Sunday, August 29, 2010

Baffert Mails Them In

When two of Bob Baffert's trainees, Richard's Kid and El Brujo, won a pair of Grade 1 races at Del Mar, their peerless conditioner was 3,000 miles across the country, tending to his stock at Saratoga (where he won a Grade 3 stake). Before he left California for New York, Baffert took the time to join the trashers of Del Mar's Polytrack racing surface, which has accounted for at least five deaths this season. The irony, of course, is that Richard's Kid and El Brujo get along swimmingly over Polytrack, and their latest efforts have made everyone in their camp $780,000 richer. Baffert's share is an estimated $78,000. I don't doubt for a moment that he will cash the check.

That Richard's Kid's repeat win in the $1-million Pacific Classic and El Brujo's win in the $300,000 Pat O'Brien Stakes will soften Baffert's harsh critique of the Del Mar track is an unlikely occurrence. Two spoonsful of sugar might make the medicine go down, but based on what Baffert recently said to the San Diego Union-Tribune, pigs will fly before the Hall of Fame trainer embraces Del Mar anytime soon. He left nothing open to translation.

"If they don't (switch back to a dirt main track), they'll see the quality of racing continue to decline," Baffert said. ". . . I'm probably going to go somewhere else next year. . . A lot of my clients, they don't want to come back."

Starting in 1997, Baffert won seven straight training titles at Del Mar. Not since Farrell Jones, in the 1960s, had a single trainer dominated the turf by the surf for such a long haul. But since 2007, when Del Mar marched to the ill-advised synthetic-track mandate by the California Horse Racing Board, Baffert's owners and the trainer himself have frequently groused about the hand they were dealt. One of Baffert's clients, Ahmed Zayat, had a public shout down with Joe Harper, the CEO of Del Mar, after which Zayat ordered Baffert to move all of his Del Mar horses to Saratoga.

Before this season, Baffert had saddled 86 stakes winners at Del Mar, more than anyone. Immediately and well behind him in the standings were four Hall of Fame trainers--Charlie Whittingham, Ron McAnally, Bobby Frankel and Wayne Lukas. But before Richard's Kid and El Brujo, Baffert was on the schneid in stakes wins this summer, had won but seven races and was winning at only an 11 per cent rate. He complained that the Del Mar surface played different virtually every day. "I'm sitting on good horses here, but I can't risk this surface," he told the San Diego newspaper.

But with the Pacific Classic being run for the 20th time, it would have been criminal for even Baffert to leave Richard's Kid in the barn. The son of Lemon Drop Kid and Tough Broad (and if that isn't a mating made in Damon Runyon heaven, I don't know what is) won the stake last year, a 24-1 shot waking up on the big day while the favorites Rail Trip and Colonel John failed to fire. Richard's Kid had won only one of six starts since then, but was still the second choice in a Pacific Classic that was vanilla, from top to bottom. The Usual Q.T., the favorite even though all of his wins had come on grass, led until mid-stretch before finishing fifth.

An hour later, Baffert had entered three horses in the Pat O'Brien, but scratched everyone but the right one. His entire career, El Brujo has been running on synthetic surfaces one place or the other, and he was fourth, absent the cleanest of trips, in the Bing Crosby Stakes at Del Mar a month ago. Among others, he beat Smiling Tiger, winner of the Crosby, in the O'Brien. Won't you come home, Bob Baffert, won't you come home? Del Mar is moaning, the whole day long. . .

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Saturday, August 21, 2010

California Schemin’

My friend Mark Ratzky has apparently taken a non-paying job as a consultant for the California Horse Racing Board. Ratzky, a former Daily Racing Form staffer, has submitted a list of options for where the waifish Oak Tree group might run its races this fall, now that Santa Anita is in-out-in-out, Del Mar has gone quietly into the night, and Hollywood Park, hat in hand, has come to the fore for the second time.

