By Bob Priddy, Missourinet Contributing Editor
(MLB)—Missouri’s Major League Baseball teams are off to a 3-0 start after the first weekend of games in Florida and Arizona. The Cardinals posted wins over the Astros and the Mets. Dylan Carlson and Paul Goldschmidt homered in Sunday’s win over the Mets. The Royals beat Arizona 11-10 in a game indicating, as the old saying says, hitters are ahead of pitchers at the start of spring training. Emanuel Rivera, Michael Taylor, and Salvador Perez homered. The Royals won it with six runs in the last three innings.
(TIGERS BASKETBALL)—University of Missouri curators reportedly will meet today and are considered likely to approve the hiring of Dennis Gates as the latest Tiger basketball coach. Gates has led Cleveland State for the last three years with a 50-40 record but in his last two seasons the team has gone 39-19 with one trip to the NCAA tournament and one to the NIT.
RACING NUMBERS: 600, 5 FOR 5, AND 1-2
(INDYCAR)—Roger Penske called it a career as a sports car driver in 1965 to concentrate on his car dealership in Philadelphia. He backed a car in the Daytona 24 Hours the next year, beginning a career that last weekend gave him his 600th victory across several racing platforms.
Josef Newgarden passed Penske teammate Scott McLaughlin on the outside of the last turn to win a thriller at Texas Motor Speedway by less than seven one-hundredths of a second. McLaughlin was going for his second straight win to open the INDYCAR season and had led 186 laps in the 248-lap race.
Penske (shown here in one of his less-buttoned down moments after kissing the bricks at Indianapolis in 2018 after Will Power gave Team Penske it’s seventeenth 500 win and a year before Simon Pagenaud provided Penske’s 19th Indianapolis 500 victory) met Newgarden in victory circle with a bonus—six $100 bills, a bonus for winning the Penske’s 600th race. Newgarden called the win “unbelieveable.” His drivers have won both races this year. Last year, Penske drivers had only three victories for the entire season.
Marcus Ericsson had his best finish in an INDYCAR oval race, at third, just 1.35 seconds back. Third Penske driver Will Power was fourth with Scott Dixon, the six-time series champion, crossing the line fifth.
Sixth was seven-time NASCAR champion Jimmy Johnson, who as running his first INDYCAR oval race after spending last season running only ovals. Johnson used his extensive stock car experience at Texas to move from his 18th starting position to sixth, by far his best finish in open-wheel racing. He said he became more comfortable as the race progressed. “Once we hit the halfway point of the race, I really could sense and feel the car,” he said. “It became second nature, and off I went. We knew going oval racing would help and today got us into the competitive mix.”
(NASCAR)—William Byron has become the fifth winner in the first five races of the year in NASCAR’s top series. In a wild race at the re-designed Atlanta Motor Speedway that saw 46 lead changes involving twenty drivers and eleven caution flags, Byron pounced with ten laps to go and got past Bubba Wallace, then held off Ross Chastain at the finish by .145 seconds.
The win is Byron’s third in his five-year, 149-race career. All five winners this year have yet to see their 30th birthday. Austin Cindric, the Daytona 500 winner, is 23. Kyle Larson, the defending series champion, is 29. Alex Bowman is 28 and Chase Briscoe is 27. All five might be in the ten-race playoff at the end of the season. But there are still 21 races to go and eleven places to fill in that field. If more than 16 drivers win a race this year, the ones with the most standings points will make the playoffs. A driver also must finish in the top thirty in points.
At the end, 28 of the 37 starting cars had been involved in crashes during the race.
It was another “close” finish for Chastain, his second straight runner-up and his third time in three races he’s been in the top three. He came back from two laps down after a blown tire sent him into the wall on the 95th lap of the 325 laps in the race and he was penalized for improper refueling.
Third place went to Kurt Busch, who also recovered from an on-track incident. Chastain teammate Daniel Suarez finished fourth, giving NASCAR’s newest team—Trackhouse Racing—two cars in the top four. Corey Lajoie picked up his first top-five career finish as he escaped being involved in a three-car crash at the finish line that left Wallace finishing ninth.
(FORMULA 1)—Ferrari has posted its first 1-2 finish since the 2019 Singapore Grand Prix, with Clarles LeClerc driving for the scuderia’s first victory in 46 races. Carlos Sainz finished second with Lewis Hamilton and new teammate George Russell fourth.
The race was a disaster for defending F1 champion Max Verstappen and the Red Bull team. Verstappen dropped out with steering a fuel system issue. Teammate Sergio Perez, running second, spun out on the last lap. He also was battling fuel system problems.
The last time neither Red Bull car finished a race was the Austrian Grand Prix in 2020.