Star Over The Bay’s Win Is on the Dry Side

The first time trainer Mike Mitchell saddled a Grade I winner, with Kela in the Bing Crosby Handicap this summer at Del Mar, his wife Denise honored a 20-year-old promise and jumped into a fountain at the track.

Mitchell won his second Grade I Sunday when Star Over The Bay, a horse he had claimed for $80,000, scored a gate-to-wire victory in the $250,000 Clement L. Hirsch Memorial Turf Championship. Although there is a fountain at Santa Anita just as wet as the one at Del Mar, the trainer’s wife said there would be no extracurriculars.

“What happened at Del Mar was a once-in-a-lifetime thing,” Denise Mitchell said.

Some of the 45 owners of Star Over The Bay, a 6-year-old gelding who was taken from trainer Vladimir Cerin out of a race at Hollywood Park, pumped up their interests by flying a pre-race banner over the track that said, “Good Luck, Star Over The Bay.”

“That’s most likely the work of Sean Gerson,” Mike Mitchell said as he emerged from a winner’s circle that barely had room for his horse. The 50% owner of the gray is Carl Van Burger. Since Mitchell’s claim -- the best of his career, the 56-year-old trainer said -- Star Over The Bay had already finished second in a stake at Lone Star Park and won a pair of Grade II stakes.

Star Over The Bay, ridden by Tyler Baze, will be a rarity, a California horse with experience over the track, when he runs in the Breeders’ Cup Turf at Lone Star on Oct. 30. Two more of Sunday’s winners, Roman Ruler and Island Fashion, are also Texas-bound. Roman Ruler will run in the Juvenile after an easy win over three rivals in the $200,000 Norfolk, and Island Fashion is headed for the Distaff after her win in the $250,000 Lady’s Secret Handicap.

Roman Ruler, with Corey Nakatani aboard, rebounded from a loss at Del Mar, won for the third time in four starts and gave trainer Bob Baffert a fourth win in the Norfolk. Declan’s Moon, who beat Roman Ruler in a stiff battle in the Del Mar Futurity, is expected to skip the Breeders’ Cup.

Island Fashion, giving jockey Kerwin John his first graded stakes win, was trained superbly by Marcelo Polanco following 20 days in Tokyo early this summer, which resulted in a 16th-place finish in a $1.6-million race. The Lady’s Secret was the gray filly’s first race in four months.

“The Japan trip might have been the best thing,” Polanco said. “We were able to give her a vacation and when she got back she had put on about 50 pounds.”

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Alan Cooper, manager of the Niarchos family’s racing stable, said Bago, winner of Sunday’s $1.9-million Arc de Triomphe at Longchamp in Paris, is likely to run on dirt for the first time in the $4-million Breeders’ Cup Classic at Lone Star.

An Arc winner has never won a Breeders’ Cup race. Bago, 7-1 overseas and 2-1 in mutuel fields in the U.S., overtook Cherry Mix near the wire and won by three-quarters of a length. The French-bred 3-year-old’s time of 2:25 for the distance of about 1 1/2 miles was two-fifths slower than the course record. Ouija Board, the 3-year-old filly who finished third, may run in the Breeders’ Cup Filly & Mare Turf.

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Bayamo, pulled up by jockey David Flores on the far turn in the Hirsch Memorial, suffered a suspensory-ligament injury to the left foreleg that is not believed to be life-threatening. ... Nakatani’s appeal of a 30-day suspension from March at Santa Anita was denied. The suspension begins Friday and runs through Nov. 7, but he will be able to ride in the Breeders’ Cup.