Childs Walker

1 month ago | thebaltimorebanner.com | Childs Walker

You don’t usually want to be the subject of a Babb note. It’s not that the sage figure dissecting your failings expresses himself with any particular fury. It’s that Bob Babb is unsparing, even now, after 46 years of critiquing Johns Hopkins baseball players. “He’s an honest guy,” said Shawn Steuerer, an All-America third baseman on Babb’s current Hopkins team.

1 month ago | thebaltimorebanner.com | Childs Walker

The birds chirped. The horse transports rumbled. As the sun rose over Pimlico Race Course on Sunday morning, there was no indication that a remarkable race had unfolded on the same grounds just 11 hours earlier. There’s an inevitable exhale the morning after the tempest that is a Triple Crown race. But the feeling was more pronounced than usual, because this was not just the end of another Preakness weekend; it was the final bow for Pimlico as we know it.

1 month ago | thebaltimorebanner.com | Childs Walker

Person after person asked the same question: “How did he win that race?”Journalism looked agitated from the moment he stepped onto the track at Pimlico Race Course before the 150th running of the Preakness Stakes. He whipped his head about, pushing his exercise rider to the dirt at one point. Though he broke from the gate cleanly enough, he wasn’t moving with the alacrity he had two weeks earlier in the Kentucky Derby. That was just the start of his troubles.

1 month ago | tylerpaper.com | Childs Walker

BALTIMORE — Leaky ceilings and overstressed plumbing. A single elevator that might or might not work. A section of the grandstand that had to be condemned in 2019 because it could no longer safely support patrons. Is there any feature worthy of nostalgia at the version of Pimlico Race Course that’s about to host the Preakness Stakes for the final time before the broken-down Baltimore landmark is razed and replaced?

1 month ago | thebaltimorebanner.com | Childs Walker

No one has more reason to cling to tradition than D. Wayne Lukas. The 89-year-old trainer has saddled seven Preakness Stakes winners, from Codex in 1980 all the way to Seize the Grey last May. He has never been daunted by the brief, two-week break between the Kentucky Derby and the second jewel of the Triple Crown in Baltimore. But listen to the dean — make that “Coach,” Lukas’ nom de guerre — of Preakness trainers on the subject of the Triple Crown calendar: “Boy, now’s the time to change it.