(CARDINALS)—The St. Louis Cardinals have opened the week with four two-run homers by four different players to beat the Cubs and pull to within a half-game of first. Place. The 8-2 win is the Redbirds’ sixth in their last seven games. Matthew Liberatore pitched seven strong innings and had plenty of over-the-wall support from Alex Burlison, Brendan Donovan, Lars Nootbar, and Nolan Gorman.
Reliever Andre Granillo, just called up from Memphis, got his first strikeout, his first save, and his first win in a Chicago doubleheader. He picked up his first major league win by throwing four pitches in the first game of a doubleheader as the Cardinals got a run in their next at-bat.
(ROYALS)—The Royals dropped to 38-40 with a loss Sunday to the Padres. They next face Tampa Bay, a team that is 43-35.
Rookie Jac is still adjusting to major league pitching but he has ripped two considerable home runs and has made a sparking grab over the wall to keep a home run from being a home run.
Although he’s only hitting .203, there’s another statistic that is important for Royals fans to recognize. He had yet to record his first strikeout.
Last week, Salvador Perez continued his outstanding June with his 282nd career home run. His season batting average is .235 but he’s catching up to respectable levels, hitting .280 in the first nineteen games in June. He already has 41 RBI.
(MIZFB)—The recruiting never stops in college football and Missouri is up to five pledges for the class of 2026. The latest signee is Chicago three-star running back Maxwell Warner, the 26th best player and number one running back in Illinois.
(MIZZBB)—Missouri’s basketball team is looking at a pretty tough schedule for the 2025-26 season. Nineteen of their 31 scheduled games will be against schools that made the NCAA tournament last year. Ten of their opponents were in the big tournament earlier this year.
The first game is November 3 against Howard University.
Now for the horsepower set:
(Indycar)—The Indycar prime time Sunday night race at World Wide Technology Raceway near St. Louis a few days ago was such a hit with television viewers that more oval races might be scheduled in the future. The primetime broadcast of this year’s race, won by Kyle Kirkwood, drew 96 percent more viewers than watched the race in 2024 and for the first time in nine years, more than one-million viewer tuned in to the first two races after the Indianapolis 500.
Penske vice-president Bud Denker says the audience numbers for younger viewers was encouraging. He told RACER magazine. “The other thing that was so terrific was the 18- to 34-year-old trend we’re seeing, We’re up 56 percent now for the season in the 18- to 34-year-old category. So that’s mega for us with new viewership.”
Alex Palou won his sixth race of the year at Road America last weekend, leaving the series with only two winning driver through the first nine races. Three-time winner Kyle Kirkwood finished fourth. Felix Rosenqvist and Santino Ferrucci joined Palou on the podium.
The last time and Indycar driver won six of the first nine races of the year was 1975 when A. J. Foyt did it.
Rosenqvist finished two seconds back but nobody had anything to challenge Palou after him. Ferrucci was 17 seconds behind.
Rosenqvist had the fastest lap of the race. You can ride along with him at:
Felix Rosenqvist Sets Fastest Lap at XPEL Grand Prix
Indycar moves on to the road course at Mid-Ohio in two weeks.
(NASCAR)—Chase Briscoe withstood the intense pressure of teammate Denny Hamlin and last years series champion, Ryan Blaney for the last 34 laps of the NASCAR race at Pocono. All three drivers with trying to stretch their fuel to the end.
Briscoe won his first race for his new team—Joe Gibbs Racing—by about seven-tenths of a second over Denny Hamlin. Blaney held on for third.
He beat the master of the Pocono Raceway; Hamlin has a record seven wins on that track and his finished first or second ten times. His win makes him the 11th driver to qualify for the 16-driver competition in the season’s last ten races that will decide the NASCAR Cup champion.
(Photo credit: World Wide Technology Raceway; Bob Priddy—Palou at WWTR)