Flatter: This is looking more like Kentucky Derby 149 1/2

We have this odd fetish with even numbers that are oval. Take a routine chore like the turning of a calendar page, put a zero at the end of it, and it becomes an event.

A 50th wedding anniversary is golden. America’s bicentennial was not celebrated formally on a single 4th of July but for 15 protracted months. The new millennium came complete with once-in-a-lifetime celebrations and a dud of a computer virus.

Report: Baffert horses will not be moved for Derby eligibility.

Being the exhibitions they are with the need to sell tickets, sports go overboard to embrace milestones. Major League Baseball broke its leagues into divisions and got a 100th-anniversary postage stamp in 1969. In Atlanta they were not just the 1996 Olympics but, instead, the centenary Olympics. The stodgy NFL even made its logo gold for its 50th Super Bowl season in 2015.

Alas, that will not be the case this year at Churchill Downs. For all the hoopla of what should be a sesquicentennial celebration, it will be no better than Kentucky Derby 149 1/2.

The race that annually showcases the nation’s best 3-year-olds will not do so this year. That is because the twin spires have been made to look like a treehouse with a sign hanging outside. It says, “No Bob allowed.”

Hopefully, this is not another tired effort to rehash the past 33 months since Bob Baffert revealed Medina Spirit had failed a drug test. We could waste time trudging through the barn-side news conference, the spell checks for betamethasone, the injection vs. ointment debate, the tedious hearings and even the stripping of Medina Spirit’s 2021 Derby victory.

We need not be mired in the past. We should move forward. But Churchill Downs Inc. will not.

When Baffert and Medina Spirit’s owner Amr Zedan abandoned their court fight last week, their olive branch was stubbornly rejected. CDI made like the divorce winner who kept the house, full custody and 100 percent of the scorn.

An attempted rapprochement actually began last year. Baffert’s attorney Clark Brewster told Horse Racing Nation that CDI “asked that (Baffert) not pursue the appeal in the federal case against Churchill, and we obliged them on that point. We let that case lapse and didn’t file the appeal out of a sense of goodwill and cooperation and with a forgiving attitude.”

Churchill responded at the time with a frigid shoulder and an extension of Baffert’s two-year suspension by at least another 1 1/2 years through the end of 2024. It looked then as it did last week. As Robert Duvall said in “Network,” it was “intractable and adamantine.”

Who is to say CDI will not add even more time onto Baffert’s suspension? That announcement comes due in the middle of the college football playoffs next winter, probably around 5 p.m. EST on New Year’s Eve.

The hyperbole churned by his critics notwithstanding, Baffert is no criminal. Yet he is serving an indeterminate sentence, the kind reserved for the biggest threats to society. A horseman accused of breaking debatable medication rules who also was told, yes, it was something you said, should not be facing five-to-life.

Here is the part where we racing fans suffer. Since Baffert told the Los Angeles Times this week that he and his client owners did not transfer horses to eligible trainers by Monday’s deadline, this Kentucky Derby will not be a complete showcase for the best 3-year-olds in training.

This goes beyond the volatile, fluky footing of the road to Louisville. The ongoing ban of Baffert and the nose-thumbing of his above-board decision not to pick and roll through his former assistant Tim Yakteen pre-empts injuries and poor performances. It is as if some really good horses do not exist.

It was not a subtle message when CDI kept moving the transfer deadline up on Baffert. In 2022 it was effectively the dates of the final big preps. Last year it was Feb. 28. This year it was 30 days sooner. If this keeps up, the transfer deadline may as well come at a yearling sale.

Baffert horses Cave Rock, Reincarnate, Arabian Knight and Newgate had the points from four prep wins vacated last season. Before that, Corniche, Newgrange, Messier and Blackadder had the points thrown out from six combined victories. Reincarnate and Messier got to the Derby in Yakteen’s name, and even though they did not win, they still represented the possibility their owners saw in sending them first to a trainer who still owns six Kentucky Derby victories.

Now the Baffert-to-Churchill-through-Yakteen route is a goner. Don’t blame Baffert. He seems sincere in trying to do what CDI wants him to do. Instead, he is left to say thank you, sir, may I have another?

What looked first like a punitive action against Baffert has turned vindictive and downright exclusionary. This is nothing new in sports. The PGA Tour and LIV Golf battle and Jon Rahm’s resultant absence from this weekend’s Pebble Beach Pro-Am are evidence. So, too, is the fact the Indy 500 has not been the same since a 25-year civil war between USAC and CART fractured open-wheel racing. At least some higher-ups figured it out before the proposed Super League could break up Europe soccer.

With Nysos and Maymun and the rest of the 3-year-olds in the Baffert barn being denied their opportunities to work their way to Churchill Downs on May 4, America’s signature race will not be its greatest race this year. Never mind an asterisk. The run for the roses will not be whole in 2024. Thus it will be Kentucky Derby 149 1/2.

If Baffert gets the same horse into the winner’s circles at Pimlico and Saratoga in the Preakness and the Belmont Stakes*, we will be looking at the 3-year-old male champion in waiting without ever passing through the home office of racing.

It has been suggested if Baffert were removed from the Kentucky Derby’s recent history, the roll of winners lately would not read like list of champions. Throw out American Pharoah, Justify and Authentic, and the names beneath the spires since 2015 would be Nyquist, Always Dreaming, Country House, Mandaloun, Rich Strike and Mage. Only Mandaloun, who trailed Medina Spirit to the wire, won another race.

There is no doubt most of the fans who will come to Churchill Downs and most of the viewers who will watch the Derby this year are not wired into all this noise. I doubt most of them are even aware this is going on.

The Baffert story will be told, though. So, too, will a follow-up on all the horse deaths from last spring, because that is where most of America left off. These are corrosive ingredients that can eat away at even the greatest of sporting citadels like a ritual horse race.

Stubbornness suggests it is too late to make all this right in time to round Kentucky Derby 149 1/2 up to a number worth burnishing.

It just occurred to me. This marks exactly 999 days since Baffert spoke defiantly to the media outside his barn at Churchill Downs.

Anyone have any plans for Saturday?

Ron Flatter’s column appears Friday mornings at Horse Racing Nation. Comments below are welcomed, encouraged and may be used in the feedback segment of the Ron Flatter Racing Pod, which also is posted every Friday.