(Baseball)—Our two major league teams could do no better than .500 ball for the last ten games and for one of them, that was a big disappointment.
The Cardinals were played a three-game series against the worst team in baseball this year and managed to lose two out of three. The White Sox, losers of 14 of the first 15 road games this year won the last two games of the series againt the Cardinals to drop St. Louis four games under break-even for the year. They’re 15-19, last in their division. The game was the first of the year for Dylan Carlson. He went hitless in three at-bats.
The Royals bullpen gave up a tying run to the Rangers in the ninth inning Sunday and a winnig run in the tenth. The Rangers now have won six series in a row against Kansas City in the last three years.
How much have the Royals improved since 2023? The Royals are 20-15 through their first 35 games of 2024. Last year, after 35 games, they were 9-26 and did not reach twenty wins until their 73rd game.
(ROYALS vs. CARDS)—-Here is a quick look at the reason the Royals are five above .500 and the Cardinals are four below it:
The Royals have scored 161 runs. Their pitchers have given up 117.
The Cardinals have scored 118 runs. Their pitchers have given up 150. Last night, in their loss to the Mets, they went one for six with runners in scoring position and in their last few games they’ve gone 10 for 55 and are now a season worst five games below break even.
(FOOTBALL—BATTLEHAWKS)—The St. Louis Battlehawks’ 22-8 win over th Houston Roughnecks has set up THE big game of the year in the UFL. Next Saturday the Battlehawks (5-1) square off against the undefeated Birmingham Stallions (6-0).
The ‘Hawks had only one good offensive quarter, the second, when Quarterback A. J. McCarron was 17 for 21 with a pair of touchdowns.
The game drew almost 33,000 fans.
Birmingham remained undefeated with a 39-32 win over the Memphis Showboats (1-5).
The game next weekend matches the top survivor of the XFL against the top survivor of the USFL before the two leagues merged. It will be a stern test for St. Louis. Birmingham went into last weekend’s game leading the league in total yards, rushing yards, yards per reception, total offense, all-purpose yards, first downs, field goals made, punt return yards, sacks, rushing touchdowns allowed, scoring allowed and first downs allowed.
Now the fast stuff:
(DERBY)—Normally we don’t pay much attention to racing that only goes one lap, but this year’s Kentucky Derby was exceptional so we’re making an exception.
We know that Mystik Dan won the Derby by a nose or noses in 2:03.34. The Derby says Sierra Leone finished second by a nose and Forever Young by a nose, however many tenths of a second a nose is.
(NASCAR)—NASCAR doesn’t do noses. Kyle Larson inched past Chris Buscher by one one-thousandth of a second to win the weekend race at Kansas Speedway, the closest race finish in NASCAR’s 75-year history). Buescher took the lead on the start of the overtime period but gave Larson just enough space to pull even with him on the outside of the last turn and beat him to the line in a photo finish.
The top four cars (17 Buescher; 5 Larson; 9 Chase Elliott; 19 Truex, just outside the picture) finished within 0.0075 seconds. (By contrast, the average eye blink is a full tenth of a second so they really did have four cars finish the race in the blink of an eye, or less!)
It’s Larson’s second win of the year as he enters a month that will end with him racing 1100 miles on Memorial Day Sunday.
(FORMULA 1)—Lando Norris is the talk of Formula 1 this week after winning the Grand Prix of Miami by almost eight seconds over the usually-dominant Max Verstappen. Norris was driving a McLaren with the latest chassis upgrades and kept Verstappen at bay in the latter stages of the race.
Verstappen struggled for speed all weekend.
(INDYCAR)—IndyCar begins its “month of May” (an anachronistic phrase for the Indianapolis Motor Speedway’s preparations for the Indianapolis 500) next weekend with a race on the Speedway’s road course.
In the old days, the Speedway would be open for practice for the first couple of weeks of May, with qualifications for the race spread through two more weekends and the race on Memorial Day itself. Now, such preparations are less necessary and the road race will be next weekend with practice for a week and qualifications on the 19th, final preparation runs on the 24th and the race on the 26th. A crowd of more than 300,000 is anticipated—that’s about one out of every one-thousand people in this country.
(Photo credits: NBC News; NASCAR)