Short Yearlings at Keeneland January

Highlighting some solid pedigrees in the first major sale of the year

Today is the first day of the Keeneland January Horses of All Ages Sale. There are a total of 1,467 horses cataloged for the sale, which runs through Thursday, including 690 “short” yearlings. Today, I want to take a look at some of these yearlings and highlight a few that catch my eye on pedigree as potential pinhooking prospects. As such, I’m looking for horses with commercial value - particularly those with a high likelihood of increasing their value in the next eight months to a year. To that end, I’m largely focusing on horses with active female families and/or by young stallions whose foals I think will have success on the racetrack this year, although perennially commercial stallions will also be considered.

Some pedigree patterns that I value highly in evaluating racehorses, such as deeper linebreeding patterns, won’t carry as much weight in this evaluation, since they aren’t taken into account by many buyers, though I’ll still mention them where they’re present. As a result, a lot of these horses will be a bit more obvious types than what I usually try to highlight on here. This post will not take conformation into account, and thus is limited in its usefulness, but I hope you will find some value in the exercise nonetheless.

With these criteria in mind, I’ve selected five horses to highlight, listed in rough order of preference:

Hip 169 - c. Justify x Take a Memo (Empire Maker)

This colt is a half brother to the impressive maiden special weight winner Imperial Gun

This colt is a half brother to a very exciting maiden special weight winner, Imperial Gun, who took over early in an Oaklawn Park maiden special weight on December 31st to win by 5 3/4 lengths. You can read about the race and watch the stretch run of that replay here. Imperial Gun earned a 91 Equibase speed figure for that effort, and there’s likely more to come from this Steve Asmussen trainee, who sold for $375,000 at this sale in 2022.

While the Justify/Empire Maker cross has yet to produce a stakes winner from a small sample size of five starters, the combination of the red-hot Justify with a mare who has an exciting three-year-old makes this colt a must-see at this sale. I wouldn’t be surprised to see him sell as well or better than his sibling did at this sale, but I expect that he’ll be quite the hot commodity later this year or next year if Imperial Gun continues to show the kind of ability he did in his maiden score.