horses ahead of you gets a live longshot into the picture more often than that. Squeezing the tail is also what funds the top-heavy numbers: Turk's top three combine for 84.1% (win odds) against the public's 63.2%. While I don't disagree and know what I did with the fair odds,  I just don't feel the need to take into account the 3 times in one hundred that one of those two horses would run and win this race in a simulation.  

If you're really nerdy, I take some shortcuts with my Turk Fair Line that I've never really explained. Let's explore the math.  

 The Turk takes the Morning Line and creates an Adjusted Morning Line, which proportions each horse to fit within a 0-100% scale.  There are other ways to do this.

• Turk's Adjusted ML Method: Proportional takes the same percentage off everyone — 23.7% of each horse's raw number. Simple, always valid, and it's what most people use.

• Additive takes the same number of points off everyone: 3.89 each (31.13/8). But the problem is, Tiztastic goes negative, which is why nobody uses it on a 131% line with a long tail of marginally poor runners. 

• Power solves for the exponent k that makes the total hit 100.  In this example,  k = 1.173. Because raising a small number to a power above 1 shrinks it harder than a large one, the tail absorbs more of the vig. Tiztastic goes from 39-1 under your method to 55-1.

• Shin (Professor Hyun Song Shin- for another Turk rambling day) models the line as containing some fraction of informed money — z = 4.84% here — and backs that out. It hits the tail hardest of all: Tiztastic at 75-1.

Power and Shin are better suited for horse racing because of the favorite–longshot bias.  Bettors systematically overbet longshots and underbet favorites, so a longshot's posted price carries more of the margin than a favorite's. Both methods capture that.  

Proportional (what the Turk does) assumes the margin is spread evenly, which the empirical record says it isn't.

Proportional makes longshots look more likely than the public really thinks. The Turk's adjusted column says the public gives Tiztastic 2.46%; Shin says the public's real opinion will be closer to 1.3%. 

How I adjust for this, and where I say I'm cutting corners, is when I buold my Fair Line odds table and apply a Shin-like adjustment mentally (again, the back office of monkeys is just me), so the 1.0% on Tiztastic isn't as far off the public as Proportional suggests.  

This goes both ways, as Turk's fair line 33.3% on Magnitude looked like a big edge over the adjusted 27.24%. Against Power 29.88%, the edge shrinks by a third.

Ultimately, all that really matters is what the public thinks of the horses on the tote board, and one factor that is making it harder for the little horse player to look at these odds against the tote board is how the tote board can move so rapidly through Computer-assisted wagering (CAW).

Unless you're under a rock, a handful of high-volume teams get access to a direct data feed (which the Turk and any other smaller bettor can't get) from the tote system and place enormous bets through automated systems in the final seconds before the gates open. Because pari-mutuel odds are just a function of how the money is distributed in the pool, a large late injection recalculates everything — and by the time the new odds display, the race is already running. You bet a horse at 8-1 and watch him finish at 9-2, all the while these whale teams are getting huge wage rebates.  It's just of a number of factors that are making it harder for Joe Horseplayer to scratch out positive returns.  

Anyway, I think I digressed.  

I like Sovereignty at Saratoga, but I like him at Classic distance more than this.  I think Magnitude will take the lead early. Will he get pressured early? Just thinking about the trainers for a moment.

Asmussen's Magnitude stablemate, Tiztastic,  will only harass early if Magnitude isn't in the lead, but he's really shown no ability to press early.  Mott's Baeza and Sovereignty won't show each other any quarter.  Joesph perhaps will press Forged Steel hard into Magnitude early and keep White Abarrio pressing for his opportunity.  Same owners makes that decision easier for the conditioner. 

It's important to remember we aren't running this race as a Monte Carlo simulation, over and over again within a computer.  

I'm going to box Antiquarian who trained very sharp at Saratoga for Pletcher last week, Baeza and Magnitude, a 3 horse, $2 bet for $12.  If Baeza or Antiquarian can somehow win and Magnitude in Place, there's value worth hunting.  

Why Antiquarian? Why not.  I liked him better than the filly, better than White Abarrio.  This is more about value and looking for slightly improbable than betting highly probable chalk.  

Turk Out!

