In order to maintain a degree of mental equilibrium this week, while awaiting the green light to run Baeza in the May 3 151st Kentucky Derby (G1), John Shirreffs could have engaged in any number of distracting activities.
He had yet to finish "Inherent Vice." There was a Bergman festival on TCM. Shirreffs, a history buff, could have killed an afternoon at the Muhammad Ali Center in downtown Louisville, Ky., or the Vintage 99 Motorcycle Museum in the East End.
Instead, the trainer reached to the depths of his inner zen, cued up a video of Doris Day singing "Que Sera Sera," and tried not to hold his breath for longer than a few minutes at a time.
"If it happens, I'm going to blame it on the butterfly," Shirreffs said, as the hours ticked by in midweek without the scratch required to make room for Baeza.
Shirreffs can be a tease, playfully testing a conversational partner with thought problems or obscure references. In this particular case, he was alluding to the term "butterfly effect" first used in the 1960s by Massachusetts Institute of Technology meteorologist Edward Lorenz, whose studies focused on the unpredictability of weather.
"You know how they say a butterfly can flap its wings on one side of the world, and there's a tsunami on the other side," Shirreffs said. "The interconnectedness of everything, right? We're thinking that if maybe a butterfly just twitches a little."
Then it happened, at around 5 p.m. May 1, when it was announced that Rodriguez was scratched from the Derby field with a dicey foot, and Bazea was in. Far from celebrating another's misfortune, Shirreffs counted his lucky stars.
"I don't go there," Shirreffs said. "We all live in glass houses around here."
The work of Lorenz ultimately led to the broader concept of "chaos theory," defined as "a science of predicting the behavior of inherently unpredictable systems." In other words, handicapping the Kentucky Derby.
"Certain complex systems exhibit sensitive dependence on initial conditions," goes the theory. "Alter those conditions even slightly, and you'll produce wildly different results."
This should be the warning label on every Kentucky Derby program cover. The 151st Derby field drawn one week before the race now has been altered not only by the scratches of Tappan Street and Rodriguez—winners of the Florida Derby (G1) and Wood Memorial Stakes (G2)—as well as the lightly raced Grande, the race also has been nudged toward possible alternative outcomes by the inclusion of Baeza, with the added twist that he and Flavien Prat must break from the extreme outside post position of the 19 horses still in the race.
About such things Shirreffs cannot worry. Baeza, a son of McKinzie , spent more than a week at Churchill Downs on planet limbo, while his trainer kept adjusting the flame to keep his colt just this side of a boil.
"All the serious work had already happened," Shirreffs said. "Now it's all about getting the horse to the race where he's not too fresh, and not too tired. It's finding that middle road. Baeza is very light on his feet. The only difference between Baeza here and back home in California is that I could have a workmate back home."
The Baeza bandwagon got rolling last Valentine's Day with a maiden race win at one mile. It was only the colt's third start, but he knew his way around the block. Before his debut for Lee and Susan Searing Dec. 1, 2024, Baeza had supplied Shirreffs with the data from 16 recorded workouts at either Santa Anita Park or Del Mar.
Making his stakes bow in the Santa Anita Derby (G1), Baeza gave favored Journalism a hard target before losing by three-quarters of a length. By some inexplicable whim of the Kentucky Derby points system, the Santa Anita runner-up earned only 37.5 points, based on the size of the five-horse field. Journalism, on the other hand, has been the toast of Derby Town.
"Life is full of things you can't do anything about," Shirreffs sighed. "That was one of them."
By now, it is well known that Baeza comes from Triple Crown royalty, as a half brother to 2023 Kentucky Derby winner Mage and 2024 Belmont Stakes (G1) winner Dornoch . Such heredity played a large part in his $1.2 million price tag as a Keeneland September Yearling Sale purchase.
In addition, Baeza was named by the Searings for the five-time national champion and Hall of Fame jockey Braulio Baeza, whose record included a Derby victory in 1963 on Chateaugay and three second-place finishes.
Baeza will be the sixth Derby starter for Shirreffs, the son of a commercial pilot who was born in Kansas, raised in New York, and served in Vietnam. Once back in civilian life, he headed to the foothills of California's Sierra Nevadas, where he learned his Thoroughbred trade from the man who ran Loma Rica Ranch, Henry Freitas. A résumé that includes Hall of Famer Zenyatta and such major stakes winners as Bertrando, Manistique, After Market, Tiago, Hollywood Story, Life Is Sweet, and Honor A. P. has landed Shirreffs, 79, on the Hall of Fame ballot several years running.
He won the Derby at first asking, in 2005, with the Holy Bull colt Giacomo for Ann and Jerry Moss. Unlike the current rules, which require Derby runners to be on the grounds at least seven days before the race, Giacomo tiptoed into town on Wednesday of Derby week. Shirreffs probably would have done that with Baeza if the rules had allowed.
"It was nice when you could have your last work on a track your horse is familiar with, rather than go to a strange track and work on it, then run on it," Shirreffs said.
But what about the idea of valuable time spent acclimating to a strange track? Doesn't that support the idea of an earlier arrival?
"Not necessarily," Shirreffs said. "When a horse works in the morning, they're more relaxed. Their adrenaline isn't flowing as high as it is in the afternoon. When they run at the strange track they're going to be in a race mode, where they're pumped a lot higher and not really thinking about the surface, like they might be in the morning."
This time around, Wednesday of Derby week came and went, and still Baeza was on the outside looking in. Shirreffs might as well have paid Zenyatta visit over near Midway, Ky., at Lane's End. But no.
"It's hard to leave, to get too far from the barn, because you never know if there's an emergency," Shirreffs said. "On the day we schooled Giacomo, my wife Dottie and the Mosses all went to the farm in Lexington. They wanted me to come, but I stayed, and when we were in the paddock schooling he twisted a shoe loose on the rubber surface.
"Giacomo was a horse with shelly, thin soles," Shirreffs said. "I had to have his exercise rider run back to the barn and meet us at the gap with bandaging material, because he could not walk on the pea gravel and asphalt of the backstretch without a shoe, or he's going to bruise his foot."
Then he would have been scratched—just like Rodriguez and Grande—and instead of Giacomo winning at odds of 50-1, the winner of the 2005 Kentucky Derby would have been Closing Argument, at odds of nearly 72-1. And somewhere, on the other side of the world, a butterfly would have laughed.
