Frankel Develops a Taste for Stakes

When trainer Bobby Frankel woke up July 1, his stable had won 13 stakes races for the year. Not a bad total for any trainer, even one who’s in the Racing Hall of Fame, but small potatoes compared to where the Frankel barn stands today.

In the last four-plus months, Frankel has won 28 stakes, the latest a 31/2-length victory Wednesday by another relatively new face, Mizzen Mast, in the $72,400 Bien Bien Stakes as Hollywood Park launched its 31-day fall season.

Mizzen Mast, who’ll probably run next in the $500,000 Hollywood Derby on Nov. 25, is only one of several 3-year-olds that are probables for the Grade I grass race that Frankel has won twice before. In the winner’s circle Wednesday, Frankel ticked off the names of the others from the current crop: Blue Steller, Adebaran, No Slip and Denon.

Denon? “Yeah,” Frankel said. “He’s by Pleasant Colony [the 1981 Kentucky Derby winner]. And he might just be the best of the bunch.”

Trainer Wayne Lukas’ phenomenal total of 92 stakes wins, in 1987, is probably forever safe, but Frankel’s output of 31 graded stakes wins this year bears researching. The Bien Bien, run for the first time, is ungraded, but even so Frankel has 14 Grade I wins, eight victories in Grade II events and nine in Grade III’s. The barn has earned about $13.4 million in purses, yet only four of his runners have been millionaires and the richest of those is the recently retired Aptitude with $1.4 million.

Compare that to the national leader, trainer Bob Baffert, whose horses have logged $15.1 million in purses.

Two of Baffert’s horses--Captain Steve and Point Given--accounted for about half of his total. Frankel’s 41 stakes winners have come from 27 horses.

Mizzen Mast, a gray son of Cozzene bred and owned by Prince Khalid Abdullah’s Juddmonte Farms, gave Frankel his third stakes win since the trainer unloaded a lot of Breeders’ Cup baggage by finally winning one of those races on Oct. 27. Squirtle Squirt’s win in the Breeders’ Cup Sprint was part of the good-news-bad-news day for Frankel, who went into the card with three horses--Flute, You and Aptitude--that he thought had better chances in other races. All were beaten, and Frankel said, “Until Squirtle Squirt won, I was really down in the dumps.”

Except for Aptitude, who will be sent to stud, the rest of the Frankel’s six-horse Breeders’ Cup roster will be kept in training next year. Three from the group are expected to run again this year: Starine in the $500,000 Matriarch at Hollywood Park on Nov. 25; You in the $200,000 Hollywood Starlet on Dec. 16; and Timboroa in the $4-million Japan Cup on Nov. 25.

Ridden by Kent Desormeaux, Mizzen Mast, the second choice, took the lead at the top of the stretch and easily outdistanced favored Momentum the rest of the way as Frankel notched his 799th win at Hollywood Park. The record of 859 belongs to the late Charlie Whittingham.

Running the last eighth of a mile in 23 seconds, Mizzen Mast finished off the mile in 1:34 and paid $7.40 for $2. Lookn East was third in a six-horse field. Since leaving France in midsummer, Mizzen Mast had run poorly twice in the U.S., beating only one horse over a soggy course in the Arlington Million and finishing ninth of 10, in his debut under Frankel, in the Del Mar Derby.

“It’s taken me some time to acclimate the horse to our program,” Frankel said. “He’s a horse that can run all day, he showed that in Europe. He should be a good horse, a very nice horse.”