Rocco Baldelli is Winning on the Diamond and the Track

You can forgive Rocco Baldelli for not watching his filly La Manta Gris (Lemon Drop Kid) win Saturday's ninth race, a maiden special weight race on the turf, at Churchill Downs. He was a little busy at the time, doing his part to help the Tampa Bay Rays defeat the New York Yankees, 9-5.

Rocco Baldelli's star-crossed career as a player came to a halt in 2010 due to a freakish illness known as mitochondrial channelopathy, a cell disorder that causes muscle fatigue. That ended his dream of winning the World Series as a player, but it also gave him time to reassess what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. Baldelli decided he wanted back into the game and went to work for the Rays, eventually becoming their first base coach. He also decided to make one of his passions–horse racing–something more.

Baldelli, 35, owns or co-owns three broodmares, two weanlings and two race horses. He is doing this on a small scale but with a focus on quality. He's not afraid to think big.

“Anyone in the thoroughbred game dreams of doing bigger and better things,” Baldelli, the guest on this week's TDN podcast, said. “I would love to have a band of broodmares to send to the War Fronts and Tapits of the world. As of now, that doesn't fit with what I am able to do. But never say never. My dream would be to some day own a filly that runs in the bigger races and to win, say, the Distaff. It doesn't sound like what most people would say. It's something I think about more than owning a colt that wins the GI Kentucky Derby. To do something like that and then have a beautiful mare to breed to for the next 15 years, that would be perfect.”

Baldelli, who grew up in Rhode Island, was a first-round draft pick in 2000 and made his MLB debut with the Rays in 2003. He got off to a fast start, hitting .289 and driving in 78 runs as a rookie. He backed that up with another big year in 2004 and seemed headed for a long and lucrative career as a star major leaguer. But bad luck stood in his way. Injuries costs him the entire 2005 season and mitochondrial channelopathy cost him his career. After he came down with the disorder, he was never again the same as a player and retired after playing just 10 games for the Rays in 2010 and hitting .208.

“It was a very confusing time for me,” said Baldelli, who also played one season with the Boston Red Sox. “It came on out of nowhere. I was worried and I was worried that it would continue to get worse. It was a little scary, to say the least. My baseball career was on the back burner, but I was more worried about my health than I was baseball.”

Baldelli was only a casual racing fan growing up. Once he started playing professionally, he came across a couple of people inside baseball who were involved with racing and that spurred his interest. The first was Dan Dement, who was a teammate of Baldelli's during his first minor league season in 2000, when he played for a team in Princeton, West Virginia. Dement, now a minor league coach with the Rays, operates Brigade Stable along with his brother, Michael. The other was former Houston Astros general manager Gerry Hunsicker. Hunsicker, who would also go on to work in management for the Rays, owned small pieces of Honor Code (A.P. Indy) and Liam's Map (Unbridled's Song).

Baldelli officially became a part of the breeding business when he bought his first horse, the broodmare Union Waters (Dixie Union) in 2011. He bought her for $140,000 out of the Edwards P. Evans dispersal at the Keeneland November Breeding Stock Sale.

“When i first jumped into this, Gerry Hunsicker helped me out a lot and so did David Ingordo,” said Baldelli, who also names Bernie Sams as someone who has been a big asset to him in the racing business. “David Ingordo went to the sales and we worked together. I wanted to buy something out of the Ned Evans dispersal because Mr. Evans had a lot of quality in his band. David is very good and knows what he likes, and I knew he could find a nice mare for me in my price range. My goal was to breed her and bring a nice foal to auction.”

After selling her first foal for just $30,000, Baldelli connected when selling the second foal, a colt by Speightstown, for $270,000 as a weanling at the 2013 Keeneland November Sale. In 2015, he turned around and sold Union Waters at Keeneland January for $155,000.

“We sold that Speightstown foal for a nice sum,” Baldelli said. “That was a really good feeling and helpful to me as a young breeder. For a while, not a lot of checks were coming in but a lot were going out. That was something I had to get used to.”

The best horse Baldelli has bred so far has been Star Super (Super Saver), who is out of a mare named Reforestration (Forestry) that Baldelli owns in partnership with Caldara Farms and Lane's End Bloodstock. Sold for $65,000, she won this year's Marshua S. at Laurel.

“If you are into this business I don't think you ever forget the first stakes winner that you've bred,” Baldelli said. “You have these hopes and dreams for each one of them, regardless if you breed one that looks like a superstar or you breed one that doesn't look like a superstar. You always think what if? We didn't know this would be the filly that would do it out of all of them. I maybe wouldn't have guessed it at one point, but that's what makes the game really fun.”

With the demands of his coaching duties, Baldelli only has so much time to focus on racing and says baseball is very much his priority. He says his primary goal is to help the Rays win a World series some day. But racing is also more to him than a diversion or a hobby. He says he will only race and buy fillies as he is more interested in the breeding than racing side of the business and hopes to build up a solid band of broodmares.

You will never catch him complaining about his bad luck on the baseball field or that he never was able to sign for the type of money that seemed to be a foregone conclusion when he broke in. He approaches racing the same way. Appreciate the good. Deal with the bad. Maybe his team will in a World Series. Maybe he will breed a Kentucky Derby winner. Either way, he's having fun trying.