Mass-Bred Legend Dr Blarney Wins at 10, but Retirement May Be Near

It was starting to look like time had finally caught up with the old war horse Dr Blarney (Dublin). He came into an allowance race Monday at Finger Lakes having lost six straight, understandable considering the horse is 10 and made his debut in 2015 at Monmouth Park. But the pride of the Massachusetts breeding program was back on his game, winning by a length under jockey Jackie Davis. It was the ninth straight year in which he had won at least one race.

“He's stayed relatively sound all these years,” trainer Karl Grusmark said. “We've had some issues with quarter cracks that pop up once in a while, but other than that he's been a very healthy horse.”

With there being no racing in Massachusetts, the state's breeding program is verging on extinction. In 2013, the year Dr Blarney was born, the Massachusetts foal crop consisted of 41 horses. In 2021, the latest year available through The Jockey Club Fact Book, that number was seven. In 2022, only one mare was bred in the state.

Dr Blarney is one of only five horses bred in Massachusetts who have raced this year.

But the breeding program could always depend on Dr Blarney for some needed doses of spirit-lifting good news. Bred by his owner, Joseph DiRico, he broke his maiden in his first start, a July 12, 2015 $30,000 maiden claimer at Monmouth for then trainer Thomas McCooey. He lost his next two, including a start in the Tyro S. at Monmouth, but soon found his element. McCooey shipped him to Suffolk Downs to take on fellow Mass-breds in the Norman Hall S. He won by 10 that day, the first of 15 state-bred stakes he would win from 16 tries. His only loss against Massachusetts-breds came in a grass race.

He ran in his last Mass-bred race in 2020, a year after Suffolk Downs closed down for good. Fort Erie offered some races for Massachusetts-breds and it was there that Dr Blarney won the Rise Jim S. for the fourth time. From there, he had to run exclusively against open company and he has held his own. He's won six more times, including a win against open stakes company in the 2020 Last Dance S. at Fort Erie, his second stakes win against open company. He also won the Governor's Day H. in 2018 at Delaware Park.

With the win this week at Finger Lakes, he upped his career record to 27-for-44 with earnings of $787,393. That doesn't include the $181,338 he's taken home in Mass-bred incentives and awards.

“It's like having an ATM machine in the shedrow,” said Grusmark, who took over the training of Dr Blarney from McCooey at the start of the 2017 season. “When he's right, he can compete. We won a stakes race at Delaware Park with him and we've run him at a lot of tracks. He's better against Mass-breds because of the competition, but he's a quality horse. He's a good honest horse that can win against good horses.”

Dr Blarney's best year earnings-wise was 2018, when he earned $188,570, but much of that was made beating up on inferior competition in state-bred races. He's made just $22,175 so far this year from three starts, but Grusmark believes there is plenty left.

“I think right now he's as good as he's been in a couple of years,” he said.

DiRico attributes Dr Blarney's longevity to how he's been handled throughout his career.

“Every winter we send him to a training center in South Carolina for three, three-and-a-half months,” he said. “Not racing during the winters has helped. He's also been racing in a lot of Massachusetts-bred races and in those races he really didn't have to extend himself. We've taken good care of him.”

So while it appears that Dr Blarney could keep going for a while, that's not the plan. With his win Monday, he passed Ask Queenie to become the leading all time Mass-bred money earner. But there's one more goal that DiRico wants to accomplish. Dr Blarney is tied with Ask Queenie and Rise Jim for most career wins ever by a Mass-bred at 27. Rise Jim is arguably the best Mass-bred ever and is a back-to-back winner of the Tom Fool S., winning the race in 1992 when it was a Grade II and again when it was a Grade III. A 28th win by Dr Blarney would mean that he had nothing else to prove.

“Mr. DiRico would be thrilled to see him become the leading Mass-bred winner of all time,” Grusmark said.

Grusmark said that Dr Blarney will likely be retired after his next win and that, win or lose, he will not race as an 11-year-old.

DiRico is already searching around to find a home for his gelding following his last race. He said one option is to give him Jessica Paquette, the announcer at Parx who worked at Suffolk in a number of roles before that track closed. She has offered him a home.

