Jay Bernardini with one of the horses he trains at Suffolk Downs

On a beautiful Saturday afternoon this summer, Suffolk Downs feels empty. About 2,500 people show up at a facility that could easily hold more than 10 times that number. Nearly all of the customers are men and most of them are elderly. Many of the men don’t even bother to go outside to watch the horses compete; instead, they crowd around TV monitors inside to see how their bets on races at other tracks come out.

Overall, $429,000 is bet at Suffolk Downs on this Saturday in late July — $94,000 on the track’s own races and $335,000 on simulcast races from Saratoga, Del Mar, Gulfstream Park, and other tracks. Another $425,000 is bet on Suffolk Downs races by patrons of simulcast facilities around the country.

The bets are not enough to keep Suffolk Downs going. The owners of the track acknowledge they are losing lots of money (nearly $47 million over the last seven years), but they have one last play. Suffolk Downs has become a wild card as the Massachusetts Gaming Commission awards a Greater Boston casino license this week.

It may seem odd to base a casino decision on a money-losing horse track, but that’s essentially what the commission did with the award of the lone slots license in February. The commission voted 3-2 in favor of Penn National’s proposed slots facility in Plainville because the project had the added advantage of saving 120 jobs at the adjacent harness-racing track.

The owners of Suffolk Downs are hoping the commission follows the same logic with the Greater Boston casino license, awarding the license to Mohegan Sun and in the process saving some 800 jobs connected to the thoroughbred track. Suffolk Downs is promising to keep the track going for at least 15 years using the hefty rent payments it will receive from Mohegan Sun to offset track losses; if Mohegan Sun doesn’t win the license, the owners of Suffolk Downs say they will probably redevelop the property for other uses.

Supporting Suffolk Downs, despite its uncertain future, is the primary way Mohegan Sun differentiates itself from its rival Wynn Enterprises, which is proposing a casino in Everett. The rationale for the gaming commission is simple: A vote for Mohegan Sun will not only authorize the construction of a casino in Revere, but retain New England’s last thoroughbred track at the same site.

“What good is it to create jobs in Everett and lose thousands here,” says Jay Bernardini of Lynn, who works as a horse trainer at Suffolk Downs.

Bernardini and other track workers say the financial support from the casino should put the track on more solid footing and help it to attract more horses and larger crowds. “People will come,” Bernardini says. “Eventually, it will blossom.”

Bernardini and others say the track competes against other forms of entertainment and can’t survive without money from gambling. “There aren’t a lot of tracks that can run on their own now,” he says.

The state’s gaming law already diverts money from gambling into horse racing, allowing tracks to offer bigger purses that will hopefully attract more horses and lead to more races. Last week, the gaming commission formalized a decision to split the extra purse money 75-25 between the thoroughbred and harness racing tracks. The commission also voted to put the purse money into escrow for three years if either of the tracks shuts down, in the hope that the money will entice a newcomer to give the business of horse racing a shot.

Steve Wynn, the Las Vegas casino operator, told CommonWealth in March that he couldn’t imagine the gaming commission basing its casino license decision on a money-losing thoroughbred horse track. “That is so preposterous. The race track business is dead. Hello? What do you need, a building to fall on your head? Thoroughbred racing is dying. Every slot machine joint put in every track hasn’t made one speck of difference,” he said.

Steve Zorn, a New York attorney who specializes in putting together horse racing partnerships, says the proceeds from casinos can prop up horse tracks. But he says tracks such as Suffolk Downs, which operate at the lower end of the horse racing spectrum, face a steep challenge as the pipeline for race horses is drying up. Records indicate the number of foals born in the United States has been falling steadily for the last decade, dropping from 35,047 in 2005 to 21,275 last year. That decline means a growing shortage of race horses, which is a big problem for tracks.

“You’ve got too many races chasing too few horses,” he says. “The obvious solution is fewer races.”

Zorn says tracks such as Suffolk are on the bubble and likely to close as the shortage of horses becomes more acute, with or without gambling money.

“I suppose they could get paid enough to stay open for 15 years and run racing as a public charity, but they’re going to be losing a lot of money,” he says.