(This entry has been updated to include last night’s Royals-Diamondbacks game)
(MIZ)—In a little more than three weeks (August 17), the Missouri Tiger football team gets down to the serious work of preparing for the season. The first game will be ten days later with Murray State’s Racers providing the fresh meat for the Tigers.
Murray State has a new coach, Jody Wright, their fifth coach in the last 17 years.
SEC sports reporters have given Coach Drinkwitz plenty of motivational material by calculating Missouri will finish sixth in the now-16-team conference. Only one Tiger player is on the first three offensive and defensive pre-season all-conference teams—Luther Burden III. Georgia has six players, Alabama and Mississippi have three each.
Georgia, Texas, Alabama, Ole Miss, and LSU are picked to finish higher than Missouri—which will play Alabama late in the season. But there’s some hope. Sportswriters have correctly picked the conference champion nine times since 1992.
Each team will play eight conference games and the two teams with the highest winning percentages will play for the league championship. This is the first year since 1991 that the SEC has not had divisions.
(BASEBALL)—Our two MLB teams remain in wild card playoff contention.
Cardinals lost 2-1 yesterday in opening a three game series against the Pirates. The winning run was set up on a wild pitch that let a runner reach second and then score on a ground=ball single. They’re four games over break even and two games ahead of the Mets, second in the wild card standings.
The Royals went into last night’s game against Arizona ten games over .500, fattening up with a three-game sweep of the White Sox in which the Royals outscored the Pale Hose 17-3 and Seth Lugo picked up his first career complete game. He has run his record to 12-4.
Bobby Witt Jr., had three hits for the fourth straight game last night and the Royals hammered the Diamondbacks 10-4. Witt was on track to hit for the cycle with a triple, double, and a home run in his first three at-bats. But he was hit by a pitch and flied out in his last two appearances. Witt ties Johnny Damon for the second-longest stretch of three-hit games. George Brett did it for six games in 1976.
Witt is on a hot streak since the All-Star game with five extra-base hits in the last four games. And he loves home cooking—he’s hitting .411 in Kauffman Stadium this year, the best at-home batting average in all of Major League Baseball.
Wheel sports now:
Wheel sports now:
(NASCAR)—Kyle Larson pitted about a dozen laps after other top contenders in the Brickyard 400, setting up a run to the checkered flag that had the crowd on its feet in the latter stages of the race.
Larson came out of his pit in 25th place and began to pick off the cars ahead of him as their drivers tried to stretch their fuel loads to the end. They might have made it if late crashes had not sent the race into two overtimes. Leader Brad Keselowski had to pit one lap into the first overtime, giving Larson his big chance to take the lead…and he grabbed in going into the first turn of the two-lap shootout.
(Larson is in front, yards before the checkered flag making him the first driver this year to win four races. Pole-winner Tyler Reddick got past defending series champion Ryan Blaney to take second.)
After the race, Larson said he’s ready to return to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway next May to try to become the first driver to win both the Indianapolis 500 and the Brickyard 400. He tried to “do the double” this year—racing in the 500 in the afternoon and then in the NASCAR 600-mile race in Charlotte that evening. Rain in both cities short-circuited the effort this year. He says nothing’s in place for that to happen yet but hinted an announcement would be coming soon.
(INDYCAR)—IndyCar has seen its second race in which one of its cars got airborne and came down on its top—and the driver walked away.
The crash that eventually involved a half-dozen cars began when Pato O’Ward spun just a turn, a potential blind spot for oncoming competitors.
All Angles: How Huge Crash Unfolded on Streets of Toronto (indycar.com)
Other cars crashed into his and the car of Santino Ferrucci used the nose of one of the cars as a launch pad, sending his car bottom-first into the catch fence before landing upside down. Ferrucci was protected by his seat belts and by the titanium aeroscreen from serious injury.
Colton Herta ended a long losing streak by winning the race through some of the streets of Toronto. Kyle Kirkwood and Scott Dixon claimed the other two podium positions.
(FORMULA 1)—F1 has reached its midpoint with the Grand Prix of Hungary with Oscar Piastri winning his first race in the series—but only because teammate Lando Norris was ordered to let him pass him. Lewis Hamilton was third, extending his record with his 200th podium finish.
The Hungary race is the third in a row without Max Verstappen in the tp position. He was fifth behind Charles Leclerc in a Ferrari. Red Bull and Verstappen have dominated Grand Prix racing for the last few years but both admit that mid-season corrections by other teams have brought them back to the mortal level. He still has a strong points lead, though.
—Major motorsports competition is taking a two-week break because of the Olympics. It is not doing so because any of its drivers are competing in the games; it’s because their television partner, NBC, will be immersed in the Paris Games for the next couple of week.
(photo credit: Bob Priddy)