By Bob Priddy, Missourinet Contributing Editor
It’s still baseball season. But there are signs that it will end soon. The biggest sign is that it’s also football season. The Tigers are 1-0. The Chiefs play a real game Thursday night. That should take our minds off of baseball. But until then:
(ROYALS)—The Kansas City Royals will lose their 100th game by the time we fill this space next week. They stood at 42-96 after weekend games and a 2-8 stretch in their last ten. They’re in a spirited fight with the Athletics to see who will accomplish the least in the American League this year. The A’s also have 42 wins. But they’ve only lost 95.
But the Royals might have discovered a diamond in the mud in August. Cole Ragans was picked up from the Rangers in the Aroldis Chapman trade and has been in The Show (as Crash Davis/Kevin Costner liked to describe it) for a month. But he has become the first Royals pitcher since member of the team to be voted the American League Pitcher of the Month since Zack Greinke was a youngster full of possible greatness in April, 2009.
He’s a lefty who lead the league in ERA and strikeouts in August—1.73 and 53 respectively. He had the most Wins Against Replacement of any pitcher at 1.9. He lasted at least five innings in each of his half-dozen starts, struck out 11 batters in two games—a career high—and never allowed more than three runs. Only Dennis Leonard, in June of ’77 (goodness! That’s 46 years ago) struck out more batters in a month for Kansas City—55.
Greinke’s sad farewell tour saw him pitch only twice in August. He went 0-2, hasn’t won since he and he Royals beat Baltimore on May 3. He’s given up 138 hits in123 innings and has an ERA of 5.34.
(CARDINALS)—The Cardinals have to go 3-22 the rest of the way if they are going to lose 100 games this year. It’s unlikely—they won four games last week alone. But they do face the embarrassing possibility of finishing behind the Pirates, against whom they are 4-9 for the year.
possibility that the Cardinals would finish below the near-perpetual division doormats is more than Post-Dispatch beat writer Benjamin Hochman and much of Cardinal Nation can stand.
The Cardinals are four games behind Pittsburgh. They lost two out of three to the Pirates last weekend. Hochman remarked the other day that the Cardinals have not had a worse record against the Pirates in more than a quarter-century. He calculates the Cardinals have been in last place in the division fir 119 of the 153 days of the season. The only time since the leagues were split into divisions that the Cardinals were last in their division was 1990.
The Cardinals had three managers that year—Joe Torre, whose team was ten games under .500 when he was let go, Whitey Herzog, whose team was 14 under break-even, and Red Schoendienst, who was 14-11.
A slight diversion in our narrative: This was the team that had an opening day lineup of Tom Brunansky (traded during the season to the Red Sox for Lee Smith), Vince Coleman, Pedro Guerrero, Joe Magrane (who started the first game), Willie McGee (who was traded to Oakland for Felix Jose and Stan Royer), Jose Oquendo, Terry Pendleton, Ozzie Smith and Todd Zeile.
Zeile was starting a career that saw him play for 11 teams (only five players have played for that many teams), hit a home run in his last at-bat (one of 53 to do that—in fact his last homer was the last home run given up by a Montreal Expos pitcher—the team moved to Washington the next year—and he became the only player in baseball history to hit at least one home run for eleven teams). The team finished 72-90 that year. This year’s team can equal that mark by going 13-12 the rest of the way, something they do not appear capable of doing.
(TIGERS)—Missouri Tiger football fans expecting a blowout win against South Dakota in the season opener saw one—for the first half. Brady Cook looked like a number one quarterback in leading the Tigers to a 28-3 halftime lead. The second half, with Sam Horn under center, was uneven but the end result was a 35-10 victory.
Cody Smith ran for 148 yards; Luther Burden III showed growth in the wide receiver position; But Harrison Mevis showed uncharacteristic inconsistency as the kicker. He missed his two field goal attempts and a point-after but got a second chance because of a defensive penalty and nailed that one.
