Stars Fall on Alabama’s Three-Horse Field at Saratoga : Horse racing: Everybody wins in $200,000 stake for 3-year-old fillies.

At the Saratoga yearling sales the other night, Bobby Frankel bought a filly he said he paid too much for. But he’s still a happy trainer. “I’ve already won the Alabama,” Frankel said Friday.

What Frankel meant is that he’s won part of the purse in today’s Alabama, the $200,000 stake for 3-year-old fillies that has drawn only three starters.

More than likely, Frankel will settle for third place with Pampered Star, despite her easy victory last month in the Monmouth Oaks. Today’s opposition is Go for Wand and Charon, generally considered to be the best in their division. Go for Wand has won seven of nine starts and Charon is six for eight, her only losses coming against Go for Wand.

“Third will be all right,” Frankel said. “And who knows, maybe the other two will kill each other off on the lead and set it up for my filly. If my horse had been in California, we wouldn’t be here. But since we were already at Monmouth, it was nothing to ship her up here for this race.”

Although Pampered Star is based in California, she has her only two stakes victories out of town. Before the Monmouth Oaks, she won the Fair Grounds Oaks in New Orleans.

With only three horses in the Alabama, the fourth-place purse money stays with the track. First is worth $113,056, second pays $47,872 and Pampered Star, unless something catastrophic happens, is expected to earn $26,112 for completing the course.

Frankel didn’t plan on buying any horses at the three-day auction, but he wound up getting a yearling by Spend A Buck, the 1985 Kentucky Derby winner, for $140,000.

“She’s a nice looking horse, but she’s probably only worth about half that much,” Frankel said. “I think most of the horses in the sale are only worth about half what they pay, but you get here, and you get swept up in the bidding with everybody else, and you wind up paying more than you should.

“I think you’re better off buying horses in Europe who have already raced. At least with those horses, you know they can run. You can look at the horses here and come to a conclusion, but you still never know. Somebody ought to do a study of one of these big sales and come back three or four years later with what the horses cost and how much money they earned. I think you’d find that most of them don’t pay for themselves.”

When Bob Levy and some partners paid $950,000 for an Alydar-Lady’s Secret filly at the dispersal sale of the late Gene Klein, Levy said that he would turn around and sell her for a sales record at Saratoga. In the horse business, this is known as pinhooking.

On Thursday night, Levy became a prophet when the filly was sold for $1.5 million, the highest price of the week at a sale not known for vigorous bidding this year.

“Maybe it was the ad we took in the Daily Racing Form that did it,” Levy joked. “I knew we might hit the top when we got four bidders going--two Japanese groups, Wayne Lukas and Georgia Hoffman.”

Lukas apparently was the underbidder because Morio Sakurai bought the filly. The Japanese were a presence at the Saratoga sales, but not enough to compensate for the reduced interest shown by the oil-rich Middle East sheiks, whose purchases were down because they remained at home to concentrate on tensions there.

Lukas might have just missed the sales topper, but he’s not missing many winner’s circle pictures at Saratoga.

On Friday, Feel the Beat joined Criminal Type and Jefforee as winners Lukas has saddled here. Feel the Beat won the $119,800 Ballerina Stakes by two lengths over Fantastic Find on a track that had changed to fast after intermittent showers most of the day.

Feel the Beat, ridden by Jose Santos, is a 5-year-old mare who has won 13 of 26 starts and earned more than $500,000 for owner Joe Allen.

Stormy but Valid, making her first start since running second to Bayakoa in the Hawthorne Handicap almost three months ago, was sent off as the 7-5 favorite by the crowd of 23,431, but after running second early, she faded to fourth at the end, eight lengths behind Feel the Beat.

Open Mind, also trained by Lukas, raced for the first time since winning the Breeders’ Cup Distaff nine months ago and finished fifth in the eight-horse field. Feel the Beat, timed in 1:22 for the seven furlongs, carried 119 pounds, the same as Stormy but Valid and Open Mind, and paid $7.60 to win.

Santos, who got a late start here because of a five-day suspension to open the meet, won Friday’s last three races and has six victories in four days of riding.

Lukas and Santos can add to their stakes total here Sunday when Steinlen is the heavy favorite in the $75,000 Bernard Baruch Handicap at 1 1/8 miles.

Steinlen, who will carry 126 pounds and spot the opposition from 10 to 16 pounds, won the Baruch last year en route to winning the Eclipse Award as the top male grass horse.

Horse Racing Notes

Matthew Firestone, who as a teen-ager picked out Genuine Risk as a yearling and then watched his parents’ $32,000 purchase win the 1980 Kentucky Derby, said Friday that the 13-year-old mare is in foal to Dixieland Band in another attempt to produce her first offspring. John Finney, representing an owner who is believed to be Bert Firestone, bought three fillies at the Saratoga yearling sales, and they reportedly will be shipped to trainer Charlie Whittingham in California. . . . Housebuster is scheduled to run next Saturday in the seven-furlong King’s Bishop Stakes.