Specht likes Tomlin, and that’s the truth

When it comes to winning graded stakes races, most owners and trainers are on the outside looking in. For better or worse, graded races are the metric by which success in Thoroughbred racing is measured. In 2018, Karl Broberg became only the third trainer to win more than 500 races in a single season, but none of them came in a graded stakes event. The Eclipse Award most likely will go to someone named Brown or Baffert.

Last year, there were 455 U.S. events graded 1, 2 or 3, beginning at Santa Anita with the Grade 3 Sham Stakes on Jan. 6 and winding back to the same track with the Grade 1 American Oaks on Dec. 29. Of those 455, a total of 292 (or 64 percent) were won by just 27 trainers who each won at least five graded events. They range from the 47 amassed by Chad Brown to a cluster at the other end of the list that includes Richard Baltas, Jason Servis, Brian Lynch, Ignacio Correas, Rusty Arnold, and Richard Hendricks.

One trainer winning 10 percent of the total is lopsided enough, but the other 163 graded events of 2018 scattered far and wide. Doug O’Neill, the two-time Kentucky Derby winner who runs one of the West’s strongest barns, managed only four graded stakes scores. Hall of Famers Shug McGaughey and Roger Attfield each won three. Wayne Lukas, Ian Wilkes, Peter Eurton, and Wayne Catalano – all of them racing household names – bagged only two graded wins each in 2018. And not for nothing, Aidan O’Brien, winner of a record 28 worldwide Grade 1 wins in 2017, started 27 horses in U.S. graded stakes last year and won exactly once.

It ain’t easy, which is why a trainer like Steve Specht is cautiously optimistic about the prospects of the 3-year-old filly Tomlin, winner of the Golden Gate Debutante, in the Grade 2 Santa Ynez Stakes at Santa Anita on Sunday. Specht would be more excited, but he was laid up Friday with a cold he caught shipping Tomlin south from Golden Gate Fields. The filly, Specht assured, was just fine.

“She’s a good-bodied filly, not real tall, good and correct, a good mind on her,” he said. “She’s never had an issue about anything, stayed good and sound all along. Except for that one grass race, where it was kind of soft and she didn’t really want anything to do with it, she’s responded to everything we’ve asked.”

Specht coughed, and apologized. He was taking the phone call in bed, where he belonged, as he recalled Tomlin’s early development.

“In the beginning she was a little bit on the lazy side,” Specht said. “When I ran her the first time she wasn’t really interested in running. We put some blinkers on her and it seemed to help. She’s been pretty solid ever since.”

Tomlin is a daughter of Distorted Humor who was a $200,000 Keeneland yearling purchase by veteran owner Tom Bachman for his Fairview racing operation. She made her first start at Golden Gate in June, then won a maiden race at Santa Rosa in early August.

Specht has been among the solid Northern California citizens for more than three decades. He had a good run with McCann’s Mojave, winner of the 2007 Sunshine Millions Classic when the purse was, in fact, a cool million, as well as stakes-class runners Antares World, second in an American Oaks, and Grade 3 El Camino Real Derby winner Zakaroff in 2017.

In fact, Zakaroff was Specht’s most recent graded stakes winner. Now 5, the son of Slew’s Tiznow returned to the races on Dec. 26 after a layoff. Before that, a chipped knee knocked him out of what could have been a more profitable 3-year-old campaign. His latest comeback was for a $40,000 tag.

“He’s not what he once was,” Specht said. “But he had a great day on a day that really counted.”

The Santa Ynez is a Kentucky Oaks points race that has been run at either 6 1/2 or seven furlongs since 1958. In its earliest days it was won by fillies who went on to become priceless mares, among them Face the Facts (dam of Judger and Bicker), Silver Spoon (dam of Inca Queen), and Spearfish (dam of King’s Bishop).

Champions Susan’s Girl, Turkish Trousers, Serena’s Song, and Indian Blessing are past Santa Ynez winners, but discerning historians need not look too far past the two most recent winners – Midnight Bisou and Unique Bella – to know it is a race more than worth its $200,000 purse.

The opposition includes the Baffert-trained Mother Mother, a close third in the recent Starlet Stakes, and Bellafina, who swept three of the four major races for the West’s 2-year-old filly division last year for Simon Callaghan and owner Kaleem Shah. Bellafina was favored in the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Fillies but finished a distant fourth to Jaywalk, a reversal of form that Callaghan is determined to set right.

There is rain forecast for the weekend, but that was hardly a concern for a man and his horse from the Bay Area.

“I don’t think the track will make any difference,” Specht said. “She’s never run in the slop before, and it’s supposed to rain. I’m running no matter what, but maybe it’ll spook a couple of the others out of the race.”