The Sir Barton 2025
The top three-year olds are running in The Preakness or waiting for The Belmont. There is another stake for three-year olds on The Preakness card, The Sir Barton at a mile and a sixteenth. I see three horses in there who can wind up in The Belmont field, or if that is too soon to come back maybe The Haskell or Jim Dandy or some other top three-year old stake. One of them could be worth a play on Saturday on what could be a muddy or sloppy track.
Crudo from the Todd Pletcher barn and Invictus from the Brad Cox barn both look loaded with promise. They both come off excellent maiden wins at 7 furlongs and will stretch out and move right into a stake here. In my opinion both look good enough to handle that especially in this spot. The third one who looks like an up and comer to me is Hymn and I’ll land on him in here.
Hymn has more experience than the other two and is bred to handle a wet surface. He is by McKinzie who was a Street Sense and out of Salt Bae, a stakes mare. Moquett has been patient with him, and I think that should pay off in here. This col should be sitting a nice trip and Saez rides him for the second time and hopefully got to know him. He has been two turns twice and I think that experience could be the difference maker on Saturday. He should also be the longest price of the horses I am looking at.
In the big one later on the card I haven’t settled on anybody just yet. It comes down to whether Journalism can handle the two weeks turn around and we won’t know that until late Saturday afternoon. At least he is familiar with a wet track now, but I do think we have some talented and interesting new shooters as they’re called in here.
Some Pimlico and Preakness myths to consider. The turns are not sharp and in fact mirror the turns at Churchill Downs. The track is generally honest and does not favor speed as widely believed. Like all tracks when wet it can play differently and change during the course of the day. The turf is not raced on much but should have plenty of give with all the rain this weekend maybe this weekend.