By Bob Priddy, Missourinet Contributing Editor
It’s the autumn of baseball season, the spring of football season, and racing heads toward its last turns. We begin with stick and ball sports today because, well, they’re more important right now.
(BASEBALL)—Next up for Albert Pujols: The Babe. Albert’s dramatic homer in the ninth gave the Cardinals the lead that held up against the Pirates. Home run number 697 broke a tie with Alex Rodriguez for fourth place on the all-time homer list. Next up: Babe Ruth with 714, realistically out of reach even with Pujols’ remarkable surge in the closing weeks of the season.
The ball was retrieved by Matt Brown in the right-center field grandstand. Pujols let Brown and his wife, Samantha, keep it and even gave them two signed balls when they offered to give him homer 697. “It’s just a baseball,” he said. “They deserve to have it. It went out of the ballpark. We play this game for the fans. So whether they want to give it back or they want to keep it, I don’t have any problem with that.”
The Kansas City Royals won their 57th game with a 4-0 shutout of the Tigers Sunday. And that sets up our first question:
Will the Royals win more games than the Cardinals lose this year? The Cardinals’ win on Sunday ran their record to 83-58.
(FOOTBALL)—The rebuilt Kansas City Chiefs seem to have eliminated a lot of the concerns fans might have had about the players they lost in the off-season and the number of rookies they kept after training camp.
Although the Arizona Cardinals blitzed quarterback Patrck Mahomes 54 percent of the time, he threw four touchdown passes against the blitz and added a fifth when the defense stayed back. Clyde Edwards Hillaire showed signs last year’s injuries are in the past with 74 yards rushing and receiving and two touchdowns. Travis Kelce got a good start on his 7th straight 1,000 yard year with 121 yards. The Cardinals had little to offer offensively or defensively as the Chiefs rolled to a 44-21 win on the road to open the season.
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The real world came calling on the Missouri Tigers during the weekend. Missouri got an early field goal for its only lead in the game and left Manhattan after absorbing a 40-12 drubbing. The Tigers won convincingly 52-24 in their first game of the year, against Louisiana
The Tigers have a chance to feel better next week against Abilene Christian University, a school with about 4,600 students that plays football in a stadium holding 12,000. It completed its move to NCAA Division 1 five years ago.
The Tigers won convincingly 44-21 in their first game of the year, against Louisiana Tech, a school of 12,600 students. So the second question:
How good will Missouri be this year against big-time competition?
RACING:
(INDYCAR)—It’s all over for INDYCAR in 2022 with two winners in the last race—the race-winner and the series champion.
Defending series champion Alex Palou ran away from the field to win the race. Will Power, who finished third, racked up enough points to win his second INDYCAR championship.
Power broke Mario Andretti’s record for most career poles by starting from P1 for the 68th time. Although he won only one race this year, he was in the top five in twelve of the seventeen races. He finished twenty points ahead of Penske teammate Josef Newgarden, who had five victories this year. Six-time champion Scott Dixon was never a threat in the race but finished third in the standings.
Power and Dixon were the only drivers to complete every lap in every race this year. Power also won the series championship in 2014. He said after the race he had driven “on the edge” all day because his car was “very loose.” He credited his championship to a mental adjustment early in the season to play the long game by not overdriving his car’s capabilities and forcing mistakes.
Palou’s last race of the year might be his last with Chip Ganassi Racing but he made it a memorable finish. He finished more than half-a-minute ahead of Newgarden. He started eleventh after a six-position starting penalty for an unapproved engine change. But he was in the lead on the 16th lap and finished by leading 67 of the 95 laps on the Laguna Seca road course near Monterey, California.
His future in the series is uncertain. He, Ganassi, and McLaren Racing are in court because he appears to have contracts to run with both teams next year.
(NASCAR)—NASCAR’s playoff applecart has been fully upset by Bubba Wallace’s win at Kansas Speedway. It’s the first time two non-playoff drivers have won the first two races of the ten-race playoff series. His win leaves fifteen of the sixteen driver to fight for twelve positions in the next round at the next race—on the “world’s fastest half mile” at Bristol, Tennessee.
Wallace dominated the closing stage of the race at Kansas, leading the last 43 laps and beating his car owner, Denny Hamlin, to the finish line by a second. It’s his first win this year, his second career Cup win.
Although Wallace is not one of the playoff drivers, his car is one of eight still in the running for the owner’s championship. It’s the car that Kurt Busch had been driving before a crash at Pocono left him with a concussion that he couldn’t shake in time to be one of the 16 playoff drivers. The car is owned by the 23XI team owned by basketball legend Michael Jordan (who wore number 23 most of his career) and Hamlin (who drives the 11-car for Joe Gibbs Racing).
He led Hamlin by almost 2.1 seconds with ten laps to go but Hamlin couldn’t catch him. Hamlin admitted mixed feelings about finishing second to a car he owns but commented, “Bubba has just really worked hard on his craft and we’ve just given him fast race cars and now he’s showing what he has got”
Christopher Bell is the only one of sixteen competitors with enough points to be locked into the second round of playoff races. Former Cup Champion Kevin Harvick, who finished last, is 35 points out of 12th, the cutoff line, and needs to win at Bristol to advance. But the fight for that 12th position is a fierce one with only thirteen points separating tenth from fifteenth.
Tyler Reddick, who started on pole at Kansas, blew a tire and hit the wall early and finished one slot ahead of Harvick, 35th. He will start at Bristol eleventh in the standings. Rookie Austin Cindric is clinging to the last playoff slot with Kyle Busch, Austin Dillon, and Chase Briscoe within two to nine points.
(Formula 1)—Six races are left and only a miracle can give somebody other than Max Verstappen his second straight Formula 1 championship. Verstappen won his fifth race in a row at the Grand Prix of Italy on the Monza course. It’s his eleventh win this year, one more than he had in last year’s championship season.
The race finished under caution after Daniel Ricciardo crashed with five laps left and stewards could not get his car’s transmission into neutral so it could be moved to an off-track area. Officials said the situation was not serious enough to warrant stopping the race so it could be finished under the green flag.
Verstappen has a shot at equaling, or breaking, Michael Schumacher’s record of 13 grands prix wins in a season, out of eighteen races in 2004, the year he won his seventh and last championship. That’s 72 percent, also a record. This year there are 22 races.
The next F1 race is in two weeks, at Singapore.
(Photo credits: Bob Priddy, Rick Gevers)