Handicapper's Corner: 2026 Clement L. Hirsch Stakes (G1)

 

Seismic Beauty vulnerable favorite in Clement L. Hirsch Stakes

By: Laurie Ross, Pedigree Power

Del Mar’s $400,000 Clement L. Hirsch Stakes, a Breeders’ Cup qualifier, attracted a field of nine older fillies and mares that will vie for a spot in the Distaff.

Bob Baffert has won the last three editions of the Clement Hirsch and four of the last six, including last year’s winner #8 Seismic Beauty. She hopes to follow in the hoofprints of Adare Manor, who won back-to-back editions in 2023-2024.

Featured as race 10, the 1 1/16 mile dirt race has a 6:40 PM ET post time.

Let’s review the most likely suspects:  

8. Seismic Beauty (5-2) hopes to copy stablemate Adare Manor as a two-time winner of the Clement L. Hirsch. However, she returned off a long layoff to finish a distant third in a four-horse field in the Santa Margarita (G2) behind Om and Joy and Simply Joking, and this Bob Baffert trainee earned an 89 Brisnet rating, one of the lowest of her career. After the race, Baffert stated, “She was fresh and got into a speed duel she wasn’t ready for. She never relaxed. Went too fast early and just emptied out.”

3. Om N Joy (6-1) is back at her happy place. She captured the Fleet Treat Stakes and Torrey Pines (G3) here last year. She had a rocky start to 2016, placing third in the Beholder (G1), and was off the board in two other stakes.  In her last start, the Aggie Ordonez trainee sat behind a blistering pace in the Santa Margarita and ran down Simply Joking, earning the field’s best last-race Brisnet figure of 100, despite Kent Desormeaux losing his crop.

Om N Joy proved she can capitalize on that scenario when she sat behind a blistering pace in the Santa Margarita and ran down Simply Joking, earning the field’s best last-race Brisnet figure of 100. She is also 2-for-4 at Del Mar, has finished in the money in all four local starts and fired a bullet :46.20 half-mile here July 19. 

6. Simply Joking (5-1) should appreciate the distance cut back; she has two wins and a second-place finish at 1 1/16 miles. She set a sharp pace in the Santa Margarita but couldn’t hold off Om N Joy at the end. Previously, she won the Santa Maria (G3) and her Brisnet speed ratings have improved with her maturity. She’ll have to contend with other speed types but has the class edge.

5. Majestic Oops (9-2) is the most dependable mare in the field. She’s hit the board in 26 of 37 starts, owns three victories at 1 1/16 miles and enters with four consecutive Brisnet ratings between 91 and 98.

Her Shawnee (G3) third was better than it appears. She raced several lengths off a strong pace, launched a five-wide move and was beaten only 3 1/4 lengths by Splendora. Her 94 late-pace figure is the strongest last-out closing number in this field.

9. Eunomia (5-1)  ships for Saffie Joseph, Jr.  She owns two wins, a second and a third from five starts at 1 1/16 miles, with a career-best 99 Brisnet rating. Two starts ago, she pressed Alpine Princess through moderate fractions in the Doubledogdare (G2), took the lead and lost by only a head while finishing 6 1/2 lengths clear of third. Over the last three years, Joseph’s horses have started five times in California with two wins and a third-place finish; however, both shippers to Del Mar were off the board.

1. Chasten (4-1)  ships in for Brad Cox. She is improving and draws the rail, allowing Florent Geroux to secure a ground-saving stalking position behind the pace battle. She won the Obeah by 6 1/4 lengths last time, earning a 96 speed rating.

Her concern is class. She flattened out when fifth in the La Troienne, and this is a much more demanding assignment than the Obeah. Additionally, Race Lens shows that over the last three years, Cox has shipped a dozen horses to California for 14 races, resulting in 2 wins and three in-the-money spots. 

Analysis

Seismic Beauty and Simply Joking are confirmed pacesetters and may duel, which will set up the race for an off-the-pace type.

Om N Joy gets the most favorable pace setup. The outside-speed congestion should let Kent Desormeaux save ground from post 3, settle her behind the leaders and make one run. Om N Joy has the best recent performance, proven Del Mar form and the only genuine closer in a speed-heavy field.

Majestic Oops lacks Om N Joy’s explosive recent finish, and Joel Rosario has been winning at a low percentage during the meet, but Majestic Oops should pick up the pieces when the leaders begin backing up.

