They canceled the Bob Hope Stakes at Del Mar. A grade 3 at a distinguished meeting – gone because it couldn’t be filled.
Predictably, the finger-pointing began. California. The CHRB. Bob Baffert. But let’s cut through the noise. I’ve been around long enough to tell you something clear, simple and inevitable:
This is not a California issue. This is not a Baffert problem. This is a race problem in the United States, from top to bottom.
The numbers don’t care about your feelings: Let’s take a look at the Jockey Club crop data foals:
- 2005: ~38,365
- 2015: ~22,900
- 2024: ~18,000 (projected)
That’s one 53% reduction over 20 years. Half the horses. About the same number of stakes races. And somehow we’re shocked when they don’t fill up?
The offer has been halved, but the circuit menu remained bloated. Every race director wants his ‘big day’. Nobody wants to cut. The same shrinking horse population is being asked to support a stakes calendar designed for the 1998 breeding market.
Field size: a problem everywhere Stop pretending this is a California phenomenon.
- US average (2010): 8.2 starters
- US average (2024): ~7.1 entrees
New York’s stake is routinely reduced to five horses. Churchill Downs is infamous for using 5 horses with a 1/5 favorite. Gulfstream’s championship game has been short fields for years and they even added a synthetic track.
The “Win Now” economy created the Super Barn: We don’t have enough good quality horses to support the calendar, especially for the youth. Why? Because the game has changed. It started when the IRS rules changed, excluding the farms that bred for racing and making a mockery of partnerships. It continued to snowball and create what we have today.
This is a ‘Win Now’ sport. Owners need to get a quick return on their investments, so they track ROI. They send the best cattle to the barns with the best strike rates, the best vets and the best systems. Winners go to winners, and horses with the best chance of being winners go to the barns that win.
- Result: A handful of barns in CA, KY and NY manage the majority of the talent.
If one trainer nominates six horses and the next nominates one, no one else shows up. “That’s not a “Baffert problem”– that is a modern economic reality. It happens with Chad Brown turf mares in New York and Cox runners in Kentucky. The sport is top-heavy in a way that no calendar can support.
The hard truth: too much effort, not enough horses You could cancel half the Grade 3 games and a quarter of the Grade 2 games tomorrow, and the game would barely feel it. Things should get better though. The purses would consolidate and the size of the fields would increase.
Instead, we cling to the illusion that every track needs a youth sprint, a filly sprint and two Derby preps. It’s window dressing for a sport that refuses to face the math.
The verdict The cancellation of the Bob Hope is just a signpost on the road that Saratoga, Keeneland and Oaklawn are also traveling.
If you want full fields and competitive events, the sport needs to do two things it has resisted for decades:
- Adjust the deployment calendar to match the population.
- Invest in the recovery of the foal harvest.
Until then, races like the Bob Hope will continue to disappear. Not because of one state, trainer or circuit, but because the bill for twenty years of neglect has finally been paid.
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