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The fifth Housatonic Recommended Mating for 2019 that features our favorite Kentucky value sire Munnings is for the five-time winning Successful Appeal mare Thicket.
We have made it quite clear numerous times how highly we think of Munnings as a stallion, and with his stud fee reduced to $20,000 in 2019, he has to be the best value sire in the business (if he wasn’t already). To hit some of the highlights: from his first 413 foals of racing age, including 128 2-year-olds of 2018, he has 28 stakes winners — an excellent 7%. This includes a pair of Grade 1 winners and eleven total Graded stakes winners. If you take this year’s 2-year-olds out of the stats (he does have two juvenile stakes winner this year), he has 9.5% stakes winners/foals aged 3 and up, and 3.9% Graded winners/foals. He has also accomplished this without much help from his mates, so far, as he has a 1.60 AEI/1.26 CI ratio.
With his better-bred crops coming shortly (starting with his 2018 yearlings, of which 64 averaged almost $80,000 this year, compared to his 2017 yearling average of $52,000 for 56 sold), these statistics are only going to improve in the coming years.
With respect to Thicket herself, Munnings already has the four-time stakes winner Hailstorm Slew from just three foals out of Successful Appeal mares (one of which is an unraced filly of 2015 from this exact pairing, who wound up in Korea but was a very nice, quick-looking physical as a yearling when she sold for $40,000), while the cross of Speightstown and his sons with In Reality-line mares has also produced Grade 3 winner Gemswick Park and another trio of stakes winners from no more than 58 foals bred that way.
This mating will result in a foal inbred 3×4 to Gone West, which is a pattern that has already produced Grade 3 winner Proforma by Munnings, while Munnings’s Grade 3 winner Chief Cicatriz is inbred 3×3 to Gone West. Those two come from just sixteen foals by Munnings inbred to Gone West in the third or fourth generation — so this pattern is working quite well, and is another reason to be excited about this particular pairing.
Proforma, by Munnings and inbred to Gone West, wins the G3 Kentucky Downs Sprint
Grade 3 winner Chief Cicatriz, by Munnings and inbred to Gone West, wins the Phoenix Gold Cup
Four-time stakes winner Hailstorm Slew, by Munnings out of a Successful Appeal mare, wins at Oaklawn
Munnings wins the G2 Woody Stephens
Munnings wins the G2 Tom Fool
Munnings breezes prior to selling for $1.8 million at Calder