Bob Baffert watched the Kentucky Derby on TV at home in Pasadena with a couple of his kids, reacting the same as most fans did. He was wowed by the three-horse photo finish. Impressed by Mystik Dan, the 18-1 shot who prevailed. Awed by Kenny McPeek and Brian Hernandez Jr.
“It’s a great training job, but you needed a brilliant ride,” Baffert said in praise of McPeek and Hernandez, the trainer and jockey who teamed up to achieve a rare double, winning the Kentucky Oaks last Friday with Thorpedo Anna and the Derby on Saturday with Mystik Dan benefiting from a rail-hugging trip.
Now Baffert switches from fan-on-the-couch mode to his more familiar competitive posture as he prepares Muth and Imagination for the 149th Preakness Stakes on May 18.
Final pre-Preakness workouts are scheduled Friday morning at Santa Anita and a flight to Baltimore is booked Tuesday for Muth, the Arkansas Derby winner with jockey Juan Hernandez, and Imagination, the Santa Anita Derby runner-up with Frankie Dettori.
Entries will be set Monday for the $2 million, Grade I Preakness, with as many as nine horses confirmed or under consideration. McPeek says he’s still deciding whether to run Mystik Dan but sounds more likely to do it as time passes. California horses Stronghold (seventh in the Derby) and Endlessly (ninth) will not run.
The Churchill Downs operators who put on the Derby have made Baffert and his horses persona non grata and equos non grata at the Louisville track since 2021, when Medina Spirit seemed to have given the trainer his seventh Derby victory only to be disqualified for a medication violation.
But the results of this year’s Derby seemed to beg for Baffert to hurry back to the Triple Crown series, offering a clearer path for Muth or Imagination to add to the Hall of Fame trainer’s eight Preakness winners, a number that includes Triple Crown winners American Pharoah in 2015 and Justify in 2018, as well as National Treasure in 2023.
Any notion that the Kentucky Derby is just as good without Baffert’s horses was dispelled when the race was won by a colt whose previous start was a third-place finish in the Arkansas Derby – 6¼ lengths behind Muth. The blanket finish among Mystik Dan, Sierra Leone and Forever Young meant that none of the 20 horses asserted superiority. The horse who went to Louisville with an air of dominance, Fierceness, faded to finish 15th. Speed figures, based on the final time, were unimpressive.
All of which contributes to Muth being the likely favorite in the Preakness.
But Baffert isn’t saying any of that. Interviewed Thursday morning at his Santa Anita barn, he expressed complete respect for his Preakness opposition.
“They were all good horses (in the Kentucky Derby),” Baffert said. “But when you have 20 horses, and there’s a lot of scrubbing going on, a lot of chaos during the race, they were just tired there at the end.”
He expects McPeek to decide to run Mystik Dan.
“Oh, he’ll be there,” said Baffert, who phoned to congratulate McPeek. “I think it’s important to be there.”
He isn’t going to try to play “spoiler” of a Triple Crown bid by Mystik Dan, and he doesn’t sound extra motivated to beat the Derby horses because of Churchill Downs’ sanctions against him.
“I don’t go in there on a mission to beat the Derby winner,” Baffert said.
The 1 3/16-mile Preakness, at Pimlico Race Course, is limited to 14 horses and doesn’t appear that it will draw that many.
Confirmed entrants, as of Thursday morning, were Muth and Imagination; the D. Wayne Lukas-trained duo of Just Steel (17th in the Derby) and Seize the Grey (winner of the Pat Day Mile on the Derby undercard); Tuscan Gold (third in the Louisiana Derby), Uncle Heavy (fifth in the Wood Memorial) and Mugatu (fifth in the Blue Grass).
Unconfirmed are Mystik Dan and Copper Tax (winner of the Federico Tesio Stakes at Laurel Park in Maryland).
Lukas, speaking on a conference call with racing writers Thursday, talked up Baffert’s chances.
“He’s going to come into this one with two good horses, and they will be fresh,” said Lukas, a six-time Preakness winner.
“Fresh is OK,” Baffert had said earlier in the morning, “but the good-horse part is more important than the fresh-horse part.”
It all makes the man who watched the Derby on TV at home in Pasadena the trainer to beat on the track in Baltimore.
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If he doesn’t win, Baffert said, he’d like to see McPeek and Mystik Dan do it and have a shot at a Triple Crown sweep June 8 in the Belmont Stakes. But that’s as close as Baffert got to sounding like a fan. He wants to win the second leg of the classic series, the first available to him this season.
“I’ve never thought of it as beating the Derby winner,” Baffert said. “It’s just winning the Preakness.”
Follow Kevin Modesti on X (formerly Twitter) @Kevin Modesti.
