Breeders’ Cup can see a payoff in ‘playoff’

There’s nothing quite like the playoffs, be it baseball, football, basketball or hockey.

But horse racing has never had any kind of playoff. The sport can have a Kentucky Derby winner going after a Triple Crown, but that involves only one horse.

So the people who run the Breeders’ Cup came up with their version of a horse racing playoff. It’s called the Breeders’ Cup Challenge Series and involves 24 races at racetracks across the country over an 11-week span that this year began July 28. Winners of the 24 races are guaranteed a spot in the Breeders’ Cup on Oct. 26-27 at Monmouth Park in New Jersey.

The series, which the Breeders’ Cup marketing people call “Win and You’re In,” culminates this weekend with nine national races. Three of those will be run Sunday at the Oak Tree meet at Santa Anita.

The Challenge Series races at the Arcadia track will be the Grade I $300,000 Ancient Title Stakes at six furlongs, the Grade I $250,000 Lady’s Secret Stakes for fillies and mares at 1 1/16 miles and the Grade II $250,000 Oak Tree Mile, featuring Lava Man.

Today’s Grade I $250,000 Clement L. Hirsch Turf Championship is not a part of the series, but it has 9-year-old gelding The Tin Man in the field. Ridden by Victor Espinoza and trained by Richard Mandella, The Tin Man has not been worse than second in his last nine races and is 13-7-2 overall.

The challenge for the creators of the Challenge Series is getting the public to understand it and embrace it.

There’s also the challenge of getting everyone in the horse racing community behind it.

“It sounds good, but any horse that wins one of those races is going to qualify for the Breeders’ Cup anyway,” trainer Vladimir Cerin said Friday. “It’s redundant.”

Greg Avioli, president and chief executive of the Breeders’ Cup, said he has heard Cerin’s point of view before. He recalled that a trainer approached him at a function in New York’s Times Square before the Whitney Handicap, a Challenge Series race run at Saratoga on July 28.

Said Avioli: “He told me, ‘Everybody knows the Whitney winner will have enough graded stakes points to get in or will be put in by the international selection committee.’

“I said to him, ‘The fact that you know about the Whitney and graded stakes and the international selection committee tells me this is not designed for you. This is designed to generate interest among the common fan.’ ”

Avioli readily admits the Challenge Series, which may be expanded to as many as 60 races and begin July 1 next year, is a marketing tool. And he says it has worked. He says the handle on the day of the Whitney at Saratoga was up $6 million from the year before and that Del Mar had its biggest single-day handle, $24,642,601, on Aug. 19, the day of the Pacific Classic, another Challenge Series race.

A flaw in the series is that not all the race winners will end up in a Breeders’ Cup race. Five of the winners in the 15 races held so far will not be competing for various reasons, including a horse’s being sold and taken out of the country, injuries, and owners unwilling to pay the supplemental entry fee, which can run as high as several hundred thousand dollars if the horse has not been previously nominated.

Also, the series draws attention to horses but not jockeys. When a jockeys Breeders’ Cup competition was suggested to Avioli, he said, “You may be on to something there. Just off the top of my head, a $100,000 bonus to the points leader, or something like that, could be a great idea.”

Jockey Richard Migliore, who will ride favored Bordonaro in Sunday’s Ancient Title, said, “The Breeders’ Cup purses are enough incentive for us. The focus of the Breeders’ Cup should be on the horses.”

--

larry.stewart@latimes.com