#Soundbites - How much do the opinions of others affect your yearling evaluations?
Bob Baffert
The opinions of others cloud my decisions sometimes. I like to go in it myself, my initial reaction when I look at the horse myself. I base it on what I see in the horse. I try to keep the outside noise out. I’ve made some mistakes by listening to other people sometimes. At the end of the day, I go with what people call is a gut feeling. I call it experience of what worked for me and what didn’t work for me.
Bruce Levine
Everybody’s got an opinion on a yearling. One guy will look at a horse and like him. The next guy - he just doesn’t like him. I do a physical. If the vet doesn’t like him, it’s very rare I’ll go against the vet. If he says it’s a 10 percent risk, that’s something different. Then I’ll let the price determine it. But if he’s telling me, “Stay away,” I’m staying away.
Mike Trombetta
When I’m making yearling selections, truthfully, everybody looks for different things. For me, personally, I like to tune out background noise and try to make my own decisions. Because, at the end of the day, I want to be happy with what I’ve selected and not so much based on what other people have to say.
Al Stall
A lot of people have teams, including myself. If it’s a team member, I’m all ears. Otherwise, I don’t really pay too much attention. We’ve been doing it a long time. We end up agreeing most of the time, and if we don’t agree we just throw it out and move on to the next. It’s us three, me and Frank and Daphne Wooten from Camden, South Carolina. They break our yearlings. We’ve been doing it together for quite a while. We’ve gotten lucky. Lucky is a very important word with yearlings.
Kathleen O’Connell
Everything is useful information. That’s the way I look at it. If you get to the point where you’re considering buying a yearling and a vet is telling you it’s got a problem, you’d want to steer away from it. As far as anything else, you can look it up. I have a high regard for the people that handle the hose, that are around the horse. So they know if it’s a nervous horse or a horse that’s a little more mentally mature. To be honest with you, I value everybody’s opinion, and then you just have to draw your own conclusion.
Mike Stidham
We have certain people we work with, a team of about five of us. We’ve been going to Keeneland for 30 years or more and we’ve had some success there with the budget we have to spend. We’re pretty pleased with what we’ve accomplished over the years, so the opinion of others really doesn’t come into play.
Mark Hennig
If I don’t like the yearling, I don’t buy it. But there’s been times where I like the yearling and someone might point something out to me that makes me take a closer look and veer away from it. We’re always capable of having a second set of eyes or a third set of eyes. I rarely look at a horse by myself. We usually have a team, an agent, my wife and I. In some cases an owner wants to look at them, too. We do miss things.
Brendan Walsh
I think you’ve got to have your opinion on them. I have people I work with, obviously, or if you’re looking for a client, you have to take their opinions on board, too. I mean they do influence you depending on the circumstances, but at the end of the day you have to have your own opinion.