Ratzky, who has always brought a warped sense of humor to the table, thinks Richard Shapiro's backyard could be a location for the Oak Tree races. Another possibility posited by Ratzky is the Harris Ranch in Fresno County. He is being preposterous, of course. Shapiro, when he was chairman of of the racing board, became the father of synthetic racing surfaces in California. That legacy is no longer worth much on the open market. Harris was a member of the Shapiro-led board that force-fed the synthetics on every major thoroughbred track in the state. By one estimate, $40 million was poured into the projects, some of it money that Santa Anita and Golden Gate Fields never had, if their subsequent concessions to bankruptcy proceedings are any criteria.

Santa Anita, which has spent more than the other tracks, counting its outlay for do-overs and make-dos, is now facing another $5-million bill for a return to square one. If there were a Broadway show, the title would be, "Hybrid Today, Dirt Tomorrow." If Mel Brooks could make a musical out of Hitler, anything's possible.

Most of Santa Anita's $5-million cost would have been paid by rent and commissions from the Oak Tree meet, which has been a fixture there since 1969. But the Thoroughbred Owners of California and the state trainers' group both said that the conversion to dirt might take more time than what Santa Anita has between now and Oak Tree's start date of September 29. The racing board agreed, and denied Oak Tree a license to race at Santa Anita. That white-haired man you see on the corner with a tin cup might be Santa Anita's major domo, Frank Stronach.

For once, the owners and the trainers were simpatico. For once, the racing board did the right thing. Have you ever tried to buy dirt, lots of dirt? Where do you go? To Dirt World? Dirt City, maybe? I looked for Dirt International in the phone book and there was no listing.

A few years ago, when the new Santa Anita synthetic track was under construction, Sherwood Chillingworth of Oak Tree took me on a tour. I noticed mound after mound of dirt in the north parking lot.

"What's that?" I said.

"That's the old dirt," Chillingworth said. "Left over from when they started putting in the new track. We're saving it in case anything goes wrong."

They didn't save it long enough. Now Santa Anita could use some dirt, lots of it, and those Everests of dirt in the parking lot have gone bye-bye.

At the racing board meeting, Stronach was told that he needed the board's permission to return to dirt, and while this may have only been one of the niceties of parliamentary procedure, it seemed idiotic at face value. The synthetic era, short-lived as it's been, has been a disaster, a monument to poor research and poorer execution. Armies of functionaries were sent to tracks all over planet, to see how ersatz tracks had made horses' lives better, and the bottom line healthier. Immaterial, it seemed, was that they looked at tracks that had different climates for racing dates, and far fewer horses and racing dates to be accommodated.

Then the four California tracks affected by the racing board's mandate--Santa Anita, Hollywood Park, Del Mar and Golden Gate Fields--went virtually separate ways in hiring companies to install the new tracks. With the exception of Hollywood Park and Santa Anita, there was no overlap of surfaces, and Santa Anita's roll of the dice with Cushion Track came up snake-eyes. What I found really puzzling was that Santa Anita and Golden Gate went different ways, even though they are both owned by Magna and might have qualified for a two-track discount. Perhaps Santa Anita, given more time to commit, was still hoping for an 11th-hour synthetic reprieve from the racing board. One thing about Stronach, he never waffled about the new surfaces. He eschewed them from the outset, and he still does.

What also bothered me was that Los Alamitos, the quarter horse track in Orange County, was exempt from the synthetic mandate, even though it runs more dates than any track in the state and has frequently had a breakdown rate that's hardly envious.

It appears that Del Mar is going to bite the bullet and not hop on Santa Anita's return-to-dirt bandwagon. Ditto, Golden Gate. If they ever change their minds, they might have to buy their dirt from Stronach. He's in a position to become the new dirt king of the Western World.

