Monday Morning Qb begins to 'scratch the surface' in Laurel's Heft

Cash is King and LC Racing’s Monday Morning Qb, three weeks after a fever cost him a chance at making his stakes debut, returned to Laurel Park in full health and rebounded with a three-quarter-length score in Saturday’s $100,000 Heft Stakes.

The Heft for 2-year-olds and $100,000 Gin Talking for 2-year-old fillies, both contested at seven furlongs, were among five stakes worth $500,000 in purses on a nine-race Christmastide Day program that closed out Maryland’s 2019 stakes schedule.

It was just the third career start and first in a stakes for Monday Morning Qb ($6.20), the program favorite for the Maryland Juvenile Futurity Dec. 7 who was scratched the morning of the race. With Jorge Vargas Jr. up for trainer Robert E. ‘Butch’ Reid, the juvenile son of Imagining completed the distance in 1:23.46 over a fast main track.

“It was unfortunate, he got sick going into the race. He popped a fever on us and fortunately my assistant and my grooms were there to pick it up,” Reid said. “He was a little bit off his feed. This is a big, good-doing horse and he never misses an oat in the morning. He left a little feed and ended up with a temperature of close to 103. Fortunately he fought it off well and it was only a couple of days, but I’m very glad we didn’t push our luck with him last time.”

Breaking from the far outside post, Vargas kept Monday Morning Qb in the clear on the outside down the backstretch tracking Romanoff, undefeated in two starts for fall meet-leading trainer Claudio Gonzalez, through fractions of 22.35 and 45.49 seconds.

Racing for the first time beyond six furlongs and first away from his home track at Parx, Monday Morning Qb circled the field on the turn, took command near the three-sixteenths pole and powered through the stretch to turn back a late run from 14-1 long shot New Commission. It was 2 ¾ lengths back to 9-5 favorite Lebda in third, while Del Mar Futurity (G1) winner Nucky tired to last after pressing the pace.

“I was impressed because we asked a lot of him today – coming on the road, coming to a track we weren’t familiar with, and going the seven-eighths of a mile. I always felt this horse was a distance horse. We’ve only begun to scratch the surface with him, I think. We’ve got other ideas down the road,” Reid said.

“We’re going to take it one step at a time. Now he’s out of conditions so there will be a stakes race somewhere for him,” he added. “We want to go a longer distance, too, so our next stop will probably be to find a two-turn race for him somewhere. That’s what I think he’s looking for.”

Standing at Anchor & Hope Farm in Port Deposit, Md., Imagining was a multiple graded-stakes winning millionaire for Phipps Stable and Hall of Fame trainer Shug McGaughey whose biggest win came in the 2014 Man o’War (G1) on turf, leaving the connections of Monday Morning Qb with plenty of options.

“He’s actually really bred for the grass, too. His father was a turf horse, so there may be some turf racing in the future for this horse, also,” Reid said. “He’s a horse that I think we can have a lot of fun with.”