By Bob Priddy, Missourinet Contributing Editor
(NORM)—Former Missouri Tiger basketball coach Norm Stewart finally is getting his place in the Hall of Famous Missourians at the State Capitol. The bust will be unveiled at 1 p.m., May 1 in the House Chamber. It later will be moved to the rotunda, joining more than three dozen other busts of famous Missourians.
Stewart turned 89 in January.
His teams rang up a record of 731-375 in 38 seasons as a head coach, 634 of them at his alma mater.
(BASEBALL)—One of our teams finished last week at 13-9. The other one finished at 9-13, with some folks remembering last year when the team started 10-24.
(KANSAS CITY)—The 13-9 record isn’t the only statistic that shows how much the Royals’ season is a turnaround from last year. Here’s another one:
The Royals were held without a run by Baltimore on Sunday, their first shutout of the year. Last year they failed to score fifteen times. Seth Lugo took his first loss and gave up his first home runs of the year after winning three straight to start his season and not giving up a homer in 41.1 innings.
Kansas City is led this year by catcher/first-baseman Salvador Perez, who starts this week hitting .333 with six homers and Bobby Witt, Jr., at .300. The pitching is among the best in baseball with a 3.18 ERA, which normally would be an outstanding year for an individual, let alone a team. The pitching continues to carry the team, which is batting a cumulative .237, Perez and Witt notwithstanding.
(CARDINALS)—The Cardinals on theother hand are 9-13. Wilson Contrares has the longest hitting streak in Major League Baseball, 14 games, at the end of the playing week. Shortstop Masyn Win and Contreras are above .300 at the plate but the ‘Birds as a team are hitting only .219. But with an offense like that, the pitching staff’s 3.95 ERA, solid thought it be in today’s game, isn’t good enough.
The Optimist Award for 2024 goes to Sonny Gray, the pitching ace who says the Cardinals are going to turn things around big-time soon. Gray is doing his part, going 2-0 without an ERA and an 11-0 strikeout to walk ratio in his first two starts. Sunday, a dozen of the 19 outs he got were strikeouts. He did give up his first walk of the year and his first home run and that was enough for the Brewers in a 2-0 shutout.
(FOOTBALL)—As we were going to press (as they used to say in the journalism biz), reports were coming out that the new Athletic Director at the University was going to be Laird Veatch, the AD at Memphis for the last five years.
It’s a return for Veatch, who supervised fund raising for the athletic deaatment, 2000=2002. He later was the general manager of Mizzou Sports Properties in 2003, coordinating external media operators for Learfield Sports, which has multimedia rights with Tiger sports teams. His first big job, other than lining up all of the NIL deals, will be raise half of the money for the $250 million dollar make over of the north end of Memorial Stadium.
(BATTLEHAWKS)—A big offensive day for the St. Louis Battlehawks coupled with a solid offensive day gave them a 32-17 win over the Memphis Showboats and a 3-1 record. St. Louis again led the UFL in attendance with 31,575 people in the Dome.
‘Hawks quarterback A. J. McCarron threw the ball an all-time high of 45 times, completed 35 of them for 222 yards and three touchdowns. Running back Jacob Saylors rushed for 103 yards. The defense gave up only 127 yards and let Memphis convert only one of ten third and fourth down attempts.
(Playing with Engines)
(INDYCAR)—Nobody INDYCAR “makes fuel” as Scott Dixon does. He proved it again with his win at the Grand Prix of Long Beach.
Dixon went about 50 of the race’s 85 laps without refueling and had to hold off Josef Newgarden, who was closing the gap with ten laps left before Newgarden was hit from behind by Colton Herta’s car.Herta went on to finish second, about one second behind Dixon.
The win extends Dixon’s record of having at leat one victory to twenty consecutive years.
(NASCAR)—The “big one” didn’t happen until the field was roaring toward the checkered flag at Talladega Superspeedway. With cars crashing ahead of him, and more crashing behind him, Tyler Reddick kept his foot on the floor and steered out of harms way to the win.
The crash was triggered when pole sitter Michael McDowell tried to block Brad Keselowski but touched Keselowski’s car at 200 mph and turned into the wall. Reddick let the wrecking cars move out of his way while he slipped Keselowski for the win.
(FORMULA 1)—Max Verstappen adds the trophy for the Chinese Grand Prix to his shelf, posting a 13 second victory over runnerup Lando Norris.
(Photo Credit: Bob Priddy)