Bob Baffert’s Kentucky Derby-sized hopes for Lookin At Lucky

To many, a derby is a man’s hat. Or, if you live near the racetrack at Santa Anita, a Derby is a fancy restaurant with pictures of famous horses and jockeys on the wall.

If you are Bob Baffert, a derby is everything.

What happens every year on the first Saturday of May in Louisville, Ky., is his driving force, his reason to go to work every day. As a Hall of Fame trainer, Baffert is a figure of great prominence in the sport, and the Kentucky Derby is his podium.

Visitors are greeted at the door of his Arcadia home by a 7-year-old boxer. Her name is Derby. She wags her tail and sniffs their shoes in a circular foyer that features paintings of four great thoroughbred racehorses, all trained by Baffert, symmetrically placed to give each equal prominence.

They are Silver Charm, Real Quiet, War Emblem and Point Given. The first three won the Kentucky Derby, as well as the Preakness. Each lost the third leg of the Triple Crown, the Belmont -- Real Quiet by the length of a fingernail. The fourth, Point Given, didn’t win the Derby when everybody, including Baffert, thought he would, and then went on to win the Preakness and Belmont.

Many people have valuable things in their homes. Baffert’s is hard to top -- an eight-Triple-Crown-race foyer.

Standing in the foyer, Baffert’s wife, Jill, is asked if her husband has Derby fever yet. It is, after all, only December. “I think he always has it,” she says.

Which bring us to today’s $750,000 CashCall Futurity at Hollywood Park. It is a key trial for 2-year-olds, who become 3-year-olds Jan. 1 and become eligible for Triple Crown races. Those, along with the Breeders’ Cup, are the ongoing lifeblood of a sport currently in need of a transfusion.

Eight horses will go to the gate for the Hollywood Park race and three of them, Lookin At Lucky, The Program and Marcello, are trained by Baffert. The star in Baffert’s barn, the current best chance to get the white-haired, 56-year-old face of racing into the winner’s circle in the featured race May 1, is Lookin At Lucky. He has started five races, won four and finished second once.

The second place still sticks in Baffert’s craw. It was in the recent Breeders’ Cup Juvenile, where Lookin At Lucky drew a bad outside post and lost by a head to Vale of York.

“Racing luck,” Baffert says. “No matter how good the horse, you’ve got to have it.”

Lookin At Lucky, like the recent super horse Curlin, is a son of Smart Strike. He was a late baby, born in May 2007. But he won his first race, over six furlongs at Hollywood Park, in July of this year, and quickly amassed $843,000 in winnings well before his official third birthday in 13 days, by winning two Grade I races and a Grade II, and taking second in the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile.

The usual large Derby field is filled by horses with the most winnings. “We’re there now,” Baffert says. “We could just sit and do nothing.”

But Baffert knows how drastically things change with 3-year-olds in the four months of prep races leading to the Derby. He also knows that his job now may be more avoiding mistakes than tinkering with training procedures. If Lookin At Lucky wins the CashCall, there is little doubt he will immediately move to the top of the favorites list for the Kentucky Derby. Six horses, including Real Quiet, have won the CashCall and gone on to win the Derby.

“It’s hard,” Baffert says. “You don’t want to jinx him. He has the tools. I’m excited already, but I have been for a long time. I knew when he broke his maiden that I had a Derby horse.”

According to Baffert, so did his jockey for all five races, Garrett Gomez. “After the first race, he got off the horse and said, ‘Wow,’ ” Baffert says.

Baffert was first thrust into the Derby limelight in 1996, when his Cavonnier finished second to Grindstone. He won the next two years, with Silver Charm and Real Quiet, and then again in 2002 with War Emblem, after the disappointment with Point Given the year before.

But by 2006, the year of Barbaro, he had come up empty and wasn’t really a contender again until Pioneerof The Nile once again stirred the mint juleps in his veins with a second place at the Derby this year.

“Garrett Gomez has never won a Derby,” Baffert says, “and I told him, if he got to the quarter pole with a fully loaded horse, it would be like no other feeling he’d ever have.”

Gomez did and Pioneerof The Nile was, but Calvin Borel had Mine That Bird even more loaded and on the faster ground at the rail. Still, Baffert has recovered from that second place better than he has the misses of Cavonnier and Point Given.

“Pioneer got me back there into prominence, where I want to be,” Baffert says.

He wasn’t specific about that destination. He didn’t have to be.

bill.dwyre@latimes.com