A case study in confirmation bias, racing Twitter now X, and the math nobody checked
There’s a Washington Post graphic making the rounds again on racing Twitter. You’ve probably seen it. Ten trainers. Deaths per 1,000 starts. Bob Baffert’s bar rendered in black, not taupe, because subtlety apparently had the day off.
The chart is real. The data is sourced. And in the hands of people who decided the verdict before they read the evidence, it has become a kind of sacred text.
Let’s actually look at it.
Baffert’s rate is 8.30 per 1,000 starts over a 21-year window, drawn from 8,913 starts. Jeff Bonde’s rate is 8.12 — functionally identical — drawn from 6,401 starts. Charles Treece checks in at 6.79 across 11,335 starts. Jerry Hollendorfer, whose issues with California regulators became front-page news, posted 6.25 across 19,516 starts and 122 deaths — the most of anyone on the list.
I don’t recall the pitch-fork brigade showing up for Bonde. Or Treece.
A rate without context is a number in search of a narrative. Bob Baffert operates at the highest volume and the highest competitive level in American racing. He runs horses at tracks with historically demanding surfaces, in graded stakes fields where horses are trained to an edge that smaller operations simply never approach. None of that excuses a single preventable death. But it is relevant to any honest analysis of what a rate means — and the people circulating this chart have shown zero interest in that question.
The Medina Spirit Revisit
One of the posts making the rounds pairs the chart with a lengthy re-litigation of the Medina Spirit disqualification, built around the argument that Baffert’s use of Otomax, a topical cream containing betamethasone, demonstrated a reckless indifference to detail that disqualifies him from speaking on horse safety.
There’s a problem with that argument, and it’s hiding in plain sight: betamethasone is now a legal, regulated substance in American racing. That fact doesn’t appear anywhere in the post. It matters enormously. The Medina Spirit DQ turned on a threshold, not on the presence of a prohibited substance. Racing’s own regulatory evolution since that ruling implicitly acknowledges the complexity here — complexity that partisan accounts have no interest in exploring.
The Otomax label direction argument that Baffert ignored a seven-day use caution is prosecutorial theater. Label cautions are not medication rules. Trainers work with veterinarians on treatment protocols. The suggestion that reading the side panel of a topical cream should have triggered a DQ-awareness alarm is the kind of reasoning that sounds compelling in a tweet and collapses immediately under scrutiny.
The Question Nobody Asks
The most telling moment in the piece in question isn’t the data. It’s this line: “I can’t help but wonder whether or not LuR was paid by Baffert, much like product placements in films.”
That’s not journalism. That’s not even informed speculation. That’s an insinuation wrapped in a rhetorical question, published without a shred of supporting evidence, about a real organization and a real person. Note carefully what it does: it converts the absence of an explanation the author finds satisfying into evidence of wrongdoing.
If that standard were applied consistently, a lot of people on racing Twitter now X would owe a lot of people some apologies.
What This Is Really About
There is a legitimate conversation to be had about trainer fatality rates, about surface safety, about medication policy and its enforcement. Past The Wire has been having that conversation for years, with named sources, documented records, and the willingness to make arguments that don’t always land well with any particular constituency.
That conversation requires intellectual honesty. It requires acknowledging when data is incomplete. It requires the same skepticism applied to the trainer you dislike that you’d apply to the one you admire.
What it does not require, what it actively cannot survive, is the transformation of a bar chart into a conviction, and a rhetorical question into an accusation.
The chart is real. The math, in the hands of people who stopped reading when they found what they were looking for, is something else entirely.
One more thing worth stating plainly. Bob Baffert is arguably the most scrutinized trainer in the history of American racing. Regulatory bodies, rival camps, mainstream media outlets, and a dedicated corner of racing Twitter have been examining every entry, every medication record, and every barn death for the better part of two decades. If carelessness or recklessness were genuinely systemic, the people who have devoted considerable energy to proving exactly that would have produced something more substantial than a recycled Washington Post graphic and a rhetorical question about product placement. The absence of that material isn’t an oversight. It’s the answer.
Photo: Bob Baffert, Coglianese Photo, Gulfstream Park