In the meantime, DiRico is making plans to say goodbye to a horse that has been so good to him.

“Since he's been stabled at Finger Lakes, I don't really get much of a chance to see him,” DiRico said. “I have a house at Saratoga for the summer and this year when I go up there I'm going to make sure that I go to Finger Lakes and see him and feed him carrots. When he's retired, I'll have to deal with that when the time comes. He's been very special.”

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The Week in Review: While Racing Sleeps Late, MLB Opts for Morning Betting

Since the advent of the simulcasting era 30 years ago, I've never understood why some enterprising track somewhere hasn't seized a late-morning first-post slot and carved out its own niche at a time of day when no other pari-mutuel competition on the continent is running.

Be it midweek in the winter, when most of the fair-to-middling Eastern time zone tracks do little to distinguish their products, or as a Saturday special during the summer when some C-level track could have an uncontested advantage for several hours as a lead-in to the attention-grabbing cards at Saratoga, the 10 a.m. to noon Eastern stretch remains an uncharted chasm.

Four years ago this month, shortly after the legalization of sports betting in the United States, I wrote a morning racing-related column for TDN that stated, “The time slot is there for the taking. In real estate, the money-making mantra is 'location, location, location.' The equivalent in simulcasting–if you're not a top track on the totem pole–is 'timing, timing, timing.'”

The revisit of this topic will tack on a slight correction to that 2018 story: The late-morning time slot is no longer completely wide open in terms of the overall wagering landscape. Major League Baseball (MLB) now sees Sunday morning starts at 11:30 a.m. Eastern as a lucrative opportunity.

Although the Sunday morning baseball games debuted with a soft-ish launch, MLB has inked a multi-year deal to lay claim to that time slot (some of the games later in the season will begin at noon, which is still at least an hour earlier than most traditional afternoon starts).

The streamed-only games can only be viewed by online subscribers who pay a monthly fee to watch them. And while MLB revenue executives are championing the early starts as a way to reach new fans outside of cable TV as viewing habits change, the unspoken but obvious message is that pro sports are staking out new territory, time-wise, to maximize revenue from gambling partnerships.

The National Football League figured this out with Monday Night Football broadcasts back in 1970. Although critics were initially skeptical that viewers would tune in to watch (and although it was illegal at the time, bet on) whatever two teams happened to be matched just because it was the only action on the tube, Monday Night Football eventually morphed into an eyeball-capturing juggernaut that spawned only-game-in-town football broadcast strategies on Thursday and Sunday evenings.

A heat wave across the Midwest at the end of June caused both and Churchill Downs (10:30 a.m.) Belterra Park (11:35 a.m.) to experiment with morning racing as a means to keep horses from competing at the hottest point of the afternoon. The one-off post time switches weren't pre-arranged with much notice or fanfare, hence a handle comparison wouldn't be of much value in these instances.

And since Churchill is an A-list track that has the benefit of lights to add flexibility to its scheduling of post times, regular morning racing there wouldn't make much sense.

But you could make a cogent case for Belterra taking a flyer on morning racing.

The Ohio track's current Tuesday-through-Friday schedule with 12:35 p.m. posts causes it to get lost in the shuffle against Saratoga, Monmouth, Gulfstream and Colonial Downs during the month of July. It would even benefit from standing out from the likes of Finger Lakes, Thistledown and Horseshoe Indianapolis, all of which overlap to some degree depending on the day of the week.

Beyer Blitz

Three Grade II stakes winners earned triple-digit Beyer Speed Figures last Saturday. Which was most impressive?

From a raw talent perspective, Life Is Good (Into Mischief)'s 112 wiring of the John Nerud S. over seven furlongs at Belmont Park was outright scary. Now 7-for-9 lifetime and having put together a string of seven consecutive triple-digit Beyers, this 'TDN Rising Star' scored by five after chewing up no-slouch rival Speaker's Corner (Street Sense). But beyond those two, the four-horse field was scant on competition, which allowed Life Is Good to motor home without any sort of a stretch tussle.

