Sports

Ed Fountaine’s Stakes Spot Plays

WOOD MEMORIAL

Aqueduct, ninth race. Grade 1. Purse: $1 million. 1¹/₈ miles, 3-year-olds. Post: 5:15 p.m.

LOWDOWN: Gemologist is unbeaten in four starts including two wins going two turns as a 2-year-old, one of them the Kentucky Jockey Club stakes. But that’s not the main reason to like him in the Wood. Making his first start this year in a mile allowance race at Gulfstream Park, Gemologist easily made the lead without being hustled by Javier Castellano, set an honest pace while in hand, then drew off and galloped home while still under a snug hold. It was the kind of visually impressive victory you don’t often see, and which suggests big things to come.

TV: NBC, HRTV, TVG, NYRA Channel 71

SANTA ANITA DERBY

Santa Anita, sixth race. Grade 1. Purse: $750,000. 1¹/₈ miles, 3-year-olds. Post: 5:30 p.m.

LOWDOWN: Liaison ended 2011 as one of the top Triple Crown prospects in California with three straight wins including the Real Quiet and CashCall Futurity. But so far in 2012 he has been the forgotten horse, losing his jockey when he clipped heels in the R.B. Lewis, then rallying half-heartedly for fourth in the San Felipe. But Liaison is a horse that “needs 1¹/₈ miles,” trainer Bob Baffert told us months ago, and today he gets it, coming off a pair of six-furlong works in 1:11 1/5 and 1:10 4/5 that indicate Baffert hasn’t given up on him.

TV: NBC, HRTV, NYRA Channel 71.

ILLINOIS DERBY

Hawthorne, ninth race. Grade 3. Purse: $500,00. 1¹/₈ miles, 3-year-olds. Post: 6:46 p.m.

LOWDOWN: Hakama made a wide, but premature move to take the lead in the stretch of the Private Terms at Laurel last out and was nailed on the wire. The son of First Samurai owns a pair of wins going two turns, both of them gate-to-wire. He might go to the front in this final prep for the Kentucky Derby and never look back.

TV: TVG, NYRA Channel 71.

LAST WEEK: At Meydan, So You Think ran fourth in the Dubai World Cup. At Gulfstream, Brilliant Speed was fifth in the Appleton. Union Rags ran third in the Florida Derby.