The second half of a 3-year-old racehorse’s season can produce surprises. Sometimes, a 3-year-old coming out of the Triple Crown will run out of steam and other times a new sophomore will step forward and announce his presence with authority like “Nuke” LaLoosh in the classic baseball movie “Bull Durham.”

Nevada Beach would have made LaLoosh proud (had he not been a fictional character) with dominant 1 ½-length win in his graded stakes debut in the $300,000 Goodwood Stakes Sept. 27 at Santa Anita Park. The victory in the “Win and You’re In” Challenge Series race earned the lightly raced colt an expenses-paid starting spot in the 1 ¼-mile Longines Breeders’ Cup Classic Nov. 1 at Del Mar and his Hall of Fame trainer, Bob Baffert, is inclined to accept.

“Unless I see something I don’t like between now and then, as of now we’ll definitely run in the Breeders’ Cup,” Baffert said Sunday. “He’ll like the distance. He was just getting going there at the end.”

Accomplishments: Nevada Beach, a $260,000 purchase at the 2023 Keeneland September yearling sale, did not make his first start until April 19, 2025. He thus was never in the mix for the Triple Crown races. He won his first start at one mile by three-quarters of a length in an auspicious beginning.

Baffert next tested the dark bay or brown colt by Omaha Beach in a stakes race in his second start June 8 at Santa Anita in the 1 1/16-mile Affirmed Stakes and he finished second to more seasoned stablemate Gaming, a Grade 1 winner making his eighth start. Three weeks later, Nevada Beach nailed down his first stakes win with a 4 ¼-length runaway in the Los Alamitos Derby, completing 1 1/8 miles in a swift 1:47.59 as the 2-5 favorite.

The Goodwood Stakes marked the first time in Nevada Beach’s career that he did not enter the starting gate as the favorite – he was the third choice in the six-horse field at 8.50-1 odds – and he was stepping up to a Grade 1 race while facing older males for the first time. This was a significant test and, while Nevada Beach was not perfect, he proved up to the challenge.

He settled in fourth early under Hall of Fame jockey Mike Smith while last year’s Big Ass Fans Breeders’ Cup Dirt Mile winner Full Serrano set a moderate pace. Nevada Beach and Smith were not going to let him coast on the lead and move up to press Full Serano on the backstretch and that duo battled through the final turn into the Santa Anita stretch.

Nevada Beach switched leads a few times when Full Serrano refused to relent, but eventually he pulled away to win by 1 ½ lengths. He completed his final three-eighths of a mile in :36.74 with a final furlong in an eye-catching :12.31 according to Equibase. Considering he was pretty green in the stretch, Nevada Beach delivered a magnificent race in his fourth start, indicating he might just be scratching the surface of his ability.

Speed Figures: It’s no surprise that the Goodwood was a career-best effort for Nevada Beach. He boosted his Equibase Speed Figure six points to a 108 and his Beyer Speed Figure nine points to a 101. All of his races to date have been fast, but this was a significant improvement against a better caliber of opposition.

Looking Ahead: In a normal year, I might be aggressively hitching my wagon to the Nevada Beach train. He ticks almost every box I look for in a dirt horse approaching a marquee race. But this is no ordinary year and this is shaping up to be an abnormally strong edition of the Breeders’ Cup Classic. With standout older runners like Sierra Leone, Fierceness, Mindframe, and Forever Young plus 3-year-old Triple Crown race winners Sovereignty and Journalism and recent Pennsylvania Derby victor Baeza, the 2025 edition of the Breeders’ Cup Classic could be one of the strongest in history. To return to the baseball references, it’s a modern-day Murderer’s Row.

Long-term, I’m gobbling up Nevada Beach stock like a kid horking down candy on Halloween, but the 2025 Breeders’ Cup Classic against that quality of competition is just too much too soon for my taste for Nevada Beach in his fifth career start. He would have to be a superstar to win on Nov. 1 in his first try at 1 ¼ miles. Maybe Nevada Beach is just that, but I’ll be focused on others for the top spot in the Breeders’ Cup Classic and use him aggressively underneath to spice up my exotic bets.