Bob Baffert is a great trainer and a bad bet.
The white-haired wonder won his second Triple Crown and a career-high 32% of his races last year, but if you had bet an equal amount on each of Baffert’s 348 starters, you would have lost 7 cents on every dollar.
The price of his extraordinary success has come to include meager payoffs.
Baffert is so good with high-end horses that wealthy owners entrust him with their finest prospects and seasoned handicappers have learned to look elsewhere for value. His reputation depresses the odds on his entries to such an extent that more than half of Baffert’s 2018 winners — 61 out of 113 — paid 2-to-1 or less.
According to Equibase, Baffert’s average winning payout last year — $5.73 — was barely half of the national average of $11.23 for thoroughbred flat races.
“My horses do get overbet,” Baffert said. “There are a lot of times I’ll send a horse up there and (gamblers) will ask me, ‘What do you think? Is it a real favorite or a fake favorite?'”
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“It doesn’t matter if they’re running a burro,” rival trainer D. Wayne Lukas said. “They say, ‘Well, here’s Baffert. He wins races.’ So they bet.”
Mindful of wagering patterns as well as merit, Churchill Downs oddsmaker Mike Battaglia reflexively shortens the odds on Baffert’s entries. A horse that might otherwise be 10-1 or 12-1 in Battaglia’s morning line will be 6-1 or 8-1 if it is based in Baffert’s barn.
“Same with (Todd) Pletcher and Chad Brown,” Battaglia said. “When you see their names, you know they’re going to bet them down. … It’s a tribute. You know they have their horses ready.”
If there is a sure thing to be found at the racetrack, it is that the surest things tend to have a short shelf life. Pletcher showed a positive return on investment (ROI) in 1997 — meaning that betting $2 to win on each of his starters would have produced a profit — but he hasn’t been able to duplicate that feat over a full year since. Louisville-based Brad Cox has shown a positive ROI in six different years, most recently in 2015, but as his stature has risen and the caliber of his horses has improved, his ROI has receded.
The same can be said of Mike Maker, who produced a positive ROI four times in five years between 2004 and 2008, but not once in the last decade.
With American racetracks averaging a 17.3% takeout rate from pari-mutuel pools, beating a system heavily stacked in favor of the house requires extraordinary performance and, it appears, a relatively low profile.
“You’re a victim of your own fate there,” trainer Dale Romans said. “The more successful you get, the lower your odds are going to get, so the less chance you have to overcome it.
“… It’s just simple math. When you take out 18% off the top, in the long, big picture of a lot of races, it has to work out that way.”
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