Author Archives: bpriddy

Are the Cardinals playing Charlie Brown football with us?  And the joy of being in the right place at the right time.  

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Charlie Brown football—Lucy snatches the football away just as Charlie Brown tries to kick it. Are the Cardinals leading us to think, again, that they’ve started to claw their way back to decency, only to snatch defeat from victory again?

The Cardinals got two strong pitching performances in their last games heading into the all-star break.  Miles Mikolas  went seven innings on Saturday and the relief corps closed out the White Sox 3-0.  Steven Matz, making his first start since May 24 when his record fell to 0-7 and his ERA soared to 5.02, went into the sixth inning on Sunday and the Cardinals, struck out nine and gave up only two hits.  He didn’t get the decision as the Cardinals scored the winning run in the 10th on a Paul DeJong double.

Are they doing it again to their fans—-showing a spark that increases desperate hoe that the season can still amount to something?   Or will they return from the break and drift backwards again?

Admittedly, the White Sox were hardly top-not material in the weekend series.  The Sox enter the break at 38-54.  The Cardinals have the next few days to think about a lot of things that led to their 38-52 pre-break season.

The Royals also go into the break as winners—for only the 26th time this year. They’ve lost 65 times. But Sunday, they got three runs in the sixth to send the Cleveland Guardians into the break with a .500 record. Ryan Yarbrough, pitching for the Royals for the first time since he was hit in the face by a line drive May 7, gave up six hits and struck out five in six innings. He gave up the Guardians only run.

Tonight’s All-Star Game finds only two players from our two teams on the roster. Nolan Arenado will start at third base for the American League.  Salvador Perez represents the Royals as a reserve.  He’s hitting .246 for the season, fifteen points better than his team’s winning percentage.

Stars of tomorrow—maybe.  Major League teams have spent the last couple of days picking the talent that might be season-savers for some teams in a few years.

In the first round, the Royals took high school catcher Blake Mitchell of Sinton, Texas, who has committed to LSU but is considered likely to withdraw the commitment.

The Cardinals went for Chase Davis, a power hitting outfielder whose 60 home runs in the last three years at the University of Arizona rank third in school history.

In Round two, the Royals picked pitcher Blake Wolters, the Player of the Year in Illinois this year, a righthander with a 99 mph fastball. He also was an all-state basketball player. He’s giving up his commitment to Arizona.

With a second pick in the first round, the Royals selected outfielder Carson Roccaforte from Louiana-Lafayette, a projected center fielder.

The Cardinals did not have a second round pick.

The Royals went for another high school player of the year in the third round—Hiro Wyatt of Staples Connecticut.  The Cardinals went for outfielder Travis Honeyman of Boston College.  Round four found the Royals taking Vanderbilt pitcher Hunter Owen and the Cardinals picking a Cardinal, pitcher Quin Mathews.

The Royals stayed at home in the fifth round, taking outfielder Spencer Nivens from Missouri State University.  The Cardinals drafted Miami outfielder Zach Levenson.

One player from the University of Missouri was taken—pitcher Austin troesser by the Mets as a fourth-round compensation pick.

(Football)—The Kansas City Chiefs open their training camp at St. Joseph twelve days from today.

24/7 sports looked at the SEC teams and ranked them on the basis of returning starters—ranking the Missouri Tigers second or third with 13 (8 on defense) and commenting, “The Tigers expect to be elite on the defensive side of the football this season with several all-conference candidates returning at all levels. Missouri ranked fourth in the SEC in total defense last season and nearly knocked off top-ranked and unbeaten Georgia at home as a result.”  Ahead of Missouri in the ranking is Texas A&M with 16 returning starters and Old Miss (also with thirteen),

Those of you who only want stick and ball sports can go find something else to do now because we’re going to talk a little bit about racing.

(NASCAR)—William Byron was in the right place at the right time in Atlanta.  When the big rain came, and the red flag flew, he had the lead. Byron took the lead away from A. J. Allmendinger with 19 laps left in a race with a high intensity level because of the approaching storm.

Allmendinder was third with Daniel Suarez as the runner-up after starting 26th.  Michael McDowell, squeezing ever last gas vapor out of his tank, was able to bring his car home fourth.

The win is  the fourth of the year for Byron, the most of any Cup driver this season, and it moves him into the lead for the regular-season points championship.  Byron drives the 24-car for Hendrick Motorsports, the number used by Hall of Famer Jeff Gordon.  This year is the first time since 2014 that car 24 has won four races in a season.

Pole sitter Aric Almirola led the most laps in the race but dropped back to 18th in the final stage.