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Sunday, August 15, 2010

Mr. 10,000 Becomes Mr. 11,000

I wrote a book, a history of Bay Meadows, that might be published some day, and Chapter 8 of the final draft is called "Mr. 10,000." Get me rewrite. Russell Baze won his 11,000th race on August 14, and doesn't time fly? It seems like only yesterday that Baze was at 10,000. It seems like only the day before yesterday that he was at 5,000.

Once I worked with a sardonic copy editor named George Kiseda. He played the devil's advocate so well that he should have come to work with a pitchfork, a cape, fake horns and a rubber tail. But Kiseda could also write, so when he attacked your purple prose, you paid attention. When Kiseda covered the NBA, the team in Philadelphia was notorious for padding the gate. So one night, in his game story, he wrote: "The crowd was announced as 12,473. Many of them were disguised as empty seats."


When Bill Shoemaker was still riding, toward the end of his career, it was de rigueur to mention how many career wins he had. "I don't care how many races he's won," Kiseda would crab. "Tell me how many he lost."

If Kiseda were still on the desk, he'd be asking the same question about Russell Baze. Math is not my forte, but after Baze recorded his 11,000th career win, my abacus showed that he also had 36,235 non-winning mounts. In the argot of the dugout, his batting average is .232, and if Kiseda saw that, he would sniff and say: "Triple-A stuff." He would be wrong, of course. A win rate of .232, over that many races, is Hall of Fame stuff, and the voters sent him into the shrine in 1999.

Everything else since then for the 52-year-old Baze might have seemed like icing on the cake, but his work ethic is relentless. Win No. 11,000 came at the Santa Rosa fair, in a maiden race aboard a filly, named Separate Forest, who had never raced before. "I'm going to keep chipping away," Baze was quoted in the Daily Racing Form. "I don't think 12,000 is out of reach."

It always comes up, every time Baze reaches a milestone, that too many of his wins have come at the Santa Rosas of racing, the boondocks of the game. Baze has heard this plaint before. "None of it bothers me," he once said. "I've done what I've done. Everybody is entitled to their opinion. But my argument to all that is, if it's so easy to win all these races on a minor circuit, how come someone else hasn't done it? I've heard that stuff about being the big fish in a little pond. I think what I am is a mid-sized fish in a mid-sized pond."

Riding most of his career at Golden Gate Fields and Bay Meadows, which isn't there anymore, Baze has seldom found Grade 1 horses in his backyard, but one that actually came out of nowhere was the champion sprinter Lost in the Fog. Greg Gilchrist, who trained Lost in the Fog, best remembered Baze for a race on another horse that didn't mean much. It was a miserable day in San Francisco, one the Chamber of Commerce wouldn't commit to memory, and with the rain coming down in buckets it would have been fashionable for Baze to bolt from the jockeys' room before the last race was run.

"It was getting dark, and the rain was actually coming down sideways," Gilchrist said. "The mud was a foot deep. But Russell stuck around, just to ride an $8,000 claimer. I looked up at a TV set as the horses were getting in the gate. You could hardly see them. But there was Russell, smiling as they loaded his horse."

Baze's career started on another dank day, at another track that's no longer there. He had just cleared 16 in 1974 when his father, Joe Baze, gave him a leg up at Yakima Meadows in Washington State on a $1,250 claimer named Oregon Warrior, who was trying to shake a five-race losing streak.

"This horse doesn't like horses running on the outside of him," was the only instruction that Joe Baze, a former jockey, gave his son.

Baze kept Oregon Warrior five-wide all the way, and they won by 2 1/2 lengths. The young man's share of the purse was $250.

"I was tickled to death," Baze said.

Joe Baze made sure his son rode the right way, and always rode to win.

"You know what makes Russell so good?" said Jason Lumpkins, a jockey who rode against him in Northern California. "He rides every race like it's his last ride."

The day after his record 11,000th win, Baze was to be back at the Santa Rosa fair, on the road to 12,000. He had seven mounts, one of them aboard a 5-year-old mare in the last race. If his horse won, Baze stood to earn about $600, before taxes. He would be tickled to death if that happened.

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