Now the “Second Season” Begins

Ron Correll
Senior columnist
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The 2018 Triple Crown season is over and we’ve crowned the second champion in four years. Justify is a worthy bearer of the crown. The son of Scat Daddy accomplished a lot in a few short months. He’s undefeated in six races and won three of those in a short five-week span.

Justify is the second undefeated Triple Crown winner, joining Seattle Slew who performed the same feat in 1977. Slew’s owners got greedy and didn’t give the colt enough rest. They brought him back in less than a month to run in the Swaps at Hollywood Park and he finished a tired fourth. Justify’s connection will not be as careless with their star.

Elliott Walden of WinStar Farm, one of the owners, said trainer Bob Baffert would take the colt back to California and give him a break. Good move. Protect your product. They have a chance to make a lot of money in the breeding shed when he’s retired, so you don’t do anything to tarnish that.

The second season for 3-year-olds will get started in mid-to-late summer with the Jim Dandy at Saratoga on July 28 in upstate New York and the Haskell Invitational on July 29 at Monmouth Park in New Jersey. These will be prep races for the “Midsummer Derby” (Travers) on Aug. 25 at Saratoga.

In the past Baffert has used the Haskell for some of his top 3-year-olds and has been very successful in the race. He’s also won the last two Travers with Arrogate and West Coast and if he would run Justify in the Travers and win that would be the first Triple Crown winner since Whirlaway in 1941 to accomplish the feat.

I’ll wait until later in the year to re-evaluate this year’s 3-year-olds, but it seems I was a little to free with my praise of this crop when I said earlier that I thought there were eight or nine really good colts. It now may more likely be three or four really good ones.

By no means does that mean I’m questioning what Justify beat. The colt still had to run the races and come in first each time. I still think his two biggest challengers are Good Magic and Audible. The rest will find some of the “back-road derbies” more to their liking.

All these colts need a break, even Bravazo. I don’t care what D. Wayne Lukas said about the colt’s pedigree and wanting to run all day. He looked like a tired horse at the end the Belmont. And once again this is not a knock on Justify, but they didn’t go that fast in the race. Mike Smith road Justify the way he needed to in getting the win.

This column also will be taking a break until right before the Jim Dandy and Haskell. So have a good summer and let’s look forward to the second half of the year.