(FORMULA 1)—Max Verstappen has on his sixth grand prix race in a row, and the 11th straight for Red Bull.   The eleven straight wins ties the Formula 1 record for consecutive victories by a team, first achieved by McLaren with drivers Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost.

Verstappen was joined on the winner’s state at the Grand Prix of Britain by runnerup Lando Norris of McLaren and Lewis Hamilton of Mercedes.

(INDYCAR)—Indycar races through the streets of Toronto this coming Sunday. Alex Palou will be looking for his fourth straight win.

Two drivers are hoping to extend streaks and also to achieve personal milestones in the race.  Scott Dixon holds the series record of 18 straight seaosns with at least one win and 20 seasons with at least one victory.  Will Power has 16 years with at least one win and 17 seasons overall ith at least one victory.

Dixon is one of only four drivers in INDYCAR history to record at least 100 podium finishes. Power is at 97 with eight races left this season to reach 100.

Dixon. With 133, ranks behind only Mario Andretti’s 144.  A. J. Foyt had 119 and Michael Andretti retired with an even 100.  A top-three finish at Toronto will tie Power with Al Unser Sr., at 98.

Jefferson City’s first tornado

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The scars of the May 23, 2019 tornado that hit Jefferson City remain fresh—and obvious to many who remember when a house stood here, a big beautiful tree over there, when a fence conceals a vacant lot that once held a gathering place for plays, when broken windows at the state penitentiary continue to stare blankly at passersby.

When city and county officials had time to add things up, they found it had damaged 316 residential buildings, 82 commercial buildings and thirty government structures. It was classed as an EF-3, with winds of 73-112 mph (the scale assigns storms of less than 73 mph as an EF0).

Within hours of that tornado, and continuing today, there are those who speculate about what would have happened if the tornado had followed a path just a few blocks west—-and hit a hospital or the Southside and downtown business district and even the Capitol.

We had a tornado that did.  Hit the Capitol.  And a hospital.  And areas in between.

It was May 12, 1890, a Monday in the town of about 6,700 residents. “The almost stifling heat during the afternoon indicated that a storm of some kind was brewing and the heavy cloud that rolled up in the southwest about 4:30 indicated further that it was a storm of the business turn of mind, and that it had business in this immediate vicinity” reported the Jefferson City Daily Tribune the next day.  “It came with a roar and a crash that was terrible enough to fill the minds of those who witnessed it with apprehension of dire disaster.”

The Cole County Democrat reported, “The winds rose in a stiff blow, carrying the dark green looking clouds in every direction and threatening destruction to everything.”

And then the cloud split into three segments, “one division striking for the extreme western portion of the city, another traveling up Monroe Street to the river, while the third division took in the southern and eastern portion of the city taking in the penitentiary.”

The Chillicothe Constitution reported, “For half an hour the wind blew a hurricane, driving before it a storm of rain which so enveloped the town that nothing could be seen but the vivid flashes of lightning…At 4:45 o’clock the wind had risen almost to the force of a cyclone, and as it came roaring over the hills it struck the state Capitol with terrific force.

The seven-year old St. Peter Catholic Church was hammered and, “The heavy brick arch on top of the rear wall was blown over on the roof and went crashing through clear to the basement, making a complete wreck of the richly furnished altar and sacristy.”  Fortunately, said the Daily Tribune, “it is understood that a cyclone policy was carried on the church.”

The Capitol was immediately next. “Here the wind got a grip under the cornice of the roof of the old part of the building north of the dome and did not relax its hold until a great section of the roof, tin, timbers and all, had been rolled up, crushed, splintered and scattered…,” said the newspaper.  The Chillicothe paper said the debris was “rolled together like a scroll and carried over the bluff.”

The tornado struck only a few months after a new cornerstone had been laid after two new wings had been added to the Capitol.

“At the same moment, half a dozen trees in the Capitol Park were snapped in twain, and the glass in the dome came tumbling with a crash into the rotunda.”  But, “the building itself stood solid as a rock.”

The eastern division of the storm unroofed the penitentiary hospital but apparently did little damage beyond that.

But the central division, the storm “tore down several chimneys, one off he residence of Postmaster Sample, one off the resident of J. R. Edwards, the smoke stack from the Brton residence and J. T. Craven lost his tin chimney. The shade trees in Mr. R. Dallmeyer’s yard were twisted considerably.  The Democrat building lost a cellar door, it being lifted by the storm from the pavement and carried at least one hundred feet. One window of the building being completely destroyed, the venetian blind being blown clear away with only a small fragment left. The resident of Mr. W. M. Meyer on Adams Street has the bale end blown in, doing some damage to his furniture but fortunately injuring no one.”

