After American Pharoah was defeated in the Travers Stakes last Saturday, owner Ahmed Zayat said that his “gut feeling right now, without being outspoken, is to retire him.”Others agreed: “The loss after eight straight brilliant victories was a tough one,” wrote the Associated Press, calling the Travers outcome an “indication that the time to retire the horse is sooner rather than later.”Zayat slept on his gut for a few days and has now come to a far more sensible conclusion. He announced Thursday that the Triple Crown winner will instead stay in training and be pointed for the Breeders’ Cup Classic on Oct. 31 at Keeneland.Good for him. Retiring American Pharoah after his Travers defeat would have been a disservice to the horse, his connections, and his legion of fans – and it all would have been due to an erroneous, though widespread, view of what happened in the Travers.In the immediate aftermath of the race, Zayat and jockey Victor Espinoza kept saying that American Pharoah had not run his race, and a swarm of their followers agreed that something had gone terribly wrong. There must have been an illness, an injury, or even a race-riding conspiracy for the horse to have lost. Cue the tinkly piano music: Something awful happened at Saratoga.No, it didn’t. What happened to American Pharoah is that he lost a horse race with as good an effort as any he put in during the spring classics. He had the first truly tough trip of his career, fighting off a long challenge from Frosted that sapped just enough of his strength to leave him vulnerable to Keen Ice’s late charge. It happens dozens of times a day at racetracks across the country: The valiant front-runner wins the battle but loses the war. Such horses are not immediately retired because they lost.From a Beyer Speed Figure perspective, the Travers was not an aberrant or subpar performance. American Pharoah recorded figures of 105, 102, 105, and 109 in winning the Triple Crown and the Haskell Invitational. In the Travers, he ran a 105 despite the pace pressure while finishing second, beaten just three-quarters of a length. The race that this Travers immediately reminded me of was Smarty Jones’s defeat in the 2004 Belmont Stakes, where he fended off repeated pressure for the first time in his previously undefeated career, taking just enough starch out of him for Birdstone to run him down. You could argue that his tenacity in holding second place despite the taxing trip enhanced rather diminished his stature and revealed a new dimension of courage under fire.You could say the same of American Pharoah. Any horse can lose a race because of the way it unfolds.Tweak needed for juvenile turf stakesThe American Graded Stakes Committee generally does a pretty good job of sorting through the American racing calendar and tiering the best stakes races as Grade 1, Grade 2, or Grade 3 events. When it comes to 2-year-old grass racing, however, its grades are indefensible and illogical.There are only five American graded stakes on grass for 2-year-olds leading up to the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Turf and Juvenile Fillies Turf: the With Anticipation at Saratoga this past Wednesday, then the Pilgrim and Miss Grillo at Belmont on Sept. 26 and 27 and the Bourbon and Jessamine at Keeneland Oct. 4 and 7. Care to guess which is the only one of them rated a Grade 2, while the others are all Grade 3s? Unbelievably, the only Grade 2 is the very first of them, the With Anticipation, which drew a field of six Wednesday at Saratoga and where maidens finished first and second. Does anyone truly believe this race deserves the same Grade 2 status as the San Antonio, Louisiana Derby, Oaklawn Handicap, Black-Eyed Susan, and Woody Stephens? Everything about its Grade 2 ranking is preposterous. How can you start out the division’s stakes season with a Grade 2 and then having nothing but Grade 3s until the Breeders’ Cup? The Pilgrim and Bourbon consistently attract bigger and better fields than the With Anticipation – no surprise since they are four to five weeks later and draw more experienced and accomplished runners. It also makes no sense that the With Anticipation’s companion filly race, the P.G. Johnson a day later, is entirely ungraded, while the Pilgrim and Miss Grillo, the Bourbon and Jessamine are matching pairs of Grade 3s.In addition, it seems unreasonable that Saratoga, Belmont, and Keeneland all have graded stakes for 2-year-old turfers while California has none. It’s time to upgrade the Zuma Beach and the Surfer Girl to Grade 3s despite their dreadful names.This is eminently fixable: Upgrade those two Santa Anita races and the P.G. Johnson to Grade 3s and knock the With Anticipation down from a Grade 2 to a Grade 3. See, wasn’t that easy?