Our baseball teams are hot.
(CARDINALS)—The St. Louis Cardinals finished the week with two straight series wins and a winning streak of eight games The streak has pulled the ‘birds into second place, one game behind the Cubs. The Cardinals, once at 14-19 are now at 22-19. Theu rank second in all of major league baseball with a .261 team batting average. The’re ninth in hits.
(ROYALS)—Although they lost two games in a row last weekend, the Kansas City Royals still have won 16 of their last 20 and are tied with Cleveland for second in their division, 2½ games behind Detrot. Kris Bubic has the fourth best ERA in MLB, 1.69.
(AS WE GO TO PRESS)—The Cardinals extended their streak nine with a win over the Phillies in the first game of a midweek series. The Royals ended their four-game losing streak with a series opening win against Houston and now have gone 25% of the way to a 100-victory season.
(UFL)—The St. Louis Battlehawks aren’t scoring a lot of points with their backup quarterback but they don’t need to, given their defense.
They ran their record to 5-2 during the weekend with a 19-9 victory on the home field of the Memphis Showboats. St. Louis broke the game open with ten first-quarter points. After Memphis closed to 10-6 in the second quarter, St. Louis bounced back with a 78-yard that made it 16-6 at the half. The teams traded field goals in the second half.
Next for Battlehawks: the Birmingham Stallions, in the St. Louis Dome, next Saturday noon. The Battlehawks, Birmingham, and the Washington Defenders are 5-2 heading down the stretch in the UFL season. Birmingham will play the ‘hawks next weekend in the St. Louis dome.
(INDYCAR)—It’s May and for racing fans the word is Indianapolis. INDYCAR has started the month with a race on the speedway road course. And Alex Palou has continued his run in the leadup to the biggest race of the year for the series.
But that’s the longest race so far this year and Josef Newgarden will be shooting for an unprecedented third straight win. The 500 championship could be a matter of which of the biggest teams in the series gets the Borg-Warner trophy.
Palou is on track to have the greatest INDYCAR season in 61 years. His win on the speedway road course is his fourth in five races this year and makes him the clear favorite to add a fifth win in the Indianapolis 500 on the 25th.
Palou had a ten-second lead when the first caution period this year came along after 408 green flag laps to start the season. But he pulled away on the restart and in the remaining dozen laps rebuilt his lead to more than five seconds.
Pato O’Ward picked up his second runner-up position of the season.
Through five races this year, Palou’s average finishing position is 1.2. INDYCAR says the only start in the last half-century that comes close to that is the season-opening run by Sebastian Bourdais in 2006, who was at 1.4 after four victories and a third place.
While his start to the year has been spectacular, he has no lock on the 500, a race much longer than the first five races of the INDYCAR season. Josef Newgarden, who finished twelfth on the road course, will aggressively chase his goal of being the first driver to win three consecutive 500s. Former winner Will Power has had top tens in the last four races, including third on the road course last weekend. Power says he will be “shocked” if Palou dominates the 500 as he has dominated the first five races.
And O’Ward, who has two heart-breaking seconds in the big race, now has two seconds so far this year and wants to taste the champagne.
Scott Dixon, who finished fifth in the race, is a six-time series champion and has led more laps in the 500 than any other driver, wants to lead at least one more and get his second win in the race.
The 500 is likely to have seven drivers who have combined for 12 wins.
(NASCAR)—Kyle Larson’s car wasn’t 100% healthy when he crossed the finish line for his second straight win at the Kansas Speedway, but it was enough to get to the checkered flag seven-tenths of a second before Christopher Bell did.
He babied his right side tires for the last few laps, especially the last one when pieces of rubber were seen flying from the right front.
It was Larson’s third win of the year. He started from the poll and led 221 of the 267 laps to join Bell as the only three-time winner in the NASCAR Cup series this year.
He now ranks third among active drivers in laps led with 10,073. He has more than five-thousand laps to lead before he gets to Denny Hamlin and more than nine thousand before he equals Kyle Busch.
(Photo Credits: Palou, INDYCAR