Fasig-Tipton Saratoga Select Sale 2024

Sharing some of my favorite pedigrees from this year's select sale

Fasig-Tipton’s Saratoga sale is a highlight of the yearling sales calendar every year, and this year’s edition begins at 6:30pm ET this evening. Narrowing down the catalog of 240 to just a handful of horses is always a daunting task, but I’ve managed to find five horses I believe have intriguing pedigrees that are worth talking about here. As usual, I focused on trying to find horses with pedigree factors that weren’t immediately apparent by glancing at the catalog, generally focusing on interesting linebreeding patterns and horses from genetic families that have proven successful with the sire or sire line. Of course, with a sale like this, most of these horses are also going to have some very obvious positives on their pedigree page, which I will also make note of. I have listed my selections in order by hip number.

Hip 44 - f. Gun Runner x Firefly (Tapit)

This filly is bred on the same Gun Runner/Tapit cross as seven of her sire’s stakes winners (19.4% of 36 starters) and is out of a mare who has produced five winners from as many foals, including a stakes winner by Optimizer. Firefly’s foals have an average career-high Equibase speed figure of 92.6, and the cross with Gun Runner could very well produce her highest-class runner to date, as he’s been remarkable with Tapit mares and with this female family.

The major question mark here is the four crosses of Fappiano this filly carries, as her sire is inbred to 4x4 that stallion and her dam is inbred 3x2 to his son Unbridled. This pattern of crossing two horses inbred to Fappiano has produced a stakes winner, by Candy Ride’s Leofric, in just 13 starters, so it would seem as though it can work, but it is still a bit of a gamble. Also, while Gun Runner has produced 9.5% stakes winners in 84 starters out of mares carrying Unbridled, that cross is heavily influenced by Tapit, who is out of an Unbridled mare. In fact, Gun Runner has only a single stakes winner in 48 starters out of mares carrying a non-Tapit source of Unbridled. This, again, is a bit of a question mark. While not something that would deter me from recommending this filly, especially with the female family connection we’ll get into momentarily, I believe it is something worth keeping in mind.

The female family in question is 20a, and it is a family that Gun Runner has had exceptional results with so far. According to PedigreeQuery, Gun Runner has seven foals from family 20a. Of those foals, five have raced, another is an unraced four-year-old who never sold at auction, and the last was a $2.2 million purchase at OBS April last year. All five foals to race are winners: graded stakes winner Sixtythreecaliber, graded stakes winner Runaway Wife, stakes winner Recharge (also out of a Tapit mare), and Recharge’s winning full siblings Resource and Magazine Street. Factoring in results from family 20b (a branch of 20a tracing to the 1846 mare Escalade, but still the same mitochondrial family) adds two more starters: the winning three-year-old Pony Express (last seen finishing 6th in the Jim Dandy) and stakes placed winner Chileno. Overall, Gun Runner has seven starters from branches of Lowe family 20, with seven winners and four black type horses (two graded stakes winners, a listed stakes winner, and a stakes placed winner). That, combined with the Tapit cross and the useful production from the mare, make this filly a very interesting prospect.