In the equine March Madness, the season’s two final hundred-point contests, the Arkansas and Florida Derbies, basically a month out from the showdown at Churchill, serve as punctuation marks. We could fairly say that if your athlete hasn’t put up some Kentucky Derby points until this penultimate weekend, you’d better make sure he’s ready for a run. Put differently, there is a special love-it-or-leave-it energy to this weekend’s contests. Everybody out there, every runner, every owner, every jock, every stable hand is trying like the devil to make it matter, none more so than Hall of Fame trainer Bob Baffert, now, having served his three-year Churchill ban (with an extension of a year) after his Derby winner Medina Spirit was disqualified for a betamethasone violation, allowed to enter horses in the Kentucky show.
On cue then, and with quite something to prove given his glaring absence, Baffert is back in fighting form with the leading colt in the $1.5 million Arkansas Derby, Cornucopian. Hard on his heels are the second- and third-favorites, Coal Battle, trained by Lonnie Riley, and the ominously-named Sandman, trained by Mark Casse.
Points required for entry into the Kentucky Derby vary year to year, but roughly speaking, anything north of 60 points will get a “berth,” provided that the wild 21-horse Kentucky hayride is on the radar for the athlete and his or her connections come May. Some years, 45 points will do it. And some trainers skip Kentucky altogether, by choice or by force, as Hall of Fame trainer Todd Pletcher did with the 2023 Arkansas Derby champion Forte, pictured above winning that race at Oaklawn, by pointing him at that year’s Belmont after he was scratched as the Derby favorite.
With no further ado, then, here’s the field, the riders, trainers and the morning line for the 2025 Arkansas Derby.
(Post Position, Horse, Trainer, Jockey, Morning Line)
- Brereton’s Baytown, Paul McEntee, Marshall Méndez, 30-1
- First Division, Kenny McPeek, Brian Hernandez Jr., 20-1
- Publisher, Steve Asmussen, Flavien Prat, 6-1
- Bestfriend Rocket, D. Wayne Lukas, Nik Juárez, 20-1
- Speed King, Ron Moquett, Rafael Bejarano, 15-1
- Sandman, Mark Casse, José Ortiz, 3-1
- Monet’s Magic, Ben Colebrook, Luan Machado, 20-1
- Coal Battle, Lonnie Briley, Juan P. Vargas, 7-2
- Cornucopian, Bob Baffert, John Velázquez, 7-5
(Source: Oaklawn Park, 3/26/2025)
Working Oaklawn’s top three favorites from bottom to top (in implied probability of victory), Lonnie Briley’s Coal Battle (at 7-2) is one of the more experienced runners of this or any other three-year-old field, with seven races to his resume, the last four of which were outright wins. He bested Baffert’s Madaket Road and Casse’s Sandman in the Rebel Stakes, he blistered the field in the the Smarty Jones — both at Oaklawn, both at a mile-and-a-sixteenth. Bottom line: The young fellow knows how to get up front and stay there. To be discounted at your peril.
Casse’s Sandman, barely a nose ahead of Coal Battle in implied probability at a tight 3-1, is, also, a seven-race veteran, having racked up five finishes in the money, including two wins, two shows and a single place. While it might seem as if he’s all over the map on a given day (as all three-year-olds actually are), what’s clear about this Tapit colt is that he’s in it to be at the front at the wire. He knows what he has to do and gets about doing it. The no-dallying mindset, strikingly similar to that of Coal Battle, is a huge advantage over the colts — and there are a lot of them out there — who don’t yet know how to focus their juvenile energy. At Oaklawn on Saturday afternoon, Sandman has the talented José Ortiz up, a distinct advantage. Sandman placed ahead of Tiztastic’s show in January’s Southwest Stakes at Oaklawn, and he showed — behind Coal Battle, who won and Bob Baffert’s Madaket Road, who placed — in Oaklawn’s Rebel Stakes in early March. Bottom line: Sandman fights through to be in the mix. Ergo: He’s there to mix it up with Coal Battle and Cornucopian on Saturday.
Finally, Baffert. Love him or not — and by now, it’s relatively clear that Churchill Downs definitely does not love Bob Baffert — the six-time Kentucky Derby winner does remember how to mount a Derby campaign. That noted, it’s safe to say that Cornucopian is exceedingly lightly raced, having a track “career” of exactly his maiden victory in an unnamed 6-furlong race at Oaklawn under his belt, and that win under (lighter) maiden weight. Rather, it’s his astronomical speed figures that have him as the top favorite in the Arkansas Derby. Apparently, the colt just doesn’t know how to do anything except get out there and be the fastest. Whether that brawny youth can bring that sort of unbridled thinking under real-race weights, in real tack, against real, experienced racehorses that have won multiple stakes remains to be seen. But, until the betting windows at Oaklawn open on Saturday, anyway — the boy’s triple-digit speed figures have taken the day, as well as the Oaklawn oddsmakers favor. He’s the man to beat. Luckily, he can’t read so he doesn’t know that and freak out about it.
But Baffert does know that, and he well knows the characters his athlete is up against. Cornucopian is such a rank babe-in-arms that his questions are many and varied, but the main question boils down to this: Can he, in the first real race against really fine competition of his short life, focus on the hard job to be done? Put another way, although he’s being touted as the “phenom,” he’s not one yet. Cornucopian still has to wake up on Saturday, tack up in the enclosure, and get out there and prove it.