NEW BREED : Baffert’s Not Like the Rest--He Wins a Lot More Often

He doesn’t look like most of the others; he doesn’t act like them. He cruises through the stable area of Los Alamitos Race Course--a world of western shirts and tight lips--in his custom Jeep station wagon wearing a Hawaiian print shirt and a Swiss watch. He speaks into the vehicle’s sun visor, and it speaks back to him--he has a mobile speaker phone.

Bob Baffert is not your ordinary quarter-horse trainer.

“He’s different from everyone else around here,” said Laura Meier, Baffert’s assistant trainer. “I don’t know any other way to describe it. It’s his manner and his attitude. They’re so different from all the other trainers. I guess that’s why I didn’t like him at first.”

What he is, is a whirling mix of laid back and go for the throat. A plain talker who uses the word buddy as liberally as a used-car salesman would. He appears to be the next great quarter-horse trainer (his filly Elite Empress is favored in tonight’s $629,000 Dash For Cash Futurity), but he talks eagerly about leaving the sport, soon.

Like him or not, Baffert, 35, is the quarter-horse trainer at Los Alamitos these days. He’s the leading trainer in victories (45 through Thursday) during the summer meet. Most people believe he’ll win the title when the meet ends July 23.

If he does, it will be the first time Blane Schvaneveldt has not won a Los Alamitos training championship since the winter of 1979. The last summer meet he failed to win was 1975, when he lost to Wayne Lukas.

So Baffert’s run is causing a bit of a stir around the track. Schvaneveldt, in many ways, has defined the method and manner of a successful quarter-horse trainer. He looks like a character in a Remington painting and talks about as much. Strong, silent, successful, he’s what many aspire to be.

And along comes Baffert--a college graduate, allergic to hay--who lists a forthcoming tour of the Playboy mansion as one of the perks of his recent success.

“It makes me think I’ve arrived,” he said.

Oh, he has. He has been arriving for the past couple of years.

“This has been coming for a while,” said Bill Mitchell, who owns several of the horses Baffert trains. “He’s been nipping at Blane’s heels for a while now. This was inevitable.”

Actually, Baffert had already surpassed Schvaneveldt in one category--percentage of wins. Schvaneveldt usually has the largest stable of horses available, sometimes starting four or five in a race. But, over the past two years, Baffert has had an exceptional victory percentage of better than 20%. Schvaneveldt is at 17%.

“Blane can beat you with sheer numbers,” Baffert said. “A lot of people think I have this all sewn up. But I remember Bay Meadows.”

That was the meet previous to Los Alamitos, in which Baffert had a lead in training victories going into the last weekend.

“Blane’s horses just kept coming,” Baffert said. “One after another.”

On the final day of the meet, Schvaneveldt edged Baffert for the title. That could happen again; Schvaneveldt is second in victories with 34 through Thursday, but that would take a major rally. Most people have already conceded the title to Baffert. Some have conceded more.

“I think this is going to become redundant,” Mitchell said. “This is the breakthrough meet for him.”

Mitchell provided Baffert with the breakthrough when he gave him a 2-year-old named Gold Coast Express to train. Gold Coast Express went on to become the 1986 world champion.

“Gold Coast was the key,” Baffert said. “Everything else was made possible because of that horse.”

Baffert was born and raised in Nogales, Ariz., a border town where he learned to speak English and Spanish simultaneously. He says he became enamored of horses at age 10, “but it was never anything I considered as a job.”

He attended the University of Arizona and graduated with a bachelor of science degree in animal science. He had intended to use the degree to work toward becoming a veterinarian. But that option soon closed to him when a glaring academic handicap was exposed.

His grades.

“I just had too much fun in college,” he said. “I did well enough to get by, but not enough to get into grad school.”

Baffert became a substitute teacher in Nogales, but “that got old real quick.”

He gravitated toward quarter horses at a track in Tucson. He became a jockey, although he knew it was not something he wanted to do with his life. Then came training.

“I didn’t know what I wanted to do,” he said. “I was training about six horses. I was feeling the pressure from the folks. You know, ‘When are you going to get a real job?’ I never considered training a profession. It was a hobby.”

But six horses turned into eight, then 10. Before he knew it, or really had any say in the matter, Baffert was a trainer.

Four years ago, he made his way to California and Los Alamitos, considered the sport’s top track. He brought 11 horses with him. After two years of modest success, Mitchell gave him Gold Coast Express.

That someone such as Baffert could happen into the sport and do so well has some calling him lucky. The fact that his success grows with no apparent effort on his part rankles others.

Unlike most trainers who arrive at 5:30 a.m., Baffert shows up at 7:30. He works a stable the way Rodney Dangerfield works a club. Jump in the truck to make a call, talk with Meier, do work, tell a joke to a groom in Spanish, visit with whomever happens by.

“I know there are people who say I’m lucky because it looks like I’m not doing anything,” he said. “But it can’t be luck this often. They think because I don’t come in at 5:30 that I don’t take this seriously.”

One person who believed that was Meier, who quit school at 16 to work at the Los Alamitos track. She had first seen a horse race when she was 13 and was so enamored of what she had seen that she would regularly make the 10-mile round trip, on foot, from her home in Anaheim to Los Alamitos.

For someone who had invested so much in the sport, Baffert seemed to mock all her hard work.

“He just seemed too happy,” she said.

So, when Baffert asked her to become his assistant last September, she was a bit hesitant.

“To be honest, I didn’t think he took it seriously,” she said. “But I can tell you, after a year of working with him, he takes it very seriously. He may get there at 7:30 instead of 5:30, but he’s usually the last to leave the track. He puts in the time, and he puts in good time.”

If there is one area in which Baffert excels, it is judging horses. He raids claiming races regularly. Elite Empress was claimed for $5,000 and stands to win $233,320 in the Dash For Cash Futurity.

Baffert claimed Easygo Effort for $16,000, and the horse went on to become a world champion 2-year-old gelding. Easy Go Effort has earned more than $300,000.

“He plays the part of this yuppie trainer,” said Hal Earnhardt, who owns several horses that Baffert trains. “He’s always giving credit to other people and acting like he does nothing. He’s as good a horseman as you’ll find. He appears like he doesn’t care. He does.”

Baffert says, “I want to win everything in sight.”

It appears that after that, he will be on his way to thoroughbreds, a sport that many agree seems better suited to his demeanor.

“I think it would be a perfect fit,” Earnhardt said.

Baffert says he is an unabashed fan of Lukas, who went from quarter horses to become one of the top thoroughbred trainers in the nation. Baffert also says he likes the “Hollywood atmosphere” that goes along with the sport of kings.

“I’m not saying it’s any better than quarter horses,” Baffert said. “But I would like to give it a try.”

Isn’t that how this whole thing got started?