Alabama Stakes Picks

It may be a short field, but it is a star-studded renewal of the Alabama (G1) as your Kentucky Oaks (G1) winner, Good Cheer, is looking to bounce back after the lone defeat in her career. Meanwhile, the horse that beat her, La Cara, is looking to repeat that frontrunning effort from the Acorn (G1). Then you have the biggest wildcard, Nitrogen, who is a four-time graded stakes winner, but three of those came on the turf and other one came over a sloppy track in an off-turf race. Going 1 ¼ miles is a huge question mark for most of the field, but the adage that “pace makes the race” can help guide you in this one. #6 La Cara (5/2) is the lone speed in the race and the only question is whether she can get the distance on Saturday. Aside from being lone speed, she really has very little competition in the early going as the next fastest horse might just be her stablemate, #4 Nitrogen (9/5), and I have a hard time imagining trainer Mark Casse will choose to have his best two fillies duel each other into submission. La Cara does have an “every other” race pattern that is slightly concerning, but you can also come up with rationale explanations for those poor efforts. When she is allowed to get comfortable on the lead, she is very tough to beat and jockey Dylan Davis should be able to easily divvy out of the early fractions to ensure she has plenty in the tank coming for home.

The fly in the ointment of that argument is #2 Good Cheer (8/5) who had been undefeated prior to her distant fifth-place effort in the Acorn (G1) last time out. She clearly could never get moving over the wet track that day, despite the fact she had easily handled a wet track twice before, including in her dominant Kentucky Oaks (G1) victory. The race clearly took a little something out of her as trainer Brad Cox gave her some extra time off before returning to the training track. She’s been working well and prefers to come from off the pace. She should appreciate extra distance but could need someone to wear down La Cara on the front end as she got in the Kentucky Oaks (G1) when Bob Baffert’s filly Tenma pestered La Cara the entire way around before yielding. It is hard to imagine that Good Cheer will run a bad race, but tracking down lone speed can be a challenge over any surface, particularly Saratoga, though we saw Sierra Leone close from well off the pace in last weekend’s Whitney (G1). That said, Good Cheer isn’t Sierra Leone, and the pace dynamics might not play in her favor.

If there is one filly who could upset the applecart it is Cox’s other runner, #1 Margie’s Intention, who is owned by WinStar Farms and comes into the race after a runner-up finish in the Delaware Oaks (G3) but does have a big victory in the Black-Eyed Susan (G2) in her resume. The Louisiana-bred might not have the biggest pedigree, but the fact Cox brings her here and has top jockey Irad Ortiz Jr. on the mount is worthy of attention. The filly will need to get faster on her Beyer Speed Figures (BSFs), but her best race was at her longest distance to date. I know some speculate that she is entered to press La Cara to set things up for her stablemate Good Cheer, but she is not a particularly quick filly out of the gate and while the inside rail will certainly force Ortiz Jr. to be a bit more aggressive, she is significantly slower than La Cara.

Finally, we have #4 Nitrogen (9/5) who is the ultimate X-factor. She’s been dominant on the turf during her three-year-old campaign and showed loads of versatility blowing out the field on the dirt in the Wonder Again (G3) when it was taken off the grass due to weather. However, there are a lot of asterisks from that effort. First, it was run at a mile out of the Wilson Chute. Second, it featured two other horses who were both turf runners. Three, it was over a wet track rated as sloppy. None of those three things are happening on Saturday as she’s running 1 ¼ miles against the best three-year-old dirt fillies in the country over a fast track. Yes, she’s put in some nice works in the morning over the dirt the last couple of times out, but that is a far cry from getting the job done in a premiere Grade 1 against the best in the division. Jockey Jose Ortiz should have her sitting an ideal trip just off the pace of La Cara, but I am concerned that Nitrogen’s defeat last time out was at 1 1/8 miles where she got nabbed at the end and now we are stretching out even further against a significantly better group, particularly suited for the conditions.

How I’m playing it: You might be able to get away with going two or three deep in this leg of the Late P5 as I believe you could find a reasonable single in another leg. To me, this is a two-horse race between La Cara and Good Cheer, with the former providing the better price on the morning line. I do not believe in Nitrogen in this spot as conditions are vastly different than the other time she ran on dirt. Often times when you have a couple of heavy favorites, I advocating making a tough choice and singling one of them, but this is a rare instance where you have three short prices, so eliminating just one of them can still give you an advantage so long as there are other spots for you to single in the sequence.