Like Baseball, Racing Will Have to Come to Grips with Unsettling Era

While horse racing was consumed last week by headlines related to the federal doping conspiracy trial and Bob Baffert's exclusion hearings at the behest of the New York Racing Association (NYRA), the sport of baseball, too, was embroiled in its own ongoing performance-enhancing drug (PED) saga.

Last Tuesday, retired slugger David Ortiz was voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility, while Barry Bonds (the all-time and single-season home run record-holder) and Roger Clemens (one of the most dominant pitchers in major league history) both were denied entry by a lack of votes in their 10th and final years on the ballot.

Baseball's controversy had been simmering for years against the backdrop of the “steroid era” that ran roughly from the late 1980s to around 2010, during which a number of prominent players with outsized statistical output were either strongly suspected of or tested positive for PED usage.

While Ortiz reportedly tested dirty in 2003, it was later suggested by league officials that his one-time bad test (for a substance that has never been publicly disclosed) was the result of a false positive. Given his otherwise clean record and Hall-worthy stats, Ortiz sailed through the voting in his first try. But Bonds and Clemens–both of whom had never tested positive for, nor were ever disciplined for PED usage–again didn't make the cut despite overwhelmingly dominant on-paper credentials.

Baseball's Hall of Fame is unique compared to other sports in that it has a clause stating that those voted worthy of the honor “shall be chosen on the basis of playing ability, sportsmanship, character, their contribution to the teams on which they played, and to baseball in general.”

The “character” part of that requirement is why Bonds and Clemens failed to secure the necessary 75% of the voting bloc. Just like the presumed prolific juicers Mark McGuire and Sammy Sosa, who had also put up incredibly aberrational numbers in the 1990s, they were all denied entry because of the rampant perception they had cheated and sullied their sport.

An obvious (and admittedly flippant) racing-related take on this is that perhaps baseball should be more like our sport–we induct Hall-of-Famers (at least the human ones) while they are still active in the game.

It is only after honoring trainers and jockeys for lifetime accomplishments that regulators and racing associations occasionally have to make uncomfortable decisions about whether those honorees will be allowed to participate in the day-to-day doings of Thoroughbred racing.

But the election of Ortiz could be signaling another subtle shift in baseball's Hall voting. As the years and decades pass, there is a greater likelihood that future voters will decide that players from the PED era were not specifically guilty of doping because they were caught up in a time when the entire game was perceived to be pharmaceutically tainted. Blaming circumstances always gets easier with the passage of time.

Yet as John Feinstein of the Washington Post put it last week, “A Hall of Fame–in any sport–is supposed to be about what is good in that game. It goes beyond numbers. If you insist that Bonds and Clemens should be included because of their performance, fine. Then the Hall should create a 'Steroids Wing' and recognize those with stunning statistics who we know used steroids, even if they never tested positive.”

Racing, too, is going to have to make similar decisions in the long run.

In fact, you can already see some of the nearer-term ramifications of NYRA's attempted banishment of Baffert and the edict issued by Churchill Downs, Inc. (CDI), that prohibits Baffert's trainees from running in the next two GI Kentucky Derbies coming more clearly into focus.

In the case of NYRA, it's a Pandora's Box type of vicious cycle. Now that Baffert has been established as a baseline for exclusion, who's next? We already know that trainer Marcus Vitali is scheduled for a similar “go away” hearing in March. And NYRA announced just last week trainer Wayne Potts could be on deck.

It doesn't take more than a quick scroll through social media or a chat with backstretch folks to come up with a growing list of alleged wrongdoers who all fit the mold of, “They're trying to rule off Baffert, but what about so-and-so?”

So where does it end? Can we expect that NYRA will be charging and then holding exhaustive, week-long hearings related to detrimental conduct on a continual basis from here on out? The costs could be staggering, both in terms of actual legal expenses for NYRA, plus the public relations price of never-ending negative headlines becoming entrenched atop the news cycle.

Then again, another school of thought holds that this type of trainer-by-trainer house-cleaning is long overdue and is exactly what NYRA needs to do as a protective measure.

As for CDI's banning of Baffert from the Derby, it's also fair to ask how this decision will affect the image of America's most iconic horse race over the long haul.

Right now Baffert trains two undefeated Derby contenders, the presumed divisional champion and 'TDN Rising Star' (Corniche), plus Saturday's winner of the GIII Southwest S., Newgrange (Violence). Per usual, the seven-time-Derby-winning trainer could have another colt or two primed to peak before the first Saturday in May rolls around.

A few weeks ago I wrote about how CDI's ban could backfire by turning Baffert's exclusion into the unwanted focal point of the 2022 Derby. Now let's widen the lens further: How do you think history will portray the “most exciting two minutes in sports” when the ink is dry on what might someday be called the “Dirty Derby” era that started in 2019?

We already have a decent idea of what the first section of that rough draft will look like. It starts with Maximum Security, a one-time $16,000 maiden-claimer, soaring improbably above his peers to win the 2019 Derby, only to get disqualified for a debatable in-race interference call that roiled the sport for months.

A year later, in 2020, we learned that Maximum Security's trainer, Jason Servis, was arrested in a nationwide equine drug sweep, and that the feds allegedly have him on wiretap repeatedly discussing the doping regimen of Max during the time frame that included the colt crossing the wire first in that 2019 Derby.

Then 2021 brought us another unlikely Derby victor in Medina Spirit, a colt who was so unheralded in the sales ring that he once hammered for the too-low-to-be-true price of $1,000. Yet Baffert had him honed to such a high degree that he wired the field in the first leg of the Triple Crown.

This time, the feel-good aura of rags-to-riches glory barely lasted a week until it was revealed that Medina Spirit had tested positive for an overage of betamethasone, an infraction that has still not been adjudicated by state regulators in Kentucky (although it has sparked several high-profile federal lawsuits, CDI's no-Bob stance, and NYRA's attempts to rule off Baffert).

So if the story of the 2022 and 2023 Derbies ends up being the exclusion of Baffert's trainees, what do you suppose might happen if CDI ever decides it has to take action against other allegedly toxic trainers of top colts?

If it turns out that Baffert isn't the only conditioner told he's not welcome under the Twin Spires, the sport could soon be facing a difficult reckoning involving years in which a sizable swath of otherwise-eligible equine stars aren't allowed to participate in the Derby.

There might not be enough asterisks to go around if handicapping every year's foal crop becomes an exercise of exclusion related to which human handlers are deemed not worthy of the Derby.

Similar to baseball's steroids era, Thoroughbred racing is eventually going to have to come to grips with how the present will appear in the future.

Will the current time frame be viewed as an over-reactive witch hunt? Or will it eventually be defined as the era when the industry started cleaning up its act for the betterment of the sport?

Truth tends not to favor one extreme or the other, so the unknown answer to that question most likely lies somewhere in the hazy middle.