Flatter: Making the case for trainer Steven M. Asmussen, CEO

Whenever I think of Steve Asmussen and the numbers he is accumulating and the times we count down, or rather up, to his new plateaus and records and milestones and superlatives, one name comes to mind. Cy Young.

Not that Asmussen is a throwback. Quite the opposite. It is all about the context of these gaudy totals. Monday, when he trained his 10,000th winner, his accomplishment took on the appearance of a Manhattan ZIP Code. Or, as Tony’s son Michael Kornheiser said about five completely different digits, it looked like an odometer reading.

It is well-documented that Asmussen is the winningest Thoroughbred trainer in North America. He has been since the summer of ’21. Occasionally, someone with a microphone breathlessly says “more than anyone in the world,” either not knowing or not caring that Juan Suárez Villaroel in Perú very much shares the same planet and got to 10,000 more than a year ago.

Better known is the fact Cy Young remains the winningest pitcher in Major League Baseball history, even though his yesteryear is further from today’s game than Suárez Villaroel is from Asmussen. Young’s 511 victories between 1890 and 1911 are more than double the 244 that active leader Justin Verlander carries into the new season.

Less well-known is another record Young holds. He is the losingest pitcher of all time. His 315 defeats are, again, more than double active leader Zach Greinke’s 141.

Yes, Asmussen has that same distinction in North America. Headed into Thursday, he had 49,213 starts. Subtract his 10,000 wins, and that leaves 39,213 losses. Since Jerry Hollendorfer had the next most starts with 34,373, that means Asmussen is the continent’s losingest trainer.

This is not to make him look bad, even though I am sure there are more than a few haters who will take these numbers and put them through flawed prisms. Instead, this is to underscore the uniquely prolific success Asmussen has had in the 37 years he has built a Hall of Fame career.

Equibase this week listed 69 trainers who have had at least 10,000 starts in the U.S. and Canada. Asmussen ranked 21st among them in win percentage at 20.3. His 51.1 percent rate of hitting the board ranked 14th. His 8,179 seconds and 6,952 thirds were at the top of those lists, although former record holder Dale Baird’s statistics were incomplete.

OK. Numbers, numbers, numbers. Yada, yada, yada.

What all this boils down to is Asmussen is the racing business’s equivalent of two other Steves. The ones who sold their van and calculator to build their first computer in 1976. Jobs and Wozniak parlayed that ambition into little thing we like to call Apple.

Funny thing. Jobs and Wozniak get a whole lot of credit and praise for what they built, but nobody for one second thinks they lay their hands on every Mac, iPhone or iPad that is shipped out of Cupertino, Calif.

Asmussen is much the same. He is the CEO of a successful brand. No, he does not lay his hands on every horse saddled in his name, and his critics love to pounce on that. Baird, they say, was there for all 9,445 of his winner’s circle photos, and Asmussen often is like Charlie talking to Bosley and the Angels.

Apples and oranges, folks, pun intended. If Asmussen should get his name only on the horses he personally witnessed winning, then Jobs and Wozniak should cede credit for my wife’s tablet to the assembly-line technicians who actually built it in Zhengzhou, China.

If only Steven M. Asmussen Stables were listed on NASDAQ. If so, let me know where to line up for the IPO. Hey, Churchill Downs stock made a big jump with record 2022 earnings that still fell short of Wall Street’s fourth-quarter projections. How bearish a market can horse racing be?

The argument may be advanced that Asmussen has done more difficult work than Baird, what with having to find trustworthy lieutenants like Scott Blasi and Darren Fleming and hire staffs simultaneously running four or more barns and looking after hundreds of horses around the country and round the clock.

There is no debating that what Asmussen has done is different from the accomplishments of peers and rivals before him. Jack Van Berg may have been the pioneer when it came to spreading instead of singling his operation. D. Wayne Lukas doubled down on that business model but with a higher profile. Honestly, they were Radio Shack and Commodore, state of the art in their time, before Asmussen was Apple.

Asmussen actually has taken a little of what Van Berg did, succeed with a lot of claimers and entry-level horses, and a lot of what Lukas did, become a super trainer, and put them together.

Just look at the list of horses who provided Asmussen his milestone wins. His 1,000th, 2,000th, 4,000th, 5,000th, 6,000th and 10,000th were maidens. Two of those also were claimers as were his 4,000th, 7,000th and 9,000th. His 3,000th, Forest Music in the 2005 Honorable Miss Handicap at Saratoga, was the only graded-stakes winner to take him to a next thousand.

Asmussen’s numbers emphasize quantity. Keep them healthy, get them on the track, earn their owners some money, and if they come through the claim box, make them worth the price of the tag.

Baseball and racing have gone in opposite directions in valuing this kind of volume production. In the late 19th century Young started a game every two or three days, and he had a career average of more than eight innings every time he showed up. Nowadays starting pitchers may or may not get to the sixth inning in their one game a week.

Horses used to race maybe once every two or three weeks. Now they go every four, five or six. That makes what Asmussen has done so much more remarkable. Foal crops keep shrinking, but he has led the U.S. and Canada with the most starts and starters each of the last seven years. He has had at least 2,000 starts per year since 2018, and that included a rare dip in 2022.

Asmussen told Oaklawn public relations that the context of all this was pointed out to him recently.

“A friend of mine told me that 10,000 wins calculates to a win a day for 27 straight years,” he said.

But how about averaging 3 1/2 starters per day for 37 years? Asmussen has done that, too. At a time when racing can use all the product it can get, he is a veritable factory.

Asmussen still yearns to fill the one big hole on his résumé, winning the Kentucky Derby. Gun Pilot or one of his other two this weekend in the Rebel could be the one. Maybe Extra Añejo regains his fitness and lives up to the promise he showed as a 2-year-old. Or maybe Asmussen has to wait again until next year. At 57, he still has the time. And the wherewithal.

For all his accomplishments, Cy Young won only one World Series. He won two games when the Boston Americans beat Pittsburg – no H back then – in 1903. He also went 28-9 that year. Gee, he could have won the Cy Young Award.

Other greats have had gaps on their curricula vitae, too. Dan Marino never won a Super Bowl. Phil Mickelson has zero U.S. Open titles. Ty Cobb had as many World Series rings as I have. No one would argue against their Hall of Fame merits.

And so it goes with Steve Asmussen, at once a CEO as he is an important cog in a multigenerational, family business. Eventually he may win a Kentucky Derby. And he probably will reel in Juan Suárez Villaroel for the world record. At their current win rates, that may not happen until 2027.

May we then debate Asmussen’s accomplishments all over again. By then that company the other Steves started will have a whole new toy for us to exchange opinions.