Triple Crown misses since 1978 are Big Brown's lessons in history

There has also been one poster boy for near misses, Bob Baffert.

By the time Big Brown is loaded into the gate at Belmont Park this afternoon, all 11 of the Triple Crowns will have been celebrated in the media buildup. So will all the Triple Stumbles since 1978.

A head-bob here, a muddy track there, a couple of brain-locked jockeys. It's all part of the lore. There was even the safety pin discovered stuck in the hoof of Spectacular Bid the morning of his third-place finish in 1979.

Horses on the edge of immortality finished out of the money (Alysheba in 1987, War Emblem in 2002). Another got caught not looking when a foe made a last-second run at the finish line (Touch Gold beating Silver Charm in 1997). Two were done in by the same jockey (Edgar Prado on Sarava beating War Emblem in 2002 and Prado beating Smarty Jones on Birdstone in 2004).

One horse, Charismatic in 1999, broke his leg just before the Belmont wire and still finished third, prompting Elizabeth Mitchell's book "Three Strides Before the Wire," a romantic tale of a claiming horse winning the first two legs and coming so tantalizingly close in the third.

But the storytelling of these last 30 years of frenzy and frustration can have no other leading figure than Baffert, the white-haired trainer who arrived in Southern California in the early 1990s from the quarter-horse circuit and quickly became a national force in thoroughbreds.

Baffert is the leading victim of close-call-itis. Since Affirmed held off Alydar in their legendary stretch duel, 10 others have come to the Belmont with a chance to complete the sweep. Three of them have been trained by Baffert -- Silver Charm in 1997, Real Quiet in '98 and War Emblem in '02.

"I've come to grips with a lot of this. I'm learning to deal with it," says Baffert, probably lying.

This is how it has gone since '78: