Honest Mischief tops the The Paulick Report: 2025-26 All-Value Sire Team
We'll close out this year's All-Value Sire Team with by far the closest race between First and Second Team of this year's series. The top two are so evenly matched statistically and commercially, we're practically talking about a "1 and 1A" situation.
But, someone has to come out on top, and Honest Mischief earned First Team honors for a third consecutive season based on just how much ground he's been able to clear in his young stud career.
New York has a strong state-bred stakes program that's only going to get stronger in the years ahead, and Honest Mischief already has seven stakes winners from his first two crops of racing age, which puts him in the top-six of all North American second-crop sires regardless of fee or location. His five stakes winners in 2025 was the most of any New York sire.
Honest Mischief has never stood for a fee higher for $7,500, and he has 11 horses that have earned six figures, with plenty more on the cusp of joining that club. The appeal of a state-bred program is winning a lot of races and making a lot of bonus money to do it, and with a 16 percent wins-from-starts rate, Honest Mischief is rapidly developing into a mailbox money factory for breeders, and a check-printer for racetrack connections.
What is perhaps most interesting about Honest Mischief's ascent is that he's turned into an incredible source of 2-year-old precocity despite never racing as a juvenile himself.
He finished 23rd in this year's Juvenile Sale Power Rankings, which was the fourth-best finish among this year's Value Sires. That was powered by a lightning-fast group of juveniles who turned in the second-fastest average breeze time for an eighth of a mile, at :10.108 seconds - measured in tenths of a second instead of fifths. Honest Mischief had 13 juveniles breeze one furlong during the 2-year-old sales of 2025, and eight of them went in :10-flat or faster. That's an incredible strike rate.
Those 2-year-olds went on to light the track on fire this year, too, putting Honest Mischief in the pole position as New York's top 2-year-old sire by winners, stakes winners, and earnings. He added a trio of juvenile stakes winners in 2025, including Braverthanubelieve, who took the New York Stallion Series Stakes at Aqueduct earlier this month.
Honest Mischief's resume even got a bit of international flavor in 2025, with Arigatou Gozaimasu, who finished second in the G3 U.A.E. Oaks. It was actually a pretty big season in Dubai for Honest Mischief, who also had Honest Moon run third in the Al Bastakiya.
As a son of all-everything sire Into Mischief, from a deep Juddmonte family that features stallions like Empire Maker and First Defence, Honest Mischief had all the pedigree he needed to set up shop, but we've seen no shortage of blue-blooded prospects flop at stud, especially when their partners are not consistently of Kentucky commercial quality.
Honest Mischief is not only meeting expectations under those circumstances, but he is thriving, outpacing several current and former Kentucky stallions who were offered many more breaks when it came to their initial books of mares. The competition among the New York stallion ranks gets deeper every year, but I see no reason why Honest Mischief shouldn't continue to reside at or near the top of the list well into the future.