Mountaineer trainer nears 9,000 wins

Dale Baird, 69, has never been one of the industry's glamour guys.
CHESTER, W.Va. (AP) -- It's hard to miss Dale Baird at Mountaineer Race Track.
Just find the guy under the bright blue baseball cap that bears his name. He got it five years ago in recognition of a record 8,000 wins as a thoroughbred trainer.
Soon, Baird will need another hat. The "Wizard of Waterford" is closing in on No. 9,000 over a 43-year career.
The son of a former jockey at county fairs, Baird focuses almost entirely on racing claimers -- horses for sale for a particular price. He has owned all or part of about 75 percent of the horses he trains.
Avoiding the spotlight
Baird, 69, has never been one of the industry's glamour guys. He's strictly a hat-and-jeans trainer who has yet to enter a stakes race or have visions of conditioning a champion horse.
"They're too expensive," Baird said recently from an office overlooking the track, a few specks of straw settling from his tennis shoes onto the carpet.
"I doubt if I could train for somebody. If you train with somebody, you've got to be responsible," he said.
When Baird started, owners had money -- but they just wanted to run for fun.
"They won races, but wouldn't still make any money. They didn't care. But now it's a big business here. Big business," he said.
Video slots at Mountaineer have increased purses dramatically since being introduced at the track in June 1990. That means Baird goes between wins more often, and he's become somewhat antsy to reach the milestone. He was at win No. 8,992 earlier in the week.
"It's an everyday business. So every day, we can't win. We'd like to," Baird said.
No slowing down
He recalls passing Jack Van Berg, who is No. 2 with 6,334 wins. "I just kept going, and it just kept growing," Baird said.
The feat will be most special to Baird's family -- he's the second oldest of 12 children. At least two dozen relatives plan to be at the track when he wins 9,000.
Some won't have to travel far. A brother, John, also trains horses at Mountaineer and competes head-to-head with his sibling. So do Dale's son, Bart, and a nephew, Mike.
"He's under a little bit of pressure from it, but he's been there before," John Baird said.
Baird employs 15 people and rises about 5:15 a.m. each day to train horses that could end up being duds or winners.
"You ask any trainer in the country, they all started out by racing claimers," said Remi Bellocq, executive director of the national Horsemen's Benevolent and Protective Association. "Sometimes it's tougher to win a race with a lesser horse than with a $1 million grade horse. It just takes more work.
"It's as much a compliment to his success in that he's worked with horses with more limited ability."
Family love
An Illinois native, Baird watched his father race at county fairs. After leaving the Army at age 23, Baird saddled his first winner, New York, in 1961 at Ellis Park in Henderson, Ky.
He arrived at a track in Wheeling in the mid-1960s before settling in at Waterford Park, the precursor to Mountaineer. The year-round racing schedule kept him there, and he won with such frequency that he was dubbed the "Wizard of Waterford."
Baird, who lives only a few minutes from the track, races five days a week at Mountaineer and often takes horses to race at Cleveland's Thistledown. He's led Mountaineer's trainers in wins every year since 1967, and led all North American trainers in wins in 15 different seasons.
His 5,000th win came in August 1988, and his 8,000th in July 1999, both at Mountaineer.
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