Big Cuddle adds fresh intrigue to Haskell Stakes at Monmouth Park
Big Cuddle brings a Maryland-bred upstart into the July 18 Haskell after stakes wins at Laurel and Delaware Park pushed him into Monmouth’s spotlight.
Big Cuddle will add a fresh local-to-regional angle to the $1 million Grade I Haskell Stakes on Saturday, July 18, 2026, at Monmouth Park in Oceanport, New Jersey. Monmouth Park is billing Haskell Day as Summer’s Biggest Party, with five additional stakes races on the card, including the Grade 2 United Nations.
The 3-year-old colt gives the race another proven winner and a distinctly Maryland-rooted storyline. Big Cuddle is by Great Notion out of Frechette, by El Padrino, was bred by Two Legends Farm, and is owned by Pocket 3’s Racing LLC and trained by Gary Capuano. Capuano paid $30,000 for him at the 2024 Fasig-Tipton Midlantic Eastern Fall Yearling Sale, a modest buy-in that now has a colt from the Midlantic pipeline headed into one of the summer’s biggest dirt races.
Big Cuddle earned the trip the hard way. He won the 2025 Maryland Million Nursery Stakes as a juvenile, then stepped forward again this spring with a victory in the Sir Barton Stakes at Laurel Park on May 16, 2026. He followed that with a four-length win in the Delaware Derby at Delaware Park on June 13, a result that marked him as more than a one-race regional horse and confirmed that he could carry his form beyond Maryland.
His current line shows why the Haskell field gets more interesting with him in it. Equibase lists Big Cuddle with 5 starts, 4 wins and 1 second, along with $340,020 in career earnings. That record is not the profile of a throw-in. It is the profile of a colt whose connections have moved him through every step with intent, then chosen the Haskell as the place to find out whether the rise can continue against the best 3-year-olds in the country.
That is what makes Big Cuddle matter to the broader midsummer picture. He is not arriving with the highest national profile, but he is arriving with momentum, a graded-stakes resume in the making and a win pattern that has already traveled from Laurel to Delaware. If he runs well at Monmouth, he adds another legitimate contender to the division. If he does not, the Haskell will still have done what it is supposed to do: sort promising horses from elite ones in a race that can reshape the second half of the 3-year-old season.
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