TRIPLE CROWN RATINGS

There have been only 11 Triple Crown champions--none since Affirmed in 1978--but 25 horses have won two of the three races, most recently last year, when Hansel became the 15th to score a Preakness-Belmont Stakes double.

Pine Bluff, the Preakness winner, has a chance to duplicate Hansel’s feat after having run a dull race in the Kentucky Derby. Hansel was 10th in the Derby, and his trainer, Frank Brothers, never has been able to explain why.

Trainer Tom Bohannan believes that Pine Bluff, fifth at Churchill Downs, simply didn’t like the racing surface. The only other time Pine Bluff ran at Churchill Downs, in the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile last year, he was seventh.

Belmont Park, where the Triple Crown trail ends on June 6, is Pine Bluff’s home track, but--although Bohannan says that his horse enjoys running there--neither of Pine Bluff’s two races at Belmont as a 2-year-old produced a victory. In September, running for the third time and making his first stakes start, Pine Bluff finished third, beaten by only a length, in the Belmont Futurity. A month later, after taking a bad step out of the gate, Pine Bluff came from seventh place and finished third, 11 lengths behind the winner, Tri To Watch.

Tri To Watch also finished ahead of Pine Bluff in the Futurity, running second to Agincourt, but he underwent knee surgery after an eighth-place finish in the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile and was slow returning this year. If Tri To Watch does well enough in the 1 1/8-mile Peter Pan Stakes at Belmont on Sunday, he will try to beat Pine Bluff again on June 6.

It is not uncommon for horses to skip the Derby and the Preakness and win the Belmont. It has happened seven times in the last 13 years, starting with Coastal in 1979. In the 1980s, three of trainer Woody Stephens’ five consecutive Belmont winners--Conquistador Cielo, Creme Fraiche and Danzig Connection--didn’t get into the Triple Crown until the final race. The other three spoilers have been Temperence Hill, Summing and Go And Go, the Irish horse who upset Unbridled in 1990. Summing’s victory in 1981 had the biggest impact, because it thwarted Pleasant Colony in his bid to sweep the Triple Crown.

Trainer Wayne Lukas, a Triple Crown mainstay since his Partez finished third in the 1981 Derby, doesn’t think that Pine Bluff will win the Belmont.

“I said before the Derby that this looked like the kind of year where three different horses win the Triple Crown races, and I still think that,” Lukas said. “The Arazi myth has been taken care of, and now there’s parity in the division. I don’t think we have any superstars, but it’s still a damn nice bunch of 3-year-olds.”

The most consistent of the crop have been Lukas’ Dance Floor, third in the Derby and fourth in the Preakness, and trainer Shelley Riley’s Casual Lies, second in the Derby and third in the Preakness. But Lukas concedes that the Belmont distance of 1 1/2 miles is well beyond Dance Floor’s capabilities.

“He overachieved just to do what he did in the Derby (at 1 1/4 miles) and the Preakness (1 3/16 miles),” Lukas said.

Lukas’ Belmont horse is Al Sabin, who ran sixth in the Derby.

“He might be the horse for the course,” Lukas said. “He didn’t get the chance to run when he wanted to in the Derby, and that frustrated him, because he’s a temperamental horse.”

Al Sabin, a son of Alydar with only three victories in 14 starts, is owned by Henryk deKwiatkowski, who has won the Belmont twice with Stephens-trained horses, Conquistador Cielo in 1982 and Danzig Connection in 1986.

Riley would welcome a dry Belmont surface for Casual Lies after weekend rain left Pimlico’s strip as officially “good” for the Preakness.

Riley worried on Friday about whether the track would be fast, and as it turned out, her fear was justified. “Stanley (the trainer’s nickname for Casual Lies) only ran in spurts,” Riley said. “On a dry race track, he might have been in a photo. I know it was the same track for all the horses, but some horses handle a wet track differently.”

Gary Stevens, who rode Casual Lies, agreed.

“He ran third on guts alone,” Stevens said. “He didn’t seem to be handling the track at all. He’d pick up the bridle for a few strides, then drop it. It was a gutty performance. . . . But I’m not disappointed, and the Belmont distance won’t be a problem. My horse will gallop all day long. I don’t think he liked the way the dirt was hitting him in the face in the Preakness.”

TRIPLE CROWN RATINGS

Horse S 1 2 3 Earnings 1.Pine Bluff 12 6 1 2 $1,164,108 2.Lil E. Tee 10 5 3 1 1,177,106 3.A.P. Indy 6 5 0 0 722,555 4.Casual Lies 11 5 1 3 665,468 5.Alydeed 5 3 1 1 269,212 6.Dance Floor 13 4 4 1 751,099 7.Arazi 10 8 1 0 1,117,608 8.Technology 8 4 1 1 464,963 9.Devil His Due 7 4 1 0 432,725 10.Pistols And Roses 11 6 2 2 821,046

Advisory panel for The Times’ Triple Crown Ratings: Lenny Hale, vice president for racing at Aqueduct, Belmont Park and Saratoga; Frank (Jimmy) Kilroe, director of racing emeritus at Santa Anita; and Tommy Trotter, racing secretary at Hialeah.