Brant © Benoit Photo

The Del Mar Futurity, the crowning jewel of the juvenile season at the seaside track each summer, will have its 78th running Sunday as the foremost event on an 11-race card as the shore oval brings to a close its 86th year of sport alongside the blue Pacific.

As it has come to be expected over the past three decades at Del Mar, the white-haired wonder trainer Bob Baffert has the big bullets to fire in the $300,000 headliner, this time with four of the six entrants coming out of his barn. Baffert, you see, has won this race no fewer than 18 times, including the last four in a row. The man, obviously, has a special touch with a young horse, which is one of the key reasons he resides in racing’s Hall of Fame.

For this go-round, the only other conditioner on the grounds willing to take on the king is Doug O’Neill, a man with more than a feather or two in his cap (like a pair of wins in the Kentucky Derby) and who will be sending out a two of his youngsters for the seven-furlong crucible.

Baffert’s quality quartet is led by a racy gray colt named Brant, who fetched no less than $3 million at a 2-year-old in-training sale this past March for owner Amr F. Zedan, a Saudi Arabian businessman who races under the name Zedan Racing Stables.

In his initial spin on the racetrack, the son of champion Gun Runner won for fun in fast time in a straight maiden affair on the second day of the Del Mar session, scoring by more than five lengths with Eclipse Award rider Flavien Prat aboard.

Prat has won the Del Mar Futurity three times, including the last two editions for Baffert. Morning line maker John Lies has hung Brant at even money in the dash, underlining a case for what might be Baffert’s latest shining star.

The trainer’s other runners are SF Racing, Starlight Racing, et al’s Balboa, the same outfit’s Litmus Test and Pegram, Watson and Weitman’s Desert Gate.

Here’s the full field for the stakes in post position order with riders and morning line odds:

Calumet Farm’s Brigante (Hector I. Berrios, 15-1); Brant; Balboa (Kazushi Kimura, 6-1); Davis or Great Friends Stables’ Civil Liberty (Antonio Fresu, 9/2); Desert Gate (Juan Hernandez, 4-1), and Litmus Test (Tyler Gaffalione, 6-1).

The Futurity will go off as Race 4 on the card with a post time of approximately 3 p.m.

Also on the Sunday agenda is the 14th running of the Del Mar Juvenile Turf, a mile turf test that has lured an overflow field of 15. Races like these are almost always wide-open affairs and that holds true for this version of the stakes.

One young colt in the lineup who’ll draw an extra look or two would be Hronis Racing or Iapetus Racing’s Hey Nay Nay, who is two-for-two so far in his brief career, including a smart tally on the east coast on August 2 in Monmouth Park’s Tyro Stakes.  The John Sadler-trained youngster will have Berrios in the irons.

First post Sunday is at 1:30 p.m.