As much as American Pharoah changed the lives of so many people around him, there are some things that never change.
A new year is almost at hand. Precocious 2-year-olds are about to turn the calendar page and become intriguing 3-year-olds.
And Bob Baffert is back on the Triple Crown trail.
While the odds are pretty slim that Baffert will match last year's glorious and unprecedented Triple Crown and Grand Slam season with Zayat Stable's American Pharoah, there's no such thing as a rebuilding campaign inside the Hall of Fame trainer's formidable stable.
Baffert merely reloads.
Baffert has won the last two editions of the Breeders' Cup Classic with first Bayern and then American Pharoah and both of those stars have headed off to new and more pleasurable lives at stud. While that would be a Grand Canyon-like hole to fill in anyone's barn, there's no need to pass around the collection plate for the 62-year-old trainer.
He still has Dortmund, who was third to American Pharoah in the Kentucky Derby, and figures to be a major player in the lucrative older male division.
He also has no shortage of fast, well-bred 2-year-olds, including a pair who just ran 1-2 in the year's final Grade 1 stakes for juvenile runners.
In the $350,000 Los Alamitos Derby, the final furlong boiled down to private duel between Baffert's Mor Spirit and Toews on Ice in which Mor Spirit edged clear in the final sixteenth to notch a 1-1/4-length victory over his stablemate. Some six lengths behind them, I'malreadythere passed tired horses to finish third.
"Turning for home," Baffert said, "it was a good feeling. I knew was going to win the race, just didn't know with which one."
Yes, some things never change.
The Los Alamitos Futurity marked just his fourth career start and he has yet to finish worse than second. He broke his maiden by 4-1/4 lengths at Santa Anita in October in his second race and then was shipped to Churchill Downs for the Grade 2 mile-and-a-sixteenth Kentucky Jockey Club in which he finished second to Breeders' Cup Juvenile Turf runner-up Airoforce by a length and three quarters over a sloppy track.
It was a path similar to the one Baffert charted for Dortmund a year ago, when Kaleem Shah's son of Big Brown broke his maiden at Santa Anita, then traveled east to the home of the Run for the Roses in Blue Grass country to capture an allowance race and returned to California to post a victory by a head over Firing Line, who would finish second in the Kentucky Derby.
Considering how American Pharoah was last year's 2-year-old champ, Mor Spirit is surely a few cuts below Baffert's horse of a lifetime. Yet given the illustrious body of work compiled by the man with the white hair and dark glasses, it's hardly far-fetched to believe that Mor Spirit or one of his stablemates can one day add to some of Baffert's marvelous feats, such as six wins in the Preakness or eight wins in the Haskell.
"This is the time of the year when you want to see something like this. It was a little disappointing he got beat last time, but it looks like we've got him figured out, so now we can just sit back and pick some spots for him," Baffert said. "In the race at Churchill Downs I didn't want to take a chance of taking him back and getting mud kicked in his face, so we sent him up in there [to be part of the pace]. I just told Gary today, 'ride him like you usually do and let him sit and finish.'"
Toews On Ice, owned in part by longtime Baffert pal Mike Pegram, wears the same silks as Real Quiet, who fell a nose shy of giving Baffert a Triple Crown sweep in 1998. He's more seasoned than Mor Spirit, with six career starts after the mile-and-a-sixteenth LA Futurity. He had won three straight stakes, capped by the Grade 3 Bob Hope, going into his Grade 1 debut but the Los Alamitos race marked his first start beyond seven furlongs.
The speedy son of Archarcharch pressed the pace of longshot Frank Conversation before jockey Martin Garcia guided him to a short-lived lead in the stretch.
"He ran game,'' said Baffert. "The race shaped up different than I thought it would with [Frank Conversation] showing speed, but Martin didn't panic and just sat there. He rode a good race. He just got run down by a good horse.''
A good horse in Bob Baffert's barn?
You really didn't expect anything else, did you?