Preakness 2024: Imagination has not caught the Muth bug

Baltimore, Md.

Perish the thought that something was going around the Bob Baffert barn. If futures favorite Muth could spike a fever and get scratched out of Saturday’s running of Preakness 2024, why wouldn’t it happen to his stablemate Imagination?

Jimmy Barnes has heard the rumors, which can be as loud around big races as they are unrequited. He did not have to work hard Thursday morning to squelch this one.

DeRosa: Fair odds for Preakness 2024.

“These things happen,” he said. “It’s just unfortunate for it to happen. But we do all the precautionary measures we can take as far as isolating the horse. No contamination.”

Evidence that all was right with Imagination came when he walked out in the sunshine after 8 a.m. EDT to take a gallop over the main track at Pimlico.

“Real good on the track today,” said Barnes, who traveled in advance of Baffert to look after Muth, Imagination and undercard allowance entrant Mirahmadi. “Beautiful day. It looked like we had rain (Wednesday) night, but the track held up well.”

Barnes was at a loss to explain why Muth took ill. He could have written it off to a cross-country flight Tuesday not to mention the trailer journeys between airports and the barns at Santa Anita and Pimlico.

“You don’t even know if that’s the cause,” he said. “He could have carried it with him from California. You just don’t know.”

The trip has been made longer and more complicated in the past since the Air Horse One plane operated by Tex Sutton Equine Air Transportation was grounded three years ago.

Now horses are sent on planes operated by FedEx, which has a more limited menu of flight and shipping options.

“Tex Sutton would normally fly right into Baltimore vs. FedEx, where we have to fly to Newark,” Barnes said. “Unfortunately, they land at a bad time. You land at 4:50 (p.m.), by the time you get out of there it's 5, and you’re looking at a lot of traffic coming in through New York.”

Whatever it was that caused Muth’s fever, Barnes learned about it quickly, and that allowed the traveling team to get out in front of it.

“It doesn’t look serious,” Barnes said. “The main thing is we caught it early and didn’t train (Wednesday). And we’ll come up with another plan. ... It definitely didn’t get worse at all, but these things just don’t go away overnight. It’ll take three or four days.”

Imagination seemed to weather the trip well. Prevailing wisdom suggests he will have the early lead Saturday under jockey Frankie Dettori, who will be riding in his first Preakness Stakes. Dettori was aboard when Imagination carried even-money odds and finished second to Stronghold last month, losing by a neck in the Grade 1 Santa Anita Derby.

“We would like to have won it,” Baffert told reporters last week on a National Thoroughbred Racing Association conference call. “But I liked the fact that he gutted it out pretty well. He’s still learning. We’re learning more about him. Frankie’s learning more about him.”

Imagination’s path to victory figures to be gate-to-wire. Such a front-running trip, however, would lack a certain something that Baffert averred might be a necessary ingredient for the Into Mischief colt to succeed.

“He’s a horse that needs a target,” he said. “He just got out there (in the Santa Anita Derby), and that other horse that beat him, he is a nice horse. So they were just battling all the way down the stretch, and he came out of it really well.”

Baffert figured the added 110 yards Saturday to get 1 3/16 miles would be no problem for Imagination, who is owned by the same SF Racing partnership that campaigned last year’s Preakness winner National Treasure.

“The trip’s going to make a big difference,” he said.

That and the good health of Imagination. The winner of the March 3 San Felipe (G2) is being kept away from Muth, whom Baffert said could be in the mix for the Belmont Stakes at Saratoga if the fever subsides quickly.

“It all depends on how the end of this week goes,” Barnes said.