With the Saratoga race meet having finished its extended (being young enough to remember when it was just “The August Place To Be”) run yesterday, two pairs of juvenile stakes results jumped out from the final week as especially noteworthy — those of the traditional closing weekend Grade 1 Hopeful for colts and Grade 1 Spinaway for fillies, both 7 furlong dirt events, and then the Grade 3 With Anticipation for colts and listed PG Johnson for fillies, both of which are turf routes.
Todd Pletcher trainees won all four races (proving that he hasn’t forgotten how to train 2YOs, even if that’s a smaller segment of his success than it used to be), with the Spendthrift Farm-owned Ted Noffey and Tommy Jo winning the Hopeful and Spinaway, respectively, while the Mike Repole-owned Final Score and Time To Dream took the With Anticipation and the PG Johnson.
Even more relevant for our purposes is that Ted Noffey and Tommy Jo are both by Into Mischief (who stands at Spendthrift), while Final Score and Time To Dream are both by Not This Time (whose son Up to the Mark was an Eclipse Champion for Repole and Pletcher).
Into Mischief and Not This Time both represent the Storm Cat sire-line, the former via Harlan’s Holiday (an Ohio-bred, multiple Grade 1-winning son of Storm Cat’s early Grade 1 winner Harlan), while the latter is a son of Storm Cat’s best sire son Giant’s Causeway (arguably also Storm Cat’s best racing son). Storm Cat, of course, overcame modest expectations (and offset knees) to become the most internationally sought-after stallion since his own grandsire Northern Dancer, with a plethora of top class sons and daughters on both dirt and turf, in the US and abroad; and they were darlings of the sales rings, as well.
Interestingly, both Into Mischief and Not This Time have similar profiles to their illustrious forebear: whereas Storm Cat started at a $30,000 stud fee before climbing to $500,000 a cover at the height of his powers, Into Mischief (whose own conformation is faulted by being quite obviously over-at-the-knee) began at $12,500 and was the subject of Spendthrift’s pioneering “Share the Upside” program, but now stands for a $250,000 fee, while Not This Time (who raced only four times, all at 2YO, before injury forced his retirement) started off at $15,000 and was up to $175,000 as of the 2025 breeding season.
Into Mischief is well on his way to his seventh straight Leading General Sire title (a modern record), thanks in no small part to having picked up his third Kentucky Derby-G1 victory in 2025 with Sovereignty. Into Mischief has also been the Leading Juvenile Sire six times, though at the moment he sits fourth on this year’s list behind the current leader, Not This Time.
For all of these similarities, one difference to note between the sire success of Into Mischief and Not This Time is that the former, though he does get the odd good turf horse, is very predominantly a sire of top class dirt horses — as Spendthrift notes quite clearly on his webpage, his progeny’s eight Breeders’ Cup wins have come exclusively on dirt. Meanwhile, Not This Time appears significantly more versatile with — as Taylor Made notes with pride on his webpage — Eclipse Champions on both dirt and turf. (We’d also note that in addition to his pair of juvenile turf stakes winners at Saratoga mentioned above, he also had the 17-and-3/4 length winner It’s Our Time on dirt at the meet.)
As impressive as the stallion careers of Into Mischief and Not This Time are generally, the performances by their four Saratoga stakes winners last week were each pretty incredible of their own accord.
First up came Not This Time’s Time To Dream. A $750,000 Saratoga sale yearling out of the Street Sense mare Wild Silk (and thus a half to the multiple graded winner Red Carpet Ready) who had been a debut winner, Time To Dream circled the field on the turn in the PG Johnson and sprinted home to win the 1-1/16 mile event by 5 lengths with very impressive closing fractions of :23.87 for her last quarter-mile, and an incredible :05.81 for her last sixteenth.
Time To Dream is one of a pair of black-type winners (plus two more black-type placed runners) for Not This Time out of Street Sense mares.
Final Score, himself a $600,000 purchase at the same Saratoga sale where Time To Dream brought $750k, went about his With Anticipation win the next day in a very different manner from his stablemate. He broke straight to the lead, set steady fractions, and then kicked for home with an equally-impressive turn-of-foot that saw him draw off by 4-1/2 lengths with a closing quarter-mile split of :23.49 and a final sixteenth of :05.99. In fact, Final Score also ran his second-to-last quarter in less than :24, too, and his final time of 1:41.75 was just about two full seconds faster than Time To Dream ran the day prior.
Final Score, whose female family has a significant amount of turf in it, is one of two black-type winners by Not This Time out of Bernardini mares (the other being Magnitude) from just eight runners bred this way. The With Anticipation was his third trip to the post, as he was a closing 2nd going 5-1/2 furlongs on dirt (in a race that came off the turf) before breaking his maiden at 1-1/16 miles on turf in his second start. The way that he leveled off when asked and sprinted home under those Repole blue and orange silks couldn’t help but call to mind Not This Time’s champion Up to the Mark, who finished off his races in similar style.
Moving onto the dirt races, Into Mischief’s daughter Tommy Jo is a Spendthrift homebred out of the Pioneerof the Nile mare Mother Mother, and she represents the extremely successful Into Mischief/Empire Maker cross (responsible for the likes of Mandaloun and Laurel River). Another who had broken her maiden earlier in the Saratoga meet, Tommy Jo was the even-money favorite in the Spinaway and ran to those odds.
After tracking the blistering early pace, she swung three wide around the turn and then drew off in the stretch with a distinctive low head carriage to win by 6-1/2 lengths in a solid enough time of 1:23.39 — though the quick early fractions and being eased up at the end factored into to her less-impressive closing splits (a final quarter in :25.03 and a final eighth in :13.82).
But there was nothing less than impressive about Ted Noffey in the Hopeful. A strongly-made, striking gray colt with plenty of scope, Ted Noffey sold to Spendthrift for $650,000 as a Keeneland September yearling and (like all three of the others) had broken his maiden earlier in the Saratoga meet. He broke like a shot in the Hopeful, but allowed a rival to hustle up and set the early pace to his inside. The fractions of this race were decent enough (:23.16, :46.30), but not as taxing as the early pace of the Spinaway (which went in :22.22, :44.54).
Regardless of the fractions, Ted Noffey could not have been more impressive in moving to the leader while still under a hard hold off the turn, and his explosiveness in kicking clear once Johnny V. asked him to go was phenomenal and he increased his lead over the 2nd- and 3rd-placed horses (who both also came from off the pace) from 3 lengths to 8-1/2 lengths in the final furlong. His time of 1:22.35 was significantly faster than that of Tommy Jo in the Spinaway, while his closing fractions (:23.88 and :12.17, respectively) backed up the visual impression that he was running strongly through the wire.
Ted Noffey’s dam is a daughter of the Unbridled’s Song stallion Old Fashioned, meaning he’s bred on the same cross as Eclipse Champion Covfefe, Grade 1 winner Gina Romantica, and the top-class juvenile Maximus Mischief, of whom Ted Noffey was physically reminiscent with his powerful, uphill build through the lane in the Hopeful (not to mention his quick break). Given Ted Noffey’s scope and the style of his victory, it ought to surprise nobody if he winds up providing his legendary sire with his fourth Kentucky Derby winner in 2026.