By Bob Priddy, Missourinet Contributing Editor
(BASEBALL)—The baseball season is down to its last five games, maybe to its last two, as the World Series moves to Yankee Stadium after the Dodgers took the first two games in Los Angeles. By this time next week, certainly a week after that, we’ll get the first hints of how the teams will reshape themselves for 2025.
(ROYALS)—-One of baseball’s most prestigious awards, the Roberto Clemente Award, has gone to Royals catcher Salvador Perez. He’s being recognized as an outstanding representative of the sport “through extraordinary character, community involvement, philanthropy, and positive contributions, both on and off the field.
Perez is 34, a thirteen-year member of the Royals, the only team for which he has ever played. He was a major factor in the team reaching the playoffs for the first time in a decade, hittig .274 with 27 home runs and 104 runs batted in. He is a five-time Gold Glove winner and could win his fifth Silver Slugger Award.
His merit-worthy work has not just been in Kansas City. He has distributed food to thousands of people in his home town of Valencia, Venezuela, helped create the Carlos Fortuna Foundation in Colombia, honoring the memory of the Royals minor league pitcher who died at the age of 22 of liver cancer. The organization is supervised by Monica Ramirez, who was the Royals English-as-Second-Language instructor and helped Perez learn English in 2007. He also donated one-million dollars to the Kansas City Urban Youth Academy.
He was presented the award during a pre-game press conference at Yankee Stadium before last night’s game three of the World Series. He’s the first Royals player to win the award, named for the great Pittsburgh outfielder who died in a plane crash while on a humanitarian mission in 1972.
(CARDINALS)—The Cardinals are on a budget-cutting spree and some inside observers expect a lot of faces from 2024 will be elsewhere either because of trades or because of free agency.
John Denton of MLB.com recently took a look at the possibilities, suggesting Ryan Helsley won’t be back next year and Nolan Arenado probably doesn’t want “to go through a rebuild” although Arenado, whose offensive production has declined in the lasts three years, has a no-trade clause in his contract.
Paul Goldschmidt will be a free agent in a few days and the Cardinals, who have watched his offensive production decline in the last two years, do not appear likely to want to re-sign him to the size of contract he would want.
Helsley is seen as prime trade bait, as is Sonny Gray.
Lance Lynn had a solid season but it was a one-year deal. Kyle Gibson and Andrew Kittredge also could go. The departure of Goldschmidt, Gibson, Kittredge, and Lynn would cut $60 million from the payroll—and cutting the payroll is a big goal of team management.
Another name being kicked around as a soon-to-be former Redbird is Wilson Contreras.
Regardless of how all of this turns out, the 2025 Cardinals will be younger, cheaper, and more future-focused.
(CHIEFS)—The Kansas City have made the Oakland, Los Angeles, Las Vegas Raiders their 13th straight victim (counting last year’s playoffs) and will be the last NFL team to lose a game this season. They continue to build strength in a season notable for its losses with low-risk, high-return trades.
The Raiders’ 20 points was three more than the Chiefs defense has been averaging this season and the first time the Raiders have hit the 20-mark since September 29. The last score came with little time left in the game and the outcome of the game beyond doubt.
The KC defense might have saved the game for the Chiefs after a Mahomes interception left the Raiders within smelling distance of the end zone line by stopping the Raiders on a fourth-and-goal from the three-yard line.
The Chiefs defense held the Raiders to just 33 yards rushing, less than 1.6 yards per attempt. It’s the second time this year Las Vegas has averaged less than two yards per rush. It’s happened only two other times in all of the NFL games played this year.
Receiver DeAndre Smith, obtained earlier in the week in a trade with the Titans, was targeted three times and caught two passes for 29 yards. The Chiefs gave up a conditional fifth-round draft pick to get him.
Yesterday, the Chiefs did it again by dealing for Patriot’s linebacker Josh Uche, an edge rusher with four years of NFL experience as an edge rusher. They gave a 6th round draft pick to get him. He’ll be a free agent at the end of the year. He has a couple of sacks. The Chiefs defense has recorded only 15 sacks in their first seven games, tying them for 26th in the NFL with three other teams, including the Patriots. They have only four players with more than two sacks this season.
The trade deadline is next Tuesday.
So far, the chiefs have filled vacancies caused by injuries and have taken steps to strengthen the squad during the season. If, as things evolve, they have a surplus of talent at the end of the year, they also will have an attractive assemblage of trade bait to use for off-season lineup strengthening.
(MIZ)—-The Missouri Tigers have struggled to live up to their pre-season hype as a championship playoff possibility and their 35-0 loss to Alabama has left them hanging on to a national ranking by their fingernails. They’re 25th and 21st in the top-25 polls with a quarterback whose hurting and a backup who has been ineffective, as well as a vaunted defense that two big-time teams (Texas A&M and Alabama) have vaulted over by combines scores of 75-10.
Brady Cook, already limited by a high ankle sprain, left the game with a hand injury after striking a defensive player’s helmet while throwing a pass. He finished his day with only 30 passing yards on 7 completions. As we prepared this post, Coach Drinkwitz had not indicated the severity of the injury.
Missouri has its second bye week of the season this weekend, giving the walking rounded some time to recover. Two other key parts of the offense, running back Nate Noel and wide receiver Mookie Cooper, missed the Alabama game.
The Tigers will have to run the table against Oklahoma (4-4), South Carolina (4-3), Mississippi State (1-7), and Arkansas (5-3) to finish with a double-digit win total, a possibility but backup QB Drew Pine will have step up his game. So far, he’s 35 for 55, but only for 248 yards and his three interceptions against Alabama were killers.
