Proud Baeza Is Still Among Jockeys, but . . . : Belmont Stakes: Three-time winner, now an assistant custodian at the track, will watch Saturday’s race on TV.

When the horses entered the track for the post parade, you didn’t need a program to identify the one Braulio Baeza was riding. As they say along the backstretch, he had the classic seat. Ramrod straight, chiseled features, eyes focused straight ahead, he had the pre-race posture of a military academy cadet.

Back in Panama, Baeza’s father and grandfather were jockeys before they trained horses.

“My father had a lot to do with the way I looked on a horse,” he said. “Some riders slouch when they go out there. My father said to look like you were proud when you got on a horse. Being proud of yourself was important to him.”

Baeza, 55, was voted into the Racing Hall of Fame in 1976 after he rode 3,140 winners. One was Chateaugay in the 1963 Kentucky Derby. Baeza also won the Belmont Stakes that year with Chateaugay, one of the jockey’s three Belmont victories.

Four riders have won more--Eddie Arcaro and James McLaughlin head the list with six apiece--but Baeza is the only one to have won the Belmont Stakes at three different tracks.

When he won with the longshot Sherluck in 1961, the race was run at the old Belmont Park. Then, while the New York Racing Assn. was rebuilding the track, he won with Chateaugay at Aqueduct. In 1969, Baeza won with Arts And Letters at the new Belmont Park.

He will watch Saturday’s Belmont Stakes on a television set in the jockeys’ room at Belmont Park. That used to be his regular hangout, but from 1978 until this March, he trained horses in New York.

That second career ended this year when his barn dwindled to five horses, none able to outrun a camel. A Baeza trainee hasn’t won a race in a year.

So he turned in his trainer’s license and took the only job he could find--assistant custodian in the jockeys’ room.

Baeza gives the valets their jockey assignments. Also in charge of the payroll for the jockeys and the valets, he had a stack of blue paychecks on his desk Thursday, waiting to be distributed.

From two marriages, he has four children to support. A daughter, 18, is about to enroll in college. Also at home are two sons, 10 and 12, and another daughter, 16.

“All my life, it’s been horses,” Baeza said. “When I was a jockey, I thought I was going to ride forever. That’s what I’m missing the most these days, the contact with the horses. Horses are the only thing I know. Will I go back to training again? Who knows?”

As a trainer, Baeza ran out of horses mainly because he ran out of owners. Two died. An ownership group in the Washington-Baltimore area shifted its horses to a Maryland trainer because it wanted to see them run closer to home.

In the 1960s, Baeza was the premier jockey in the Belmont Stakes. Besides the three he won, he finished second in 1962 when Admiral’s Voyage lost by a nose to Jaipur.

“All the Belmonts I won were special,” Baeza said. “I guess the one with Sherluck was the best, because that was also the first major race I ever won.”

At the time, Baeza was 21, a year removed from riding in his native Panama. Fred Hooper brought him to the United States, and for the first four years, Baeza was a contract rider for the Hooper stable.

After winning the Blue Grass Stakes at Keeneland, Sherluck’s esteem apparently began to unravel when he was fifth in the Kentucky Derby nine days later. The colt also finished fifth in the Preakness.

Baeza had ridden Sherluck to his six-length victory in the Blue Grass, but he was obligated to ride Hooper’s Crozier in the Derby and Preakness and wasn’t reunited with Sherluck until the Belmont. Sherluck paid $132.10, still a record win payoff for the race.

Baeza had a weight problem much of his riding career, and by the middle of the Saratoga meeting in August 1976, he was KOd by the calorie count.

“I was up to 128 pounds,” he said. “I called up and told them to take me off the horses I was scheduled to ride. I quit on the spot.”

By retirement time, he had added one more second place in the Belmont Stakes to his record.

Well, sort of. “The 31-length second,” Baeza said, smiling. He and Twice A Prince were the runners-up in Secretariat’s tour de force in 1973.

“My horse,” Baeza said, “was so long getting to the [finish] line that by the time we got there, the dirt had already settled.”

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Horse Racing Notes

Post positions are of little importance in a 1 1/2-mile race, and Thursday’s draw left Star Standard, the expected pace-setter, on the outside in the 12-horse field, with Thunder Gulch and Timber Country in the Nos. 10 and 11 spots. The lineup, in post-position order, with jockeys and morning-line odds: Citadeed, Eddie Maple, 8-1; Off’n’away, Mike Smith, 12-1; Pana Brass, Wigberto Ramos, 50-1; Is Sveikatas, Jorge Chavez, 50-1; Ave’s Flag, John Velasquez, 30-1; Composer, Jerry Bailey, 20-1; Wild Syn, Randy Romero, 20-1; Colonial Secretary, Jose Santos, 50-1; Knockadoon, Chris McCarron, 15-1; Thunder Gulch, Gary Stevens, 2-1; Timber Country, Pat Day, 6-5, and Star Standard, Julie Krone, 6-1. They will all carry 126 pounds.

Blues Traveller has been installed as the 4-1 favorite in the $200,000 Early Times Manhattan, another stake on the Belmont day card. Chris McCarron will ride the horse for trainer Rodney Rash. Others entered in the 1 1/4-mile grass race are Misil, Kiri’s Clown, Lassigny, Jesse F, Winsox, Pride Of Summer, Irish Linnet, Yokohama, Awad, Kissin Kris and Hasten To Add. . . . A fast track is expected for the Belmont Stakes, with the temperature expected to reach 80 degrees.