On the penultimate day of the summer meeting at Saratoga Race Course, trainer Mark Casse was standing in front of a television on the ground floor of the clubhouse, watching one of his 2-year-olds race at Kentucky Downs.
English Law didn’t win on Sept. 1, but Casse has made plenty of trips to the winner’s circle at Saratoga this summer: Nine of his 15 winners have been 2-year-olds. Another six of his juveniles have placed, including Sherbini (Cairo Prince ), who was second in the listed Schuylerville Stakes on opening weekend and third in the Spinaway (G1) on closing weekend.
His 2-year-olds at the upstate meet are from a handful of owners, with one a homebred and the others ranging in price from $30,000 to $1.2 million. He has been instrumental in picking out most of them at sales.
“I’m a big pedigree guy,” he said. “I’m big on damsires. I don’t care whether the individual horses are tall, short, whatever. If they’re athletic and I like their pedigree, and the more pedigree they have, the less I demand of their looks.”
His 2-year-old Saratoga winners have been bred in Kentucky, Arkansas, Louisiana, and New York, by eight stallions, nearly all proven, whose 2021 stud fees ranged from $7,500 to $185,000. All but two were purchased as yearlings.
“I’ve had unproven sires bite me in the butt,” he said. “We did go with Authentic (sire of $725,000 debut winner Charlotte’s Heart), but she’s out of a tremendous mare and is a half to Casa Creed. There’s also a group of sires that are underrated, and I focus on those.”
Among those stallions is Cairo Prince (Pioneerof the Nile), who sired Sherbini and Casse trainee My Boy Prince , recently second in the King’s Plate at Woodbine .
In 2022, Casse bought a horse for his wife out of the Keeneland September Yearling Sale. He paid $25,000 for the son of Cairo Prince and pinhooked him the following year for $425,000. He also points to Lookin at Lucky as a sire that’s “been very good” to him, using as an example Pounce , purchased for $20,000 and a winner of $330,000 and two grade 3 races.
Casse owns a training facility in Ocala, Fla., and he tends to buy yearlings so that he can get them started there, with a staff that includes about a dozen people who have worked for the trainer for three decades.
“When we buy yearlings, I can get them started however I want,” he said. “We can break them and we can get them ready, and then by springtime, I usually have a fairly good idea of where they need to go.
“They’re more expensive at the 2-year-old sales,” he added. “And when I’ve had them since they were yearlings, I know what they’ve done every day.”
While he’s unconcerned about winning first-out, he does believe that horses should get to the track as soon as possible.
“I want them to learn, to run by horses, and when you do that, you’re not going to win a lot of times, because every horse reacts differently to kickback.”
Of his nine maiden winners at Saratoga this summer, two won on debut, five in their second start.
This is the 45th year that Casse has been training horses. He’s watched generations of horses and their progeny, in person and on pedigree pages, and he relies as much on his own experience and knowledge as he does on the formidable amount of data available about race records, matings, and progeny earnings.
“You could look at a guy who weighs 300 pounds and another guy who weighs 100 pounds, and you say, ‘Which one has high cholesterol?’ and it may be the guy that weighs 100 pounds because it’s hereditary.
“We get to look at 100 years or more of history and pay attention to it. That’s what I do.”
