SANTA ANITA : Baffert, Desormeaux Join Forces for Good Finish to a Good Meeting

The end to the 89-day racing season at Santa Anita wasn’t much different from what went before. Bob Baffert, the meet’s leading trainer, and Kent Desormeaux, who led the jockey standings, teamed Monday to win the closing-day stake when Let’s Be Curious rolled to a six-length victory in the $102,300 San Jacinto Handicap.

Straight To Bed, a 6-year-old gelding who runs in the claiming and allowance ranks, accounted for five of Baffert’s 34 winners at the meeting, but Let’s Be Curious’ victory Monday was the most pleasing for the 42-year-old trainer because it came at 1 1/4 miles. Baffert, a successful quarter horse conditioner before he switched to thoroughbreds in 1991, has been hounded by talk that he can only train sprinters, and Let’s Be Curious was his first stakes winner beyond 1 1/8 miles.

“Maybe this will help me shake that quarter horse thing,” Baffert said. “It was great to win the title at racing’s most prestigious meet. And to end it with a 100-grander, well, this is what we’re all in the business for. Winning a race at this distance is icing on the cake.”

Desormeaux, 25, who earlier in the season became the youngest jockey to win 3,000 races, finished with 112 victories for the meeting. A year ago, he was leading rider with 90 winners, and now he’s become the first jockey to win consecutive titles at the track since Laffit Pincay in 1980-81.

Desormeaux seldom rides for Baffert.

“I don’t use him because I can never get him,” Baffert said. “He started riding (Let’s Be Curious) one race back because (Chris) Antley rode Del Mar Dennis in that race.”

Corey Nakatani was the leading stakes jockey with 17 winners, three more than Desormeaux, and Nakatani finished second in the overall standings with 107 winners.

“I’m grateful to all the horsemen for putting me on all the winners,” Desormeaux said. “I enjoyed coming to work every day, everything about it. I really enjoyed the competition with Corey Nakatani. It must have been disappointing to come as far as Corey did and know you did everything right. I had more wins, but Corey won more money. So I wouldn’t mind changing places with him.”

Nakatani, who leads the country in purses, rode horses at Santa Anita that earned $4.6 million. He missed the track record, set by Gary Stevens in 1990, by about $17,000.

Richard Mandella, who tied with Ron McAnally for stakes victories with eight, was second in the training standings behind Baffert with 28. The top owners at the meet were Marty and Pam Wygod, whose horses won a record 25 races and collected more than $1 million in purses. The Wygods won seven stakes and their horses finished first, second or third 70% of the time.

Baffert said this is his first training title, other than a split quarter horse meet at Los Alamitos, since he was at Prescott Downs in Arizona in 1983.

“I said to my owners at the start of the meet that we were going to run the horses in the right spots,” Baffert said. “We waited for the right spots until we had to. It wasn’t until the last two weeks or so that I started pushing, with winning the title in mind.”

Let’s Be Curious, a 4-year-old gelding who cost $65,000 as a yearling, ran seven times before winning. Baffert was running him for a $50,000 claiming price when he won for the first time, at Del Mar in August.

“You get those feelings, and I was never afraid that anybody was going to claim him,” Baffert said.

In his stakes debut, the San Bernardino Handicap on April 2, Let’s Be Curious finished fourth. In the San Jacinto, he was the longest shot on the board in a four-horse field and paid $10.60 after reaching the wire in 2:00 2/5. He carried 116 pounds.

On-track business at Santa Anita was down in both attendance and handle. The daily average attendance was down almost 7%, to 13,006, and the handle dropped 7.6% to $2.7 million. Off-track attendance slumped about the same as did the on-track, but overall the daily handle averaged $11.1 million, an increase of more than 13% and a North American record. Almost half of the gain in the overall handle came from full-card betting on the North California races, which was offered at the Santa Anita meet for the first time.

“Some things are out of your control,” Santa Anita President Cliff Goodrich said. “We had 40 inches of rain two years ago, an earthquake last year and 30 inches of rain this year. Everyone around here is pleased with the results, considering the rain.”

*

Horse Racing Notes

After his agent, Tony Matos, had filed a missing-person report, jockey David Flores phoned Matos late Monday afternoon to say he was all right. Flores had been unaccounted for since early Sunday, when he was supposed to fly to San Francisco to ride a horse for trainer Bobby Frankel in a stakes race at Golden Gate Fields. According to the stewards at Santa Anita, Flores told Matos he was under “personal stress.” The stewards didn’t know where Flores was when he called Matos, but Frankel said that Matos told him that the jockey was in San Diego. Flores tied for ninth in the final Santa Anita standings with 39 winners. . . . With 261 winners apiece, Bob Mieszerski of The Times and Steve Bortstein of the Daily Breeze tied for the handicapping championship.