How would a Chrome TC win affect breeding/bloodstock?
 

on breeding and sales in the future..the moneyball-esk breeding and non normal route .farm vs big sales ring ie keeneland or fasig route..36 years of huge money and the proper way of doing things or at least the historic way..may be put on its head on saturday..any thoughts?

He doesn't have the raw speed of a Seattle Slew, something I would think is paramount in a cheaply bred stallion prospect.

Someone might be willing to pay big $ for him, but I doubt he'll be a smash hit.

As for him making an impact on the breeding industry in other ways, I don't see it.

you dont people will think twice about spending 300 k on a yearling when they can just breed in house or much cheaper and get the same results..possibly

It's not like this is the first cheap horse to ever do well. . . I don't think it'll have any effect at all.

The biggest winner in all of this, win or lose, will be Harris Farms. Lucky Pulpit has produced Rousing Sermon and Luckarack in addition to California Chrome, and was standing for just 2K in 2013 I believe.

If he wins he'll never see another racetrack, which is anything but good for horse racing. I would guess he would get decent freshman book of mares, but not sure if the pedigree is there to assume he will command an extraordinary price. If he doesn't win, i think the pressure would be off the owners to rush him away, and maybe give him the summer off and prep for a fall campaign.

he will be retired right after the race, if he wins

As a result of his pedigree, I don't understand why people assume this to be the case. I can't imagine that Coolmore, Darley or WinStar is particularly eager to put up big bucks to stand a son of Lucky Pulpit, and I just don't see these owners sending the horse to Japan.

If he wins, it will have very little effect. It may have an effect on small-time people who will be encouraged to take a chance and breed a cheap mare to a cheap stallion. But most of the big owners who spend a lot of money on well bred horses are not going to change what they do. Why should they? If you have a guy with a good eye that picks out your yearlings for you, you're going to have a 100x better chance of getting a good horse by buying a $300,000 yearling than by breeding a cheap mare to a $2,500 stallion. It worked in this case, but the other 99.999% of the time you are not going to get a good horse when you breed a cheap mare to a $2,500 stallion.

In reality, Lucky Pulpit is obviously not a $2,500 stallion. He is probably more like a $10,000 sire or possibly even better. But nobody knew that at the time. You could take shot and look for a $2,500 sire that you think will be the next big thing. Malibu Moon stood for only $5,000 at the beginning. You could take a chance and try to find the next Malibu Moon but I don't think most of the big owners are going to go that route. They can afford to buy expensive yearlings and breed to the expensive stallions.

With regard to how much CC is worth, I don't think he's worth nearly what most of you think, win or lose the Belmont. I'll Have Another won the Derby and Preakness and then got hurt and was retired. They couldn't get a decent stud deal for him because people didn't like his pedigree. I think the top offer they got in this country was about $5 million. They finally got a little better offer in Japan and sent him over there. I think they got about $8 million.

If CC doesn't win the Belmont, I don't know why he would be worth any more than I'll Have Another. If he wins the Belmont, that would be a different story but I'm still not sure that he would be worth all that much with his pedigree. I could be way off on this but I don't think he could be worth much more than $10-$12 million as a stallion. Win or lose, I don't think he will be retired after the race unless he gets hurt.

Andy Beyer just wrote a column on exactly this:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/sports...499_story.html

I don't necessarily agree with this, principally the contention that his case would be bolstered had Lucky Pulpit produced a few more graded stakes winners. The reality is that through 2013 - 2014, as a sire LP has a total of 102 runners on the track. Mostly all of which are out of modest, at best, CA bred mares.
I don't think there is any argument that CC's mare was cheap, but there are a lot of mares that never ran, which in turn were highly productive broodmares (I don't think Zenyatta's mare was anything special on the track for instance).
With CC being a first foal and Lucky Pulpit's books being thin in quality, there is enough of a wildcard to assume taking a chance on both with some decent quality broodmare stock, even if only for 2 or 3 seasons. I'd say his value, should he win the Belmont, could be assessed north of 30 million dollars, and is why most assume that he won't ever run again should he pull it off.

I dont think there is a prayer of him being worth 30 million. That would put his stud fee in the 100k range. Just don't see that happening.

I hope it puts some of the big breeding info people back in their place. Listening to them talk about a great-great-great-great-greatmother of the Derby winner, as if THAT was the cause of what we see now (or something similar), is tiring. Every horse has a story, and we've gotten to a point where there is some regal distant breeding everywhere.

