It’s Getting Even Better for Frankel

When trainer Bobby Frankel hung up all those impressive numbers last year, even winning that elusive first Breeders’ Cup race, the totals had the earmarks of a career year.

But Frankel has been relentless. He won a second Breeders’ Cup race this year, his stakes wins have surpassed last year’s output and, at the $16.5-million mark in total purses, he’s likely to have the highest total in that category since Wayne Lukas set the record with $17.8 million in 1988.

Frankel’s 54th stakes win of 2002, with the grass filly Rolly Polly in Sunday’s $76,970 Safely Kept Handicap at Hollywood Park, came in neither a graded race nor a six-figure stake, but it has been victories like this that have widened the gap between him and Bob Baffert on the money list. Baffert, who has been the purse leader for the last four years, trails by more than $5 million.

In 2001, Frankel scored 49 stakes wins, 36 of them graded and 18 in Grade I events. After Sunday, those totals for 2002 were 54, 40 and 14, with his purses already dwarfing last year’s total by about $2 million. Frankel still has several Grade I races to shoot at, including the Hollywood Turf Cup, the Hollywood Derby and the Matriarch over the next two weekends.

“It’s been a little different than last year, but it’s been a great year,” Frankel said. “I’m winning different races, and more purse money accumulated this year. Sometimes I’ve been lucky, and sometimes I haven’t been lucky, like [Saturday] at Churchill Downs,” with Glia, beaten by a neck in the Mrs. Revere Stakes.

“There’s been at least a half-dozen [losses] like that one,” he said.

Frankel, who has been the Eclipse Award-winning trainer the last two years, hasn’t given up trying to break Lukas’ 1988 record.

“I’d need to win three $500,000 races to have a shot,” he said. “But I’m running in four of them before the end of the year. I have to really get hot to have a chance.”

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Industry sources say that the National Thoroughbred Racing Assn. is about to announce that there will be a “systematic review” of hundreds of pick-four and pick-six races at many tracks. The audit would establish whether the suspected past-posting -- betting after opening legs of a multiple-race bet have already been run -- is more widespread than already known.

After the $3-million Breeders’ Cup pick six was reported to have been won with an altered ticket last month, two other bets -- a pick four at Balmoral Park near Chicago and a pick six at Belmont Park -- appeared to have been won with similar betting patterns.

The number of winning pick-four and pick-six tickets that the NTRA would dissect is expected to pass the 1,000 mark.

The NTRA is soliciting the help of the three major tote companies as well as the three major racetrack ownerships -- Magna Entertainment, Churchill Downs and the New York Racing Assn. -- before it launches the study. Santa Anita is one of Magna’s tracks and Hollywood Park is owned by Churchill Downs.