A Big Shake at Oaklawn Park

Horses break from the gate at Oaklawn Park. (Photo by Eclipse Sportswire)
This past Sunday was a big day at Oaklawn Park in Hot Springs, Ark. It was the Southwest Stakes, the first of that track’s big graded stakes for 3-year-olds, which had been postponed due to weather from Presidents' Day. But the action got started early when the first race of the day saw four horses claimed.
Claiming has been hot at Oaklawn this season, which looks to be on pace to beat last year’s season, which may have been the biggest claiming year in the track’s history.
In 2014, there 423 claims at the track’s 53-day meet. In the first 10 days of racing in 2015, there were 80 claims! And this past Sunday saw not only four in the first race, but one of those claims had a 24-way shake!
For the uninitiated, a claiming race is a race where all the horses entered are up for sale at a fixed, claiming price. The catch is that buyers have to put in their claim to buy the horse BEFORE the race is run, and they are held to it no matter how the horse performs in the race. In the event that more than one person enters a claim to buy the same horse, a “shake” determines the winner.
The “shake” is a simple drawing of lots - a numbered pill or ball is placed in a pill bottle for each owner that puts in a claim. The bottle is then shaken and a ball is drawn to determine who gets to purchase the horse. Shakes are not uncommon, though they often involve two or three prospective owners. Eight or nine is considered unusual. Twenty-four is crazy! And in the first race of the day!
The horse that everyone wanted in on was a five-year-old mare named Mr Mabee’s Baby. She was coming off an impressive win in a $6,250 claiming race. The winner of the shake who was awarded the mare for the $5,000 claiming price was Lynn Whiting, trainer of the 1992 Kentucky Derby winner Lil E. Tee.
LIL E. TEE BEFORE HIS DERBY WIN

Churchill Downs Photo
Lil E. Tee was considered an upset winner that year at 16.80-to-1. Whiting had to overcome longer odds than that to win the shake on Mr Maybee’s Baby, who by the way ran second.
I went looking on the internet for some stories of big crowds in the racing clerk’s lobby. I ran across this thread on Pace Advantage that discussed a 70-way shake on the South Dakota-bred Win Stat at the now-defunct Ak-Sar-Ben racetrack in Nebraska in the early 1980s.
Win Stat was probably the best horse to ever come out of the state of South Dakota and was a real champion at Ak-Sar-Ben. At the time the horse was entered for the claiming price of $17,500, he had been running in smaller allowance and stakes races. After being claimed, Win Stat was returned to allowance levels and went on to win the $150,000, Grade 2 Ak-Sar-Ben Cornhusker Handicap, the marquee race at Ak-Sar-Ben for older horses, the very next year. Win Stat would also go on to set track records and even a world record for a mile and 70 yards in 1984 at Oaklawn Park. The horse ran until the age of 9 and earned about a half-million bucks for his new owners. His final race was in 1986 at Ak-Sar-Ben. It was, fittingly, a claiming race. Though he was a local champion and world-record holder, nobody entered a claim that day.