Baffert isn't on course for this Kentucky Derby

Last year, he was there with horses on the undercard but had nothing in the Derby.

This year, he won't even be a wallflower at racing's biggest dance.

"My goal has always been to win it," he says, "but it is also nice just to be there."

So, like Rick Neuheisel and Charlie Weis, Baffert is rebuilding. His absence at the Derby is symptomatic of a bigger problem and a deeper feeling about how and where he has been doing business.

Soon, Baffert will be taking most of his saddles and going East. Barn 1C at Santa Anita still will be a Baffert headquarters, but for the foreseeable future, the most active Baffert stables will be at Belmont and Saratoga. For a while, their gain will be California's loss.

Last August, unhappy with the new synthetic surface at Del Mar, and suddenly faced with a winning drought unlike anything he had experienced, Baffert packed up and headed for upstate New York and Saratoga.

"There was one jockey agent at Del Mar who, every time he'd see me, called me Dead Man Walking," Baffert says.

The change of scenery changed his fortunes. He won several stakes races at Saratoga, then brought home $4 million in purses with two wins in the Breeders' Cup at Monmouth Park.

Still, there was trouble in River City, and it wasn't spelled with a capital P. For Baffert, it was STS, synthetic track surfaces, which is a recent California initiative and, as far as Baffert is concerned, the push that is sending him back East.

"I didn't object at first when this was the big deal," he says. "If you spoke out against it, you were vilified, like you were anti-safety. Now, I look back on it and it seems clear that if we had just taken the $8 million to $10 million we spent on each of our tracks around here and just put it into improving the dirt we had, we'd be fine."

Baffert says the synthetic tracks are mostly good for claiming races and that, even if you have a horse that wins, you have no real idea how good it is because the track slows everybody down and equalizes the field.

"The races are all the same," he says. "Start, plod along, turn and finish. Pretty boring."

Baffert seems to speak more out of frustration than anger. He is 55 now and has had incredible success -- leading national money-winning trainer four years in a row, starting in 1998. Last year, with his late Breeders' Cup flourish, he ended up a respectable No. 11 in the country with just over $7 million in purses. Now, he is barely in the top 30 with $1.09 million.