(ROYALS)—The Kansas City Royals come home for a pair of games, starting tomorrow, after splitting two playoff games in Yankee Stadium. Yankees starter Carlos Rodon’s fun night lasted three innings before longtime nemesis Salvador Perez ripped a fourth-inning home run that helped the Royals take a 4-0 lead. The Yankees later cut the lead in half but the bullpen again held tight at the end.
The stars of both teams, Aaron Judge and Bobby Witt Jr., were not factors in either game. Witt went 0 for five. Judge had a hit in three at-bats.
Royals starter Cole Ragans struggled through four uneven innings (five K’s and 4 walks, three hits and the Yankees’ first run) but four relievers kept the Yankees at bay until Jazz Chisholm’s solo homer in the 9th. Rodon struck out the side in the first inning, finished with seven of them, but also gave up all four runs on seven hits. The Yankees wound up using seven other pitchers.
(CHIEFS)—Now, this is more like it. The Kansas City Chiefs are 5-0 for the first time since Patrick Mahomes’ first season, 2018. Mahomes passing and power running by the rejuvenated Kareem Hunt gave the Chiefs a 400-yard offense and a 26-13 win going into a bye week.
The Chiefs had to settle for field goals instead of touchdowns four times, however, and none of Mahomes’ passes were for touchdowns. Mahomes finished 28 for 39 with 313 yards including 102 to JuJu Smith-Schuster and another 70 to Travis Kelce.
(MIZ)—The real world has come to the Missouri Tigers. They threw away their top ten ranking against Texas A&M in an embarrassing beat-down Saturday that dropped them from ninth in the ratings to 18th in one and 21st in another.
The results come after a four wins, one of which was a hairbreadth win over Vanderbilt. But maybe that win was underrated against a team considered an SEC doormat.
The doormat beat previously second-rated Alabama 40-35 in Nashville.
USA Today’s Dan Wolken did a scathing review of the losses by Alabama and Missouri, among others last weekend:
Alabama’s flop at Vanderbilt leads college football Misery Index after Week 6 (msn.com)
The loss to A&M is the worst Tiger loss since the 66-24 hammering administered by Tennessee in 2022. Missouri had only 254 yards of total offense while the devense was
It was the greatest margin of defeat for Missouri since a 66-24 loss at Tennessee in 2022. The Aggies out gained the Tigers 512 to 254 yards in a dominating effort, at least by A&M
Missouri has Massachusetts on the schedule for a feel-good fifth win against a lesser school next Sunday. UMass is 1-5 after a 34-20 loss to Northern Illinois last weekend.
(CARDINALS)—The St. Louis Cardinals have decided Turner Ward isn’t the answer to the team’s offense. He’s been fired as the hitting coach after a year in which the Cardinals lacked a consistent offense, especially getting runners in scoring position across the plate.
Ward had a 12-year playing career. The Cardinals were his third team as a hitting coach. Oliver Marmol will be back as the manager but the team indicates his coaching staff is unknown for now.
The Cardinals finished 12th in the National League in runs, 12th in home runs and 13th in runs batted in. Opponents outscored them by 47 runs.
Also not back, apparently, will be Matt Carpenter, who will start a broadcasting career on the MLB Network during the playoffs. He finished his fourteenth major league season (with three teams) by hitting .234 this year with four homers and 15 RBIs. He only batted 157 times.
(NASCAR)—Another non-playoff driver has played the role of a spoiler in the chase for the Cup Championship—Ricky Stenhouse Jr., who beat Brad Keselowski by six-thousands of a second. It’s not a record by a long shot (or short shot). But what is a record is the crash five laps from the scheduled end of the race that involved 27 cars. Thirteen cars were not involved in that one, a few that had been sidelined by earlier shuts. Seventeen drivers finished on the lead lap because their cars were not damaged or were not damaged enough to be sidelined.
The crash provided a reprieve for some drivers outside the cutline for the next round of the playoffs and was a setback to some others headed for much better finishers.
Next weekend’s race on the Charlotte Roval (the road course inside the oval course) will determine which eight drivers will stay in the hunt for the Cup. Chase Elliott holds eighth place in the points, thirteen points ahead of Joey Logano and twenty up on Daniel Suarez. Austin Cindric and Chase Brisco seem to need a victory to make the next round.
Stenhouse’s win is his first in 65 races. He becomes the latest driver to end a long winless streak this year. His win is the third one in the first five playoff races taken by a non-playoff driver.
(INDYCAR)—Michael Andretti has sent his fans a message—that “decades of running flat out doesn’t come without sacrifice” and it’s time to turn his team over to his partner, Dan Towriss. He says it’s time “to spend more time with my beautiful family, including my 10-year old twins, embrace my new Nonno title and explore new things on a personal level and with my other businesses.”
Andretti, who is 62 and the son of Mario, has been racing cars for more than forty years either as a driver or an owner (he was a go-kart terror as a kid, winning 50 of 75 races, starting when he was 11. He drove his first championship-level open wheel race for the CART series in 1983. He won the championship four times. His 42 wins rank him fifth on the all-time IndyCar list. He holds the unfortunate record of leading the most Indianapolis 500 laps without winning the race—as a driver.
He retired from full-time racing in 2003 and bought into a team owned by Kim and Barry Green. The team has grown in the years since and is now known as Andretti Global. It has won national championships and he finally posted wins in the 500, as an owner.
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IndyCar is adding a unique race to its schedule in 2026—-a race in Arlington, Texas that will have the cars running a 2.73-mile course around the stadiums where the Dallas Cowboys and the Texas Rangers play. The race is scheduled for March 26, after the football season and just before baseball season starts.