Yankee Fourtune, a 5-year-old who has now won over $300,000 and who bagged a couple of grade IIIs a couple of years ago, inhabited a $16,000 claimer at Belmont Thursday. He registered a romp by the standards of turf races, coming home 4 3/4 lengths clear.
He is a horse who you can present as even better than his record. Not that he is, but there are some neat facts about him around company lines. When he won the Commonwealth Turf, the horses he beat included Guys Reward (finished 2nd and has earned $553,000), Turallure (3rd, $1,341,000), Mister Mardi Gras (5th, $729,000), and Stormy Lord (6th, $1,153,000). Then you can look at a more recent race, a December allowance where Little Mike bested him for the win by only a nose, and we all know what Little Mike has accomplished this year.
It took time for the strength of the Commonwealth Turf to play out, and the subsequent success of those horses does not necessarily mean that they ran as well that day as they would go on to run later, and does not necessarily mean that Yankee Fourtune achieved a major feat in beating them. Even setting aside somewhat nondescript Beyers, I don't think many regarded Yankee Fourtune as a likely future grade I winner when he was winning the Commonwealth Turf and running his other best races.
But he was a horse who stood out for winning as much as for anything else, taking his second career start, and winning four more in a row before suffering his first loss on the turf. How ironic, then, that running 2nd to him on Thursday was Gamblin Fever, who not only had run off the board in 13 straight races before Thursday, but stood a woeful 2 for 59 lifetime in the win department. The first of those wins came in 2009 with our W. C. Jones a neck behind him in 3rd, so I'll always feel some sort of a connection to the horse.
Yankee Fourtune's steep drop (he had been favored in his last two starts when exposed for $35,000 and $50,000) is not dissimilar to what we saw with a couple of Baffert trainees this year. Stirred Up, 3rd in the Sunland Derby and Jerome this year, started for $16,000 a couple of months ago, checking in 4th. Baffert also at least toyed with running 4-year-old Da Ruler, a 5 3/4-length winner of a nw1x at the Spring/Summer Hollywood meet, for $10,000 three weeks ago, but Da Ruler was scratched. Like with Da Ruler, Yankee Fourtune's preparation for his big-drop claiming race did not omit workouts; last competing on August 31, he had worked on September 14 and September 22.
The sobering reality is probably that many racers have essentially negligible value, even if they are just a bit on the downside and nothing is terribly wrong with them. Since this is true, the aggressive trainer has an opportunity to win races with horses like Yankee Fourtune who lay over a field.
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