Clark fair odds: Avoid First Mission as speed favors closers

The Grade 2 Clark Stakes on Saturday at Churchill Downs is everything a handicapper would want out of a year-end graded stakes for older horses worth $600,000: a competitive group featuring a pair of 3-year-olds taking on older horses and an array of pace scenarios that should guarantee a fair shot for all.

One of the 3-year-olds trying older is First Mission, the likely second choice for this year's Preakness Stakes before he scratched. in October at Keeneland, he won his first race back since winning the Lexington (G3) in April at Keeneland, but Ragozin Data was not impressed with that effort.

Obviously, he has every license to improve as a lightly raced 3-year-old. But even if he improves to his lifetime best, that would be only on par with the other contenders, and the chances of him improving to better than his lifetime best are very small. He is a complete underlay and not to be used in any wager.

So who do we use? Well, from a win perspective, no. 10 Blue Devil is 10-1 on the morning line and 9-2 on my fair odds, so he's the most exciting. But throwing out 20 percent to 30 percent of the pools in First Mission leaves a lot of meat on the bone without having to be too narrow.

Even if nos. 1 Straight Arrow, 3 Il Miracolo, 4 Gasoline, 6 Film Star and 8 Happy American, along with Blue Devil, do not offer value in the win pool, I see any one of them in combination with the other being a potential play in exactas and tris against First Mission.

Granted, that is six of 10 horses in the field. Boxing them all would cost $30, and I'm not advocating that. But I do think it's worth picking the top two or three overlays from the sextet and keying them with the others. Three horses over six is $15, and the same thing reversed is another $15. So that's the same $30 with a chance to double up on the 3 horses offering the most value.

For the purposes of this exercise, Happy American would not be one of my three. But I think there might be opportunity to key him in second and third if looking at the trifecta instead of the exacta.