Fellow 'Rising Star' Charge It (Tapit) posted a gaudy 23-length victory in the one-turn-mile Dwyer S. at Belmont. His heaviest lifting involved bumping aside a pesky rival five-eighths out so he could maneuver off the fence and reel in the pacemaker, thus becoming the fourth also-ran out of the GI Kentucky Derby to win a next-out start. He earned a 111 Beyer, but only one of his five rivals had ever won a stakes (which was for Delaware-bred 2-year-olds last year), so the quality of competition angle applies here too.

It's difficult to believe that a horse can win five straight races with triple-digit Beyers yet still be considered a bit under the radar, but that's been the case with Olympiad (Speightstown), who is bound to get a lot more attention and respect after his no-nonsense cuffing of a decent field in Saturday's Stephen Foster S. over nine furlongs at Churchill.

Olympiad emerged from a five-horse, first-turn speed scrimmage to be a stalking second through robust splits. He then blasted off at the quarter pole and dug in furiously to repel a wall of contenders off the turn. His presence near the head of affairs early in the race combined with an ability to withstand significant pressure late to score by 2 1/4 lengths lends a nice glow of legitimacy to his 111 Beyer.

(Not yet) the end of an era

It might be a stretch to say Dr. Blarney (Dublin) is the “Last of the Mohicans.” But the 9-year-old sure looks like he'll wind up his career as the most impactful of the dwindling number of remaining Massachusetts-breds.

On July 4 at Finger Lakes, the good doctor won his 26th lifetime race, storming from off the pace to win a three-way photo by a neck for owner/breeder Joe DiRico and trainer Karl Grusmark.

The victory was even sweeter because Dr. Blarney was reunited with Tammi Piermarini, his horsebacking partner for most of his 37-race career.

Piermarini, 55, is the continent's third-winningest female jockey. She hurt her knee in a starting gate accident last November, and the ride on Dr. Blarney Monday was her first race back since that accident.

Fittingly, like her multiple stakes-winning mount, Piermarini was also born in Massachusetts, having started her career back in 1985 at Boston's Suffolk Downs.

Suffolk Downs is now three years defunct and the Massachusetts-bred program began to erode about a decade before the track closed for good in 2019.

Dr. Blarney won Massachusetts-bred stakes at least once a year between ages two and seven (to spend its remaining purse funds that were earmarked for stakes, the Massachusetts breeders' association ran those races at Fort Erie in 2020). Six of his lifetime victories have been by margins between 10 and 20 lengths.

Although many of those romps came at the mercy of overmatched restricted-stakes competition, he's also won a black-type stakes at Delaware Park and has bested open-company allowance horses at Finger Lakes.

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After Rescheduling, Dr Blarney Takes Fourth Consecutive Massachusetts-Bred Rise Jim Stakes

It was an easy win for Dr Blarney, who was once again first across the finish line in the annual Rise Jim Stakes, hosted for the first time at Fort Erie Race Track. It's been just over a year since the 7-year-old chestnut gelding last raced, but that didn't stop him from taking his fourth consecutive Rise Jim Stakes. The race is a guaranteed $35,000 purse for thoroughbreds foaled in Massachusetts and registered with the Massachusetts Thoroughbred Breeders Association (MTBA).

Trained by Karl M Grusmark for owner Joseph DiRico, Dr Blarney came out in front quickly and effortlessly, taking jockey Emile Ramsammy six furlongs on the dirt in 1:10.4. Returning $2.30 to his backers, this son of Dublin now has his 21st win from 29 career starts.

Second in the Rise Jim Stakes was Saint Alfred with jockey Christopher Husbands. Third was Successful Saint and Daisuke Fukumoto.

The MTBA set up a partnership with Fort Erie Race Track in the fall, to host a number of Mass-bred races this season. Originally scheduled for July 20, the Rise Jim Stakes had to be postponed when a series of delays prevented the van carrying all six horses from arriving at Fort Erie Race Track in time for racing.

“Our partnership with the MTBA is beneficial for all parties, and we look forward to hosting more Mass-bred races at Fort Erie this season,” said Tom Valiquette, chief operating and financial officer of the Fort Erie Live Racing Consortium.

Spectator- free racing returns at Fort Erie on Tuesday, July 28 at 1:10 p.m. Watch online at http://forterieracing.com/streaming-and-replays

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