5 Baseball Stars With Passion For Horse Racing

Horse racing and baseball are completely different sports but taken by their adrenaline rush and athletic spirit, there are some baseball stars that started to get interested in horse racing, especially after their retirement.

Baseball and horse racing are two of the most popular sports in the United States, and throughout history, we’ve seen MLB athletes attending horse races, riding horses, and some of them even tried their hand at owning a stable.

Now that we have the official 2022 Kentucky Derby morning line odds and the big event is just around the corner, let’s go through the list of the biggest baseball stars that we not afraid to share their passion for horse racing.

Joe Torre

The legendary Joe Torre had a very successful career in the MLB, winning the All-Star on the field nine times, and managed to get his hands on the National League’s Most Valuable Player Award in 1971.

His career days are now long gone, and in the past two decades,he was best known as a manager. In fact, he managed to win the World Series with the New York Yankees four times.

However, as his MLB career days were slowly coming to an end, Torre was looking for another passion to fill up his free time. That of course was horse racing. He was introduced to the sport by a friend (Don Zimmer) who was also in the MLB, and he immediately was hooked by the sport.

Torre is so in love with the sport that he decided to invest in shares of successful horses including, Vineyard Haven, Sis City, Game On Dude, and Homeboykris.

Paul Lo Duca

Paul Lo Duca is another retired professional MLB player with an 11-year career in this amazing sport. He spent most of his time playing for Angeles Dodgers (7 years) and was a 4-time All-Star. Apart from his successful career in the MLB, Lo Ducawas one of the few players who followed both passions at the same time.

Lo Duca was a racehorse owner during his career in the MLB and after retiring from baseball, he switched his career completely becoming a horse racing analyst on TVG Network.His passion for horse racing and experience with the sport made him the perfect man for the job.

Brad Penny

Here we have another retired player who is also a big horse racing lover. Penny spent most of his career playing for the Florida Marlins, managed to get his hands on two MLB All-Star awards, and was a two-time World Series champion.

However, his hunger for glory made him chase other things during his professional career, and weirdly enough, that was horse racing. When he was playing for the Marlins, he managed to sneak over to Calder Race Course which was less than a mile from the stadium, and enjoy some horse racing.

After his retirement, Penny decided to go deeper into horse racing and even bought himself a couple of racehorses in California.

Moises Alou

Moises Alou is a former professional baseball player with a very successful career. He was 6-time MLB All-Star, and with exceptional skills behind his name, he changed seven teams during his career. Alou managed to win the World Championship in 1997 with the Florida Marlins, but somehow his passion for horse racing led him to change his career.

During his professional play he bred and raced Thoroughbreds in the Dominican Republic, and nowadays he is all-in on horse racing. 

Hank Allen

Although Allen spent 7 years playing baseball professionally, he never had too much success with the sport. Maybe it is because horse racing got his head spinning when he trained in Maryland. Allen started to get involved in horse racing during his professional baseball career and was very successful at it. 

He was the trainer of multiple stakes winner Northen Wolf, who managed to finish sixth behind Sunday Silence in the 1989 Kentucky Derby. Considering that the Kentucky Derby is one of the biggest races in the world, training a horse to finish sixth is quite impressive.