DEL MARDEL MAR — Over the last year, Got Stormy did enough traveling to make a seasoned flight attendant’s head spin.
The 4-year-old chestnut filly, owned by Gary Barber and trained by Mark Casse, raced at eight different tracks in two countries over 14 months heading into Sunday’s $300,000 Grade I Matriarch Stakes at Del Mar.
Belmont, Aqueduct and Saratoga in New York. Gulfstream Park in Florida. Keeneland and Churchill Downs in Kentucky. Woodbine in Canada. And, finally, Santa Anita in early November, where Got Stormy lost narrowly to Uni in the Breeders’ Cup Mile.
Even getting to Del Mar for this trip wasn’t easy. Shipped after the Breeders’ Cup to Florida, Got Stormy was vanned to Kentucky to fly to San Diego.
“She asked me when we came here, ‘Where am I going next?’ ” Casse said with a chuckle.
Casse said she used to be a nervous traveler. Hard to believe that now, because she couldn’t be more of a pro, in her comportment or results.
The favorite in a strong field of 11 that included numerous East Coast shippers for the big race on closing day of Del Mar’s fall meet, Got Stormy ($4.80) and jockey Tyler Gaffalione charged up the middle and into the lead at the eighth pole and held on to beat Daddy Is a Legend by three-quarters of a length.
“She’s amazing,” said Casse. “She’s been through a lot in the last month. She’s been on a lot of planes, a lot of van rides, and she just keeps fighting.”
Got Stormy, whose sire is Get Stormy, hasn’t finished worse than third in her last eight starts, and she has three stakes wins on the year, including the first Grade I victory she snagged against males in the Fourstardave Handicap at Saratoga in August. She was second to Uni in the Breeders’ Cup Mile.
“We kept hearing how she’d only won one Grade I. We had to fix that,” Casse said.
The $180,000 in first-place prize money gives Got Stormy earnings of $1.13 million for the year.
Baltas wins Turf Cup, training title
In a result reflective of the success trainer Richard Baltas had in the fall, his Irish-bred 6-year-old, Oscar Dominguez, was last among 10 for much of a 1½-mile turf run, and then charged to the front near the end to beat runner-up United by a neck in the $200,000 Grade II Hollywood Turf Cup Stakes.
The first stakes win by Oscar Dominguez in 37 career starts paid $24.20 and capped a meet in which Baltas captured his second Del Mar training title with 11 victories. He shared top honors with Phil D’Amato in the 2017 summer meet.
Baltas won three stakes in this meet, also capturing the Let It Ride (Bob and Jackie) and Grade II Seabiscuit (Next Shares). Peter Miller was second with six wins and had his streak of three straight fall training titles broken.
“Every year I get a little bit better horses to train,” Baltas said. “My clients have been backing me and I have a good team working for me. I’ve been second or third and had good meets. This year I just had a little bit better numbers and a little bit more quality of horses. It means a lot.”
Upset in DeMille
In the $100,000 Grade III Cecil B. DeMille Stakes, for 2-year-olds going a mile on the grass, trainer Michael McCarthy’s 15-1 long shot Smooth Like Strait, with Geovanni Franco riding, led gate-to-wire and paid $33.20 for the win.
Smooth Like Strait made his debut on Pacific Classic day at Del Mar in August, struggled getting footing on the dirt surface and finished a distant ninth. McCarthy switched the colt to turf, and he responded with a third, and then broke his maiden at Santa Anita on Oct. 31.
Cedillo wins riding title
In a competition that went to the final races, Abel Cedillo captured his first Del Mar riding title with 13 victories to Drayden Van Dyke’s 12.
A Guatemalan based at Golden Gate Fields before this past summer, Cedillo got the edge with a winning ride aboard Bob Hess Jr.’s Wound Tight ($6.60) in Sunday’s first race. Van Dyke went 0 for 8 on the day.
Year among Del Mar’s safest
Two official racing deaths in the fall at Del Mar followed none during racing in the summer, and that gave the track its safest year of racing since the Jockey Club began publishing its injury database in 2009.
The two deaths among 3,219 starters in the summer and fall combined gave Del Mar a fatality rate of 0.62 per 1,000 starts. That bested last year’s rate of 0.79 that made Del Mar the safest major racetrack in the country.
Del Mar’s previous low in the past 10 years was 0.69 in 2013, when it had races on synthetic instead of dirt.
Overall in 2019, there were five deaths of horses at Del Mar in training-related accidents — three in workout breakdowns and two when horses collided.
Betting handle up
Del Mar officials reported that the average daily handle of $11,291,574 for 13 days of racing set a record for the fall meet and was up 8.9 percent over last year. The total handle was $146,790,457.
The meet experienced two canceled days because of rainy weather.
