THOROUGHBRED RACING : Baez Needs No Introduction to Rockingham Park Bettors

Rudy Baez is (a) singer Joan Baez’s brother, (b) Pat Day’s real name or (c) the president of the Dominican Republic.

Baez, none of the above, needs an introduction, even though he rode the winners of 413 races last year, more than anybody in the country except Day, who rode 430.

However, Day’s mounts earned $14.4 million and Baez’s horses about $2 million. Day traveled the United States and Canada, winning a record 60 stakes and capping the year with a Breeders’ Cup victory on Dance Smartly.

Baez, 42, has never ridden in a Breeders’ Cup race, and it is a good bet that he won’t receive one vote for best jockey when results of the 1991 Eclipse Awards election are announced Feb. 1.

Around New England, however, and especially at Rockingham Park, Baez gets a lot of votes, in terms of the money local horseplayers plunk down when he is riding.

And when is Baez not riding? Well, hardly ever. Last year, he was in 2,121 races. Among the top-money jockeys nationally, the most anybody had were 1,759 mounts.

To put Baez’s year in perspective, even if Rockingham held races every day, he would have averaged almost six mounts daily. As it was, with three weeks off for his annual vacation to visit family and friends in his native Santo Domingo, plus 14 days on the sidelines because of stewards’ suspensions, Baez averaged nine races a day for every day he rode. Cards of 10 or more races are routine at Rockingham.

And Rockingham is the only place where Baez rode.

A regular part of the once-respected New England circuit, Rockingham, which opened in 1906, is in Salem, N.H., not far from Boston. Horses the caliber of Seabiscuit and Dr. Fager no longer run there regularly, although after Arlington International Racecourse dropped out of the American Championship Racing Series, Rockingham filled in last year with the $500,000 New England Classic. “Many of us trainers couldn’t have told you what state Rockingham Park was in,” Wayne Lukas said before the race. “Now we’re trying to figure out how you ship a horse there.”

Most of the horses in the Classic came from out of town, and Baez didn’t have a mount.

Rockingham officials are saying that Baez set the record for most victories in one year at the same track. No one seems to know who held the previous record, and so far, so good: No historians have come forth with anything that tops Baez’s achievement. En route to the record, Baez had a seven-winner day in September; the only other jockey who ever won that many in a day at Rockingham was Willie Turnbull in 1942.

Rockingham ran 261 days, one of the longest seasons in racing last year.

The day that Baez rode winner No. 400, he returned to the jockeys’ room and received a standing ovation. Nonplussed, Baez said: “I never dreamed this was possible. I’d like to thank everybody.”

Speaking up was Carl Gambardella, a Rockingham riding veteran who at 52 is nearing his 6,000th career victory: “You don’t have to thank us. Everything you’ve done you’ve earned.”

Appropriately, Baez won the final race of the 1991 Rockingham season on New Year’s Eve. Then, when racing shifted on New Year’s Day to Boston’s Suffolk Downs, which had been dark for two years, Baez won the first race on the card. Rockingham doesn’t reopen until May, so during the interim, Rudy Baez has to do something. It looks as if he is going to find time to ride a horse or two again.

The number of second-place finishes by Itsallgreektome--eight in 25 starts--is not extraordinary, but what makes them notable is that every one has been in a rich race.

Purse money for the eight stakes has been more than $4.5 million. First place in those races was worth $2.5 million, and Itsallgreektome’s octogenarian owner, Jheri Redding, settled for $983,480. The difference between that amount and $2.5 million has been a few necks, heads, noses and other small margins.

Of Itsallgreektome’s eight second-place finishes, only one was by more than three-quarters of a length, and that race, the 1990 Del Mar Derby, was a stake that Redding, trainer Wally Dollase--and even the Del Mar stewards--thought that the gray gelding deserved to win.

After Tight Spot beat Itsallgreektome by three lengths, the stewards disqualified the winner, ruling that he had illegally crisscrossed the field from an outside post position at the start of the race. The money, $165,000 for first and $60,000 for second, wasn’t paid until almost a year later, after a state hearing referee rescinded the stewards’ decision twice and a judge backed him up in court.

Itsallgreektome, voted best male turf horse in 1990, had his latest near-miss last Sunday at Hialeah, and he has won only two of his last 11 starts, with five of those seconds coming during the slump. Itsallgreektome probably will run next in the San Luis Obispo Handicap at Santa Anita on Feb. 17. Dollase’s hair may be as gray as the gelding’s before the horse’s career is over.

The Jockey Club, which is supposed to have the last word on naming horses, may get some media resistance on this one. The Jockey Club is saying that because of a little-known rule, the correct spelling of A.P. Indy, the winner of the Hollywood Futurity, is A.p. Indy. The second letter is lower case, says the Jockey Club, because the application for the name did not have a space between the “A.” and the “P.”

Neil Drysdale, trainer of A.P. Indy, says he is not sure what the name means. Can you visualize the Associated Press--the AP--spelling the colt’s name with a lower-case p ?

Maybe the Jockey Club name-checkers ought to go back and see if T.V. Lark’s name was spelled correctly. These are the same autocrats who, without arching an eyebrow, approved such names as Drop Your Drawers, Cold As A Witch’s and Fix It Again Tony. In the 1970s, Tony Ciulla claimed that he was one of racing’s biggest race fixers.

Horse Racing Notes

Santa Anita and Hollywood Park will run as an entry in bidding for the Breeders’ Cup, trying to get the races returned to California for the first time since 1987. Because of the way their racing dates fall, Santa Anita would be suited for the event in 1993 and Hollywood Park in 1994. . . . Sea Cadet will make his debut as a 4-year-old on Saturday at Bay Meadows in the Kyne Handicap. He’ll carry high weight of 124 pounds.

The winners of the 1991 Eclipse Awards will be announced in Las Vegas on Feb. 1 at 12:30 p.m. ABC, which spent $150,000 televising the 1990 horse-of-the-year announcement, did not renew the contract, so there will be no commercial telecast of the event, which will be carried to race tracks via satellite. . . . Go and Go, the Irish-bred who won the 1990 Belmont Stakes, has been retired and will stand at stud on a farm in Upstate New York.