Baffert gets an early Christmas gift

If the rest of us view the final Saturday before Christmas as a frantic shopping day, horse trainer Bob Baffert looks at it as something else entirely.

“To me, the [Kentucky] Derby starts with this race,” Baffert said.

So Christmas came early for Baffert on the next-to-last day of Hollywood Park’s fall meet. He saddled a record-tying fourth winner of the Grade I CashCall Futurity as favored Pioneerof the Nile, with Garrett Gomez aboard, took the lead at the top of the stretch and held off I Want Revenge by a nose.

Jockey Rafael Bejarano, who this year has joined Chris McCarron (1983) and Pat Valenzuela (2003) as the only riders to finish atop the jockey standings at all five Southern California race meetings, rode Chocolate Candy to third.

“He showed a lot of heart and speed,” Baffert said of his horse, the first home-bred product in Kentucky of Egyptian owner Ahmed Zayat. “He reminds me a little of Real Quiet [the 1997 CashCall and 1998 Kentucky Derby winner]. . . . This could be the horse that gets us back to the Derby.”

Gomez was similarly thrilled. He said the horse was slowed to a 1:41.95 showing on the 1 1/16 -mile course by the correctable flaws of waiting to be caught and bursting side to side down the stretch until the final necessary charge.

“When [I Want Revenge] got within a neck, he went to running, to fighting, and that’s a big positive to me,” Gomez said.

Zayat, who arrived from New Jersey to watch Pioneerof the Nile, reserved too much excitement about the fact that six CashCalls entrants since 1982 have won the Derby.

“So I’m told,” he said, crossing his fingers.

The $750,000 race represented one final surge of traditional excitement at a track celebrating its 70th year of racing and uncertain of reaching its 75th birthday.

Bay Meadows Land Co., which purchased the track in 2005, has plans to demolish it in favor of a mixed-use commercial center.

The opportunity to bulldoze in Inglewood is so real that the 2009 fall meet won’t be officially on the books until Bay Meadows tells the California Horse Racing Board by May whether it plans to continue racing.

The City of Inglewood has unveiled plans for the 238-acre racetrack, grandstand and pavilion to become a center with nearly 3,000 residential units, 620,000 square feet of retail space and a 300-room hotel.

The revenue from that project, city officials say, would far surpass what’s being generated from a sport besieged by reduced on-track attendance. Horse players have increasingly spent their gambling dollars at off-track/Internet sites, Indian casinos and card clubs.

Minutes after resigning as chairman of the CHRB this week, Richard Shapiro said the track’s dire situation weighed on him and swayed him to admit it’s more urgent to volunteer to help solve the sport’s revenue problem instead of “regulating it.”

Jack Liebau, president of Hollywood Park, said the track’s handle is down 15% this meet (on par with Keeneland’s 17% drop across the country).

He said his superiors are “continuing to proceed with the [zoning] process. How long that will take, I have no idea.”

Indeed, Bay Meadows moved toward converting its Northern California track to a real estate venture in 1992, but didn’t actually do it until 2007. And the outlook for a delay to the Hollywood Park closing is brightened by the current economic crisis. Said one track official: “The demand for condos and the ability to finance all of these plans sure looks difficult from where we are now.”

Still, the threat of closing the scenic complex -- adorned in beauty on a clear Saturday by water fountains, blowing palm trees and flamingos standing one-legged on a lake island -- was reflected about midday by the track bugle player practicing a melancholy tune alone. A few bettors who had dotted the sparse bleachers stood up for a closer, if not final, view of Hollywood Park fall meet horses crossing the finish line.

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lance.pugmire@latimes.com