Flatter: How long can this keep going on in California?

Hey, Shohei. Wanna buy a racetrack?

No, Santa Anita is not for sale. At least that is what it says here, so it must be true.

Why would it be on the market when the owners at 1/ST Racing are spending more than $30 million to spiff up the stable area, lay down an all-weather training track, build a new turf chute and throw seven figures worth of loose change at California breeders?

Oh, sure. It is a bull market for West Coast racing.

But wait. We interrupt this program for a special report. Purses at Golden Gate Fields are being slashed 25 percent by 1/ST Racing, and at Santa Anita they are reportedly about to get a 5 percent trim. We now return you to that peppy story about California racing.

Hey, this looks like a rip-off of a 50-year-old episode of “M*A*S*H.” The one where Hawkeye finds out a village in South Korea was shelled by the U.S. Army. Trying to spin the company line, Colonel Blake tells Hawkeye, “The Army has started rebuilding Tai-Dong. It’s going to be better than it ever was. All new housing. A temple. A town hall with inside toilets. A shopping center. And they’re getting the first soft ice-cream stand in all of east Asia.”

Talk about a bull market. Hawkeye was not buying it. And neither will owners and trainers in California who will have to live within tighter means in 2023-24, even if it means getting the first big swimming pool for racehorses west of the Rockies.

Of course it is complicated. The folks at 1/ST are closing up shop at Golden Gate Fields with the upcoming meet. On June 9, the day after 83 percent of the Belmont Stakes* is run across the country at Saratoga, the last one out of the track by the bay will lock up and clear out for good.

That also means closing a ledger that even the Thoroughbred Owners of California admit has been fattened in recent years with overpayments into Golden Gate purses. That bucket otherwise would have gone dry during the ongoing betting drought. That, however, does not make it any easier to stomach less income.

Welcome to the vicious cycle of racing economics. Track managers are seeing fewer betting dollars, so they cut purses, which lead to smaller and cheaper fields, and they raise takeout, and that whole recipe repels horseplayers, which means fewer betting dollars, etc., etc. Lather, rinse, repeat.

It is conveniently breezy to say it is not just Golden Gate and Santa Anita. That just about every racetrack is enduring this plight. In California, though, the decline in racing has been steeped in a geographic reality that is age old.

Think about where graded stakes are run regularly in America. There are big clusters in the Northeast and Kentucky and, this time of year, in Florida, Louisiana and Arkansas. Now lookie there, way out yonder in the west. There is California, an island on the Thoroughbred topography.

If the stakes calendars at Santa Anita and Del Mar are not to a horseman’s liking, then it is not like they can wander down the road from Saratoga to find an alternative at Monmouth Park. Or go up the road from Gulfstream to Tampa Bay Downs or even to Fair Grounds.

Now go to the cheaper world of overnight races, which have fueled Golden Gate Fields and its participants for decades. Once this last of Northern California’s big tracks closes, its professional occupants have been invited to set up shop at Santa Anita. That, however, is a canard. Horses from Northern California who race for small potatoes are just not good enough to compete down south for, well, bigger potatoes.

Ah, but a fourth day of racing each week with conditions to fit those soon-to-be-homeless horses has been floated by 1/ST as a real possibility if NorCal owners and trainers load up their trailers en masse and head down to SoCal for the winter, spring, summer and fall. Yeah, right. It would be hard to find a horseman who believes that line from the same people suddenly cutting their financial lifeline by 25 percent for six months of lame-duck racing.

Where can the Northern California racing colony relocate? Turf Paradise beckons with a new owner and the promise of a new season starting next month, but the sport’s foundation in Arizona is shakier than the fault lines in California. Emerald Downs might yet hold some promise, but ambition is cheap, and Seattle is another remote island in the racing sphere.

The next nearest oasis could be Texas. Ha. Going there means banking on a state that put all its chips in a court case to defang the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority. All the while, Sam Houston and Lone Star have seen their handle crumble to just pennies on the dollar while their simulcast signals are embargoed.

But hey, Santa Anita is getting that new equine aquatic center. It sounds as good as soft ice cream in Korea.

At the end of this episode, the California breeding industry lies in wait with hat in hand and little incentive to stay the course. If it withers away, then the vicious circle that has spun the state’s racing economy the wrong way finally will disappear down the proverbial drain.

Ah, yes. There is that death-and-taxes line. Seemingly every conversation about California racing is peppered with some variation on the phrase that it will be gone in ___ years. I myself have been hearing it for ___ years.

A Google search turned up a 2007 story in the Los Angeles Times that said Frank Stronach, the patriarch of the fractured family that owns Santa Anita, might sell the track. The developer who built the mall next door was frothing to buy it.

Well, ol’ Frank wound up filing for bankruptcy protection instead, and he spun Santa Anita and his other racecourses into a new company. So here we are 16 years later, still wondering when he and his heirs will pound that for-sale sign into the ground at 285 West Huntington.

Not to forget Del Mar, which would be a great backstop if it were available more than a few months a year. But since it is part of a state-operated fairgrounds, it is not. And all the other California fairs that run races do so on such a cheap budget, they realistically are a non-starter of a solution.

Hard as it is to imagine horses not racing in America’s most populous state, it feels like that inevitability is getting closer. I have deigned to say it will happen in my lifetime, but I am on the verge of signing up for Medicare, so that just would be more idle chatter.

In the meantime, there might be two racetracks in California that would interest Mr. Ohtani. Oh, wait. We have been led to believe this week that he and the rest of the baseball world want nothing to do with a crime-infested San Francisco Bay Area.

Well, sir. Care to make an offer on 320 acres in Arcadia? That $700 million can go a long way.