Missouri has another tune-up game ahead—Middle Tennessee State.
(CHIEFS)—The Kansas City Chiefs open their regular season Thursday night against the Detroit Lions. This is the sixtieth year for the franchise in KC, moving there from Dallas when Lamar Hunt decided Dallas wasn’t big enough for his AFL team and the NFL Cowboys.
Chris Jones is still AWOL and Coach Andy Reid say he doesn’t know what Jones’ “agenda” is and he’s been focused on preparing the Chiefs to play and win regardless of Jones’ presence. “I had 90 guys in the offseason that we needed to make sure we’re going in the right direction. Now we’re getting ready to play a game, and you’re either here or not here. that’s how I go about it.”
The Chiefs have had their entire training camp learning how to play without him. Quarterback Patrick Mahomes says he team has prepared to play the game without Jones and will let the “front office” handle the holdout. “We’re going to focus on how we can win with the guys that are here,” says Mahomes.
Now for the zoom-zoom stuff.
(INDYCAR)—Alex Palou has wrapped up his second IndyCar championship in three years with a dominating performance on the road course at Portland. He went into the race needing only an 11th place finish to wrap up the title.
It’s rare that the IndyCar championship is decided before the last race of the year. In fact, the last time it happened was with Sebastien Bourdais in 2007.
Palou started fifth, took his time and didn’t lead until lap 22. He finished leading 69 of the 100 laps in the race including the last 27. He finished almost five and a half seconds ahead of Felix Rosenqvist. Palou’s teammate and only championship challenger, Scott Dixon, came home third, giving owner Chip Ganassi drivers finishing 1-2 in the championship points with one race left. Palou becomes the fourth Ganassi driver to win multiple championships. Dixon has six. Dario Franchitti had three, and Alex Zanardi had two.
Palou’s remarkable season has seen him finish no worse than eighth in any race.
Ganassi now has 15 series championships, second only to the 17 of Team Penske. This is his third championship in four years. The team says Palou, who is 26, is only the fifth driver to win multiple championships before age 27 in series history, joining Bourdais, Sam Hornish Jr., Louis Meyer (who drove in the 1920s and 30s), and A. J. Foyt—who holds the record with seven, one more than Dixon.
IndyCar has one race left this year—next weekend at Laguna Seca. Paloux won by more than 30 seconds on that track last year.
(NASCAR)—Kyle Larson, NASCAR’s 2021 Cup Champion, is the first driver to guarantee his spot in the playoff round of 12, thanks to his grind-it-out win at Darlington Sunday night.
Larson, who brushed the wall and whose transmission briefly was hung up in neutral, got past Tyler Reddick on their last pit stops with 55 laps left, then held him off the rest of the way to win The Southern 500 at Darlington by less than half a second. He outran other playoff contenders Chris Buescher, William Byron, Ross Chastain, Brad Keselowski and Bubba Wallace to punch his ticket for round two.
Larson described the race as “kind of a struggle” after his early issues but “we kept our heads in the game. That was really important. This race is all about keeping your head in it.”
Ryan Preece, who rode through a horrifying crash at Daytona a week earlier, was cleared to run at Darlington. He started 34th in the 36-car field. He finished 28th and was never a factor.
(FORMULA 1)—Max Verstappen set a new record for consecutive Formula 1 wins in a year with his run to victory in the Italian Grand Prix at Monza. It’s his tenth win in a row. He now has won 12 races this year and his Red Bull team has a string of 15 straight top finishes.
What he has done since the start of the 2022 season (there are eight races left this year) is remarkable. He has won 21 of the last 25 F1 races, 27 of the last 36. He now has 47 career victories, 37 of them since the start of the 2021 season.
He has been among the top three finishers 31 out of 36 times and has finished below second only twice in the last three-dozen races.
He has a strong 145-point lead in the championship chase, an almost insurmountable margin.
(Photo credits: Rick Gevers and Bob Priddy)