Who Will Be The Favorite? What Price?

Originally Posted by RolloTomasi

The best part of this was some genius convinced the trainer of St. Trinians, a mare who was riding a 4 or 5 race win streak (all by open lengths) since coming to the US, to run her against males and stretch out an additional 1.5 furlongs in the Big Cap rather than waiting a week for the Santa Margarita.

In her prior start, St. Trinians had dusted BC Distaff winner Life Is Sweet (along with the place horse, Spinster winner Mushka) as well as Zardana, who one race later upset Rachel Alexandra in her 4yo debut at Fair Grounds.

I guess none of that was convincing enough to try Zenyatta coming off a 4 month layoff.

The connections were vindicated in the end, though. Zenyatta beat by a length or so the same horses in the Santa Margarita that St. Trinians was beating by 4-5 lengths. So it was wise to avoid a head-to-head matchup.

With an additional start under her belt (and with St. Trinians being knocked off form in the Big Cap), Zenyatta was also able to prove a 1/2 length best over St. Trinians a couple of months later in the Vanity. With such a dominating win, no one could be disappointed that there wasn't the early matchup at Santa Anita. And it's not like people were interested in some sort of rival for Zenyatta within her own division (since her connections refused to target the plentiful open 10 furlong races in CA).

That genius was partially me. I suggested to Mike Mitchell he look long and hard at the BIG CAP.

It couldn't have been that horrible of an entry Rollo. Pretty sure she went favored.

Rosario also won a Grade 1 that day. The $400,000 Santa Anita Oaks on CRISP for John Sadler.

Wasn't enough to save my job.

The mastermind behind everything was Bejarano's agent Joe Ferrer. He could speak Spanish to Rosario. He convinced him that I was wrong for asking permission to work for Garcia.

That I should have been happy with just Joel. In retrospect he was 100% right. It was a bad move. Greedy to try to have two guys in the top 5 in the Country.

He also said he'd help Ebanks with Bejarano's 2nd calls. Which Ebanks fell for. Fererr, an extremely clever agent, pointed him to a lot of bad horses which didn't help Joel at all. But VERY good for Raffa.

Ebanks promised to drop Tyler Baze and work exclusively for Rosario. I picked up Tyler and was doing very well with him and Martin until Baffert told Martin he had to fire me or risk losing his business.

Martin felt awful but had no choice. He was riding first call for Baffert and making a TON of money. To this day Baffert will say he had nothing to do with Martin firing me. But Garcia told me the truth.

Baffert was very notorious for being especially tough on agents. I thought we worked together fine. But I don't think he liked the fact that some of the others allowed him to be a bit more controlling than me.

After Martin fired me. Tyler and I were doing VERY good. My book was bulging with calls at Del Mar when he got his face smashed in behind the gate on a cheap Peter Miller maiden named NIGHT JUSTICE.

It took him over a year to get back to the races. I didn't feel like coming back to hustling when he came back. So he hired Craig O'Brien. They did very well. Tyler is a great guy, IMO an elite rider and a dream to work for.