Inevitably Baffert

I admit to being baffled how Bob Baffert could only have won 26% of his starts last year. Maybe he just runs too many horses in the same races or something. Every time I go through charts, I take for granted when I see a certain kind of race, like Santa Anita's sprinting first-level allowance for 4+up on the dirt Friday, that Baffert won the race. I didn't know the winning horse D'pendable, but I said to myself, "Oh, that must be a Baffert horse." My feelings were even stronger when I saw the horse won easily after almost a 10-month layoff.

Since I took for granted that Baffert won the race, without even knowing that he had a starter in it, I was incredulous over the winning payout, which was $11.00. The horse may have paid that much because he was new to the dirt in his 3rd start (had previously only run on turf), and because the once (and still?) highly regarded Runflatout was one of the challengers.

Looking at his yearly numbers, I see that Baffert has never really been a phenomenal winning-percentage guy: his 2011 rate was actually his best since 1997, and his second best ever, unless you count some very low-start years when he was just getting going with thoroughbreds. Whether he is winning 17%, as he did in 2007, or 26%, as he did last year, I would submit that he is much more the magician than his winning percentage numbers suggest. A more serious hypothesis to explain why his winning percentages reflect a mere mortal than the "overloading races with entries" theory is of course that he perhaps place his horses ambitiously: he tries to climb the ladder, rather than racking up wins.

In any event, you will never convince me that he isn't getting his horses to run lengths and lengths faster than an average trainer would (actually, lengths and lengths faster than even a good trainer at the elite 'A' tracks would). I read the Racing Form and past performances, see, and the Baffert horses do not display normal form patterns.