Pyne has not been able to show the results he had in 2022 when he took over at Notre Dame and led the Fighting Irish to an 8-2 record the rest of the way that season, throwing for 2,021 yards, 22 touchdowns and only three interceptions. Pyne should be better-prepared for the Oklahoma game. In the next two weeks, he’s likely to get most of the practice snaps—if not all of them, depending on Cook’s injuries.
(MIZ, Volume II)—Basketball is here.
An exhibition game against Lincoln University, in Jefferson City, went the way it was expected to go—a rout for the Missouri Tigers against the Lincoln Blue Tigers 90-45 and it wasn’t that close. But it was the highest scoring total since the Tigers ran off 92 against Missouri Southern in 2015 when the margin was one point more, 92-46. Missouri’s biggest lead was 50 points with 8:44 to go in the first half.
It was the first competition for Missouri’s top-five recruit class and 13th rated transfer class.
Junior guard Mark Mitchell scored 15 points in the first half and finished with 22. Caleb Grill (pictured), who sat out of most of last year with a wrist injury, had 20 as the two shot 14 of 17 from the field and 7 of 8 from the rim. Missouri led 53-19 at the half.
Real basketball for Missouri begins next Monday night at Memphis.
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There’s no break in the recruiting work in college basketball these days. A week before the regular season opened, Missouri announced it has landed four-star power forward Nicholas Randall for the Class of 2025.
Randall is a St. Louis native now playing for Compass Prep in Chandler Arizona, a 6-7, 225 pound forward ranked 120th in the recruiting class by 247Sports. Missouri beat out Creighton and San Francisco to get him. He joins Tolton High School (Columbia) point guard Aaron Rowe in a recruiting class already ranked 69th in the country with plenty of time for additional signings.
(BLUES)—The St. Louis Blues have started the season at 5-4. It’s early but there are questions abut how competitive the Blues will be against teams already ahead of them in the standings. They were impressive with their 5-1 win over the Toronto Maple Leafs only to fall 5-2 to the Montreal Canadians who went into the game with three losses and a tie in their last four games. (ZOU)
—-Now, the wheels go round and round—
(NASCAR)—Tyler Reddick pulled off another of his epic drives to win a spot in the final four for the NASCAR Cup. Reddick, whose gutsy drive in a wreck-damaged car at Talladega kept his championship hopes alive two weeks ago, went from third to first on the last lap at Las Vegas, sweeping past defending NASCAR champion Ryan Blaney on the last turn. The win makes him the second driver locked into the final four for the last race of the year in two weeks.
At Talladega, Reddick was five points below the playoff cutline with five laps left and was caught up in the largest crash in NASCAR history. “I was spinning around backward and hit front and back,” he said after the race, but he kept his car on the track and finished 20th, ahead of six of his contenders and well into the field for the playoffs.
His banzai final lap at Las Vegas carried to a two-tenths of a second win over Blaney, who now almost needs to win next weekend on the Martinsville short track to defend his championship in the season’s last race at Phoenix.
Reddick’s last-lap heroics drew enthusiastic reviews from team co-owner Michael Jordan, the NBA Hall of Famer. “Little kid drove his ass off,” said Jordan. He just let go. He just went for it and I’m glad. We needed it.”
Little kid? Reddick is five feet, five inches tall. Jordan is 6-9.
(INDYCAR)—A case of Patomania broke out in Mexico City in the leadup to the Formula 1 race there last week. INDYCAR star and Mexican native Pato O’Ward was there for his first ride in a Formula 1 car in his native land. He wasn’t there to qualify for the race, but to try out the car on the Autodromo Hermano Rodriguez. And he did pretty well, actually, with a hot lap time of 1:19.245 in his McLaren in the first of three practice sessions.
McLaren Racing CEO Zak Brown praised O’Ward as “the most popular driver in INDYCAR” whose popularity is “growing by the moment.” He thought the practice runs were important to building a fan base in Mexico. “I believe that people who like Formula One will also like INDYCAR if they’re unfamiliar with it.”
The other two practice sessions were for Formula 1 regulars who turned increasingly faster laps until Ferrari’s Carlo Sainz topped the field with a lap of 1:15.946.
INDYCAR is in discussions to run one of the series races in Mexico. O’Ward says he’s been saying “for years” that an INDYCAR race would draw well in Mexico and he thinks fan reaction to his test run proves his point.
Brown thinks Mexico is “a huge market” for motorsports and will draw attention throughout the world to INDYCAR.
(FORMULA 1)—News accounts sometimes close with a “kicker,” usually an anecdote intended to amuse the consumer after a diet of serios stuff.
This is the first time we have done such a thing. Ferrari put its two drivers on the podium after the Mexican Grand Prix, with Carlos Sainz the winner, McLaren’s Lando Norris in second, and Charles Leclerc in the other Ferrari third.
In the post-race press conference, Leclerc described his near-crash with Norris, recognizing immediately that he had said something that had had caused a penalty for points leader Max Verstappen in an earlier race. “”I was like f*** and then luckily… Oh no, oh no, I don’t want to join Max!”
Well, he is joining Max. Formula 1 has a policy that language used in public forums “meets generally accepted standards for all audiences and broadcasts. F1 wants no “coarse [or] rude” language that might “cause offense.” Verstappen used the same word after the Singapore Grand Prix. Leclerc will get the same penalty—an “obligation to accomplish some work of public interest.”
Here is the interesting part: When Verstappen was called to account by the race stewards, he—as a Formula 1 statement put it—“explained that the word used is ordinary in speech as he learned it, English not being his native language.”
It appears these two guys have learned our language all too well.
Formula 1 has four races left and four post-race news conferences left for drivers to practice their English language.
(Image credits: Perez—KC Royals; Caleb Grill—Instagram; Uche—Chiefswire; Reddick—NASCAR; OWard—Bob Priddy