Midnight Lute To Return

- Midnight Lute (Real Quiet) will return to race in 2008, at the age of five; and Baffert said that should he run again this year, "the only realistic spot would be the Cigar Mile." [Daily Racing Form] He's only raced ten times, having missed a year between two and three with the throat problem for which he had surgery. His 2007 campaign has been an interesting one; he had excuses in each of his losing efforts in the Strub series, and again when turned back to seven furlongs in the Commonwealth. Baffert once had Derby aspirations with him, and spoke of pointing to the Classic next year.

I think that the fact that Trevor Denman noted only that he'd "started to make his run" on the turn is due more to how far back he was and the unlikeliness of Midnight Lute's winning move than the announcer missing him. As soon as he started to accelerate in the stretch, Denman perked up and used his "he looks like he just jumped in at the quarter pole" line. In truth, it looked more like the eighth pole.

Idiot Proof was hard ridden all the way outside of Talent Search, and held on well for second. Other than that, there's not really much to say. Benny the Bull closed OK for 4th. Commentator, who never got to the top and faded to 7th, has fallen a long ways since those heady days of consecutive 120+ Beyers in the summer of '05. Neither Greg's Gold nor Smokey Stover did much running in the muck, and Kelly's Landing did not finish last, as Tom Amoss predicted on The Works.