If anything, this should reinforce the fact that good horses can, in fact, come from anywhere, and that you don't have to spend a big fortune to make a small fortune.

he won't have the hysteria about him the way smarty did. you can see that now, because everyone was going nuts about smarty and a deal was cut before the belmont.
him being out of a nondescript mare doesn't help, but being by a pulpit colt does.

we all know that the odds are far better that he turns out to be a bust like the bid at stud, than a powerhouse like seattle slew.

Smarty Jones was a son of a pretty fashionable sire in Elusive Quality, who was standing in his own right for about $50,000 back by 2004 (ultimately going up to $100,000 before sliding back down). That is a huge difference from Lucky Pulpit.

As much as the story of Claifornia Chrome is endearing, it's pretty clear that he is a freak (and those do come along every once in a while). At a time where the industry has a large unwanted horse problem, encouraging people to breed mares that ought not to be bred (of course, that can be subjective) to relatively non-descript stallions because they might get the next California Chrome would not be good for the industry. These are the type of horses that often get "no bid" at a sale.

I don't think Elusive Quality was even at 50k before SJ. He was quite a bit lower if memory serves me correctly.

Just looked it up. 10k

That was very well stated... almost a page from the King Glorious On Pedigree handbook. Well done.

No idea but if you had asked what the cultural effect would be?

Easy.

It would be the record-setting spike in prescriptions and sales of anti-depressants due to the vast number of predominantly older white males on horsie boards lapsing into a deep and collective depression (stemming from the arrival of the newly-registered, self-designated Chromies who will take over).

(The boards, not the world). :p

He started at $10,000, but he was a "hot" sire by June 2004.

Here is a story about Elusive Quality from January 2005 discussing the rise of his stud fee: http://www.bloodhorse.com/horse-raci...lusive-quality

We won't mention any names though :D

No we wont and isn't it interesting that the Zenyatta girls (well in my mind they are mostly female but who knows!) pretty much stayed in their safe zones but something tells me if he wins that won't be the case.

It's all good. :D

ESPN article on this subject today:

http://tinyurl.com/lbq3b64

It would also cause record sales of maxi pads.

Good article by Beyer. Best comparison that I can think of is Tiznow, and he was from a dam that had produced other good horses before him (such as Budroyale), unlike dam of California Chrome. Tiznow's first year stud fee was $30,000.

oh, i know it. i figured every one knew it which is why i didn't go into that.

Chrome & Zenyatta :{>:

Forgive me for not addressing the question posed, but if there is a secondary consequence to a successful bid by Chrome, my hope is that it trickles toward some of my employees.

Since I'm the only person (I assume anywhere) they know who follows racing, I'm backing Chrome simply so that they will stop talking to me about it. This morning someone asked if the connections were going to pull out of the Belmont since "he can't wear his nose thingy."

Last Thursday before a meeting someone asked if California Cruiser (sic) had won the Triple Crown yet.

Perhaps I am not doing my part to grow appreciation of the game, but it has been pretty irritating.

If he wins the Belmont, my best guess is that he'd be worth about $20M and stand initially for $62,500.

He'll have to produce big sales numbers from his first two books or he'll be standing in PA for $20,000 before his his second crop hits the track. From there, he'll need to produce runners to stay in that $20-25k range or it's a boat ride to a new country for him.

They'll keep racing him after a two month break. I don't
think the decision will come until the end of his 3 yr old season. If he keeps winning races they get the cash and his stock keeps rising. These guys are smart!

And if he loses, after winning the Triple Crown against run of the mill older horses his value will go down. What people fail to realize, you could have the fastest donkey in the world. That is faster than any thoroughbred, you would still not breed to the donkey. Breeding is about percentages. The chance that California Chrome has these genes out of his parents is one in one million chance, that everything aligned itself right up. Just look at Empire Maker, he was a stallion prospect before he was even weaned because of his dam, and the siblings he has. California Chrome, could be the breeding version of the Green Monkey. Which big farm, in today's economy is going to risk, that kind of money on a horse that has outlier genes, to pass on? It is a nice story, not matter how you dress the pig, it is still a pig.

He is the first foal out of a Not For Love mare, and by a stallion that's never seen quality breeding stock and still manages to throw decent cal-breds.

So the argument about percentages goes out the window when you peel it back, doesn't it?
I agree with IC that he is really the tallest pigmy of this crop, but I don't necessarily buy the argument that he won't be successful stallion because he doesn't possess commercial bloodlines.

I think Japan is a very logical spot especially if he wins Belmont.