Eclipse Voters Faced With Difficult Choice in 2yo Male Division

by Bill Finley

The GI Breeders’ Cup Juvenile didn’t provide Eclipse voters with anything definite. And it doesn’t figure that today’s Los Alamitos Futurity, the last Grade I race of the year for this division, will either. The race drew just five horses and the only stakes winner among them is No Problem (Munnings), who captured the GIII Bob Hope in his last start. There’s not an Eclipse Award winner in this field. 

So when voters fill out their ballots, they’ll likely focus on two horses, Juvenile winner Texas Red (Afleet Alex) or dual Grade I winner American Pharoah (Pioneerof the Nile). It looks like a battle between a horse that won the most important 2-year-old race on the calendar and one who was brilliant during an abbreviated campaign. Neither has bad credentials. Neither has perfect credentials. 

After finishing fifth in his career debut in a maiden race at Del Mar, American Pharaoh stepped up into tougher company and beat up on four rivals in the GI Del Mar Futurity. 

“I’ve had a lot of horses (12, to be exact) win the Del Mar Futurity but I’ve never had one win it like he did,” American Pharoah’s trainer Bob Baffert said. “He is pretty special.” 

American Pharoah came back to win the GI Front Runner S. at Aanta Anita by 3 1/4 lengths, beating, among others, Texas Red. Texas Red finished third, 4 3/4 lengths behind the winner. American Pharoah would have been the solid favorite in the race, but was withdrawn due to a bruised left front foot. 

“When I had to pull him out of the Breeders’ Cup, it was such a low point,” Baffert said. “It was hard to get back into the Breeders’ Cup.” 

The race became a wide-open one when American Pharoah came out and the horse that stepped up and filled the void was Texas Red. Just a maiden winner at the time, he took advantage of a fast pace and closed from last to win by 6 1/2 lengths for trainer Keith Desormeaux and jockey Kent Desormeaux. The Breeders’ Cup win was a big win, but it was his lone stakes victory. 

Texas Red’s co-owner, Eric Brehm Sr., understands that American Pharoah did some special things on the racetrack, but he doesn’t believe he accomplished enough to unseat a Breeders’ Cup winner when it comes to a championship. 

“He won the head-to-head match up in the Front Runner and we won he Juvenile,” Brehm said. “I guess the voters are going to have to decided which of the two is more important. Of the seven or eight horses that have won the Eclipse Award without winning the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile, none of them have done it off two wins. Usually it has been an undefeated horse that had four wins or so.” 

Brehm knows his horse is no cinch to win the Eclipse Award and he also knows he and his partners could have clinched the title had they decided to run in the Los Alamitos Futurity. Considering the field it drew, it’s hard to imagine Texas Red wouldn’t have won. 

“Yes, we thought about the Los Alamitos race,” he said. “We planned first to get to the Breeders’ Cup and then the strategy was how best to get to the Kentucky Derby. To go to Los Alamitos, we had to consider changing our original plans, which was to give him 45 days off. We could have cut it short, gone after the Los Alamitos race and put the whole Eclipse Award thing to rest. But we said what do we really want here? It would be nice to get an Eclipse Award but we didn’t want to deviate from our original goal, which was to follow what we felt was the best plan to have right for the Kentucky Derby.” 

Ironically, Baffert was in the same position last year that Texas Red’s connections now find themselves in. He won the Juvenile with New Year’s Day, his only stakes win on the year. Voters seemed to be looking for another alternative and found one when Shared Belief won the Cash Call Futurity, now the Los Alamitos Futurity, by 5 3/4 lengths. That earned him an Eclipse Award. 

Baffert hopes American Pharoah is on the winning end this year. 

“It’s not just that [American Pharoah] won the two Grade I’s,” Baffert said. “It’s how brilliant he was. Last year I had New Year’s Day and it looked like he was going to get the Eclipse and along came Shared Belief. People went for him because of how brilliant he was. People tend to look for to go with the brilliance, so that’s definitely something in American Pharoah’s favor.”