Eunomia has tactical speed. Unlike Simply Joking and Seismic Beauty, Eunomia does not absolutely need the lead. However, from post 9, she risks being caught wide into the first turn, and her natural speed may pull her closer to the expected pace battle than is ideal.

The shippers Eunomia and Chasten are worth a look for underneath spots if you’re playing the field.

3. Om N Joy (6-1)

8. Seismic Beauty (5-2)

5. Majestic Oops (9-2)

6. Simply Joking (5-1)

  

Handicapper's Corner: 2026 Bing Crosby Stakes (G1)

  

The Doctor Diagnoses the Pace

By: Michael Amo, ThoroFan Chair 

The race is named for entertainer Bing Crosby, a founding partner of Del Mar Racetrack and a racehorse owner and breeder. Its inaugural running came in 1946, as it completes its eighth consecutive year this year. In 1946, the race ended in a dead heat between War Allies and Indian Watch.

This year will be a perfect Southern Californian day for racing, with the temperature hovering around seventy-eight degrees with zero chance for precipitation. Nine horses, 3-year-old and up, will run six furlongs for a share of the $400,000 purse. Featured as race 10 of 11, post time is 6:40 PM PT

Let us look at the field.

 

 

1.   Maximum Bourbon (Maximum Security) comes to Del Mar for the first time to take on horses that have more graded experience than him. By the purchase price of $400,000, his connections think highly of his chances. He belongs to a cohort of horses that appear to want a fast pace.

2.   Listenupshance (Shancelot) This one has a similar challenge against this field. His last showed his prowess in a grade three race, The True North at Saratoga on the undercard on Belmont Stakes Day, which he lost by 3/4s of a length to Book’em Danno. Jockey Jaramillo returns to ride. He is 2-for-2 at Del Mar, which should mean something.

3.   Dr. Venkman (Ghostzapper) The race is the second of a layoff, before which he ran third in the 2925 in the Breeders’ Cup Sprint (GI). He has won four out of seven tries at Del Mar. His running style suggests he will love the likely early pace. Jockey Rispoli, who piloted him in that Breeders’ Cup race returns.

4.   For All Mankind (Into Mischief) He is a private purchase at an undisclosed amount which suggests the owner has extreme confidence in him. Although his performance will have to improve greatly to have his picture taken against these.

5.   Stronghold (Ghostzapper) He won his last race in 2026, a grade three, by 2.5 lengths after about a seven-week layoff. With five grade one races under his girth this group is in his wheelhouse.

6.   Cornucopian (Into Mischief) He is trained by Bob Baffert, who holds the record for wins in this race. His last highlighted his speed by recording a 103 Beyer, which paired him with four others who topped the 100 level. Could go wire-to-wire if the others are not paying attention.

7.   Gold Sweep (Speightstown) Although new to Del Mar and stepping up in conditions is one who will love a speed duel. Gets Jockey Money Mike Smith, who is at home at Del Mar and can never be counted out. His bullet workout screams ready.

8.   Mad House (Vekoma) Comes in with a bullet workout and a 102 Beyer in a gate-to-wire race at Oaklawn Park in a grade three event in April. Has the hard-knocking, all-business jockey Leon, who has won with him in similar fashion in March. He will be blasting out of the gate hoping to get in front for the rest of the race. Big challenge.

9.   Moon Light (Audible) Victor Espinoza, his new jockey, had better be ready to call an audible at the right time as he closes from far back down the stretch. A win is a tough ask, since his showing in grade three races leaves much to be desired.

 

The key to sorting through the race is pace. Four of the horses run their best on the front end, suggesting that the pace in this six-furlong event will be hot, with a good chance they will be vulnerable to off the pace runners. The one and the six are most likely to endure the pace but suffer from it. The two and the three will be coming in the stretch trying to pass the front runners.

Here is how I believe the race will end: 

#3-Dr, Venkman (4-1)

#2-Listenupshance (8-1)

#6-Cornucopian (3-)

#1-Maximum Bourbon (7/2)

 

Handigamble ($100) 

$20 to win on Dr. Venkman $20

$40 to place on Dr. Venkman $40

$2 Exact Box—Dr. Venkman/Listenupshance/Cornucopian $12

$1 Trifecta Box-Dr. Venkman/Listenupshance/Cornucopian/Maximum Bourbon $24

$4 to treat yourself. 

Good Luck but Keep the Day Job!