The young ladies’ dormitory at Lincoln Institute lost its roof and the heavy rain damaged the interior plastering.

The Daily Tribune cataloged other damage:

“A porch in the rear of the building on High street occupied by Mrs. Robinson and Mr. Schleer was lifted over onto the roof and a big chimney, adding further destruction by tumbling over and making another big hole.  The west wall of the house on McCarty Street, occupied by Mr. W. W. Meyers, was blown in. The children had been playing in this room a few moments before the storm came, but were fortunately in another part of the building when the wall went in with a deafening crash. The cornice on the rear of the Music hall building was damaged. Mrs. Vogt’s residence on Washington street, was unroofed. The Standard Shoe Co.’s building, on Main Street, was dismantled of chimneys, and buildings in all parts of the city had similar experiences.

“The roof of the Neef house was badly wrenched and some of the rooms damaged by water.  At the Central hotel a smokestack on Maj. Lusk’s residence was blown through a window, carrying away the entire sash, and before the aperture could be protected a number of rooms were flooded, doing much damage to furniture and carpets. Shade and fruit trees, shrubbery and fences suffered at Mr. H.W. Ewing’s place, near the city. His stable was also minus the roof when the storm cleared away..”

No casualties were reported.

“Our people were considerably frightened, and well they may be, as no such clouds have ever before been seen in this city.  We are congratulating ourselves that it is no worse, and hope that such an occurrence will not visit us again,” said the Cole County Democrat.

While residents of Jefferson City were pondering the disaster, some people sixty miles away were showing no sympathy.  The booming and ambitious city of Sedalia, with more than 14,000 people, had been trying to wrestle the seat of government away from Jefferson City for more than a decade.  The Sedalia Bazoo commented, “Since the Lord partially ruined the state capitol building at Jefferson City, it is a good time to agitate the removal of the capital to Sedalia.”  The Sedalia Gazette noted, “The roof of part of Missouri’s capitol was blown off this week. This is the same building upon which was squandered a quarter of a million dollars recently” (with the addition of two wings on the north and sound ends of the 1840 Capitol).

Five years later, Sedalia interests stormed Jefferson City with a one-day lobbying blitz that led the legislature to put a proposition on the 1896 ballot to pull state government out of Jefferson City.

But that’s another story.

 

If you can’t trust the game—-

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The NFL announced last week that five players have been suspended for betting on sports contests.  Three are suspended for at least a year. Three can resume playing in game seven of the upcoming season.  Four of the players involved are with the Detroit Lions. The team has released two of them.

They aren’t the first.  Last year the NFL suspended Calvin Ridley of the Atlanta Falcons for gambling.

The Detroit Lions reportedly (ESPN) organization has fired several staff members from various departments who also might have been gambling.

A few days before that announcement, Ohio residents began wagering on sports.  The first bet was placed by former Cincinnati Reds baseball player Pete Rose, who has been banned from the Baseball Hall of Fame because of gambling.  As baseball and other sports crawl farther under the covers with gamblers, are they creeping closer to admitting people such as Rose and Shoeless Joe Jackson to Halls of Fame?  Will fans believe them as much as they once did that the answer is “no.”

One of those lobbying for sports wagering in Missouri has said it will enhance fan participation in the games.

Associated Press columnist Kyle Hightower, however, wonders if our pro sports teams are undermining public confidence in themselves, writing, “The incidents have driven a public conversation about the integrity of pro sports as legalized sports betting takes a greater hold in this country.”

He quotes Professor Declan Hill at the University of New Haven who says “Leagues are dancing with the devil. Here’s what happens.  There’ll be one play that’s kind of weird and dubious and sports fans will start to do, ‘Was that legitimate?’ And then there’ll be another one. And another one and another one. And after a few years, the sports leagues will have a problem because their fundamental credibility is being debated by their fans.”

Hightower sees players becoming “ambassadors for gambling companies” by appearing in sports gambling advertisements and promotions.

Huge money is involved here—more than $220 billion since the U. S. Supreme Court legalized sports betting in 2018.  Leagues already are providing official stats to the big gambling companies. Some fans already wonder how pure leagues can be when this kind of big money is involved. And the money is going to be even bigger.

Missouri is an island surrounded by states with sports betting. The industry is leaning hard on the Missouri legislature to end that status. So far, internal squabbling among gambling interests has frustrated sports wagering backers.  But it seems inevitable that our lawmakers eventually will buckle.

And what will happen to our trust in the games we watch when the fans’ “participation” in the games is “enhanced?”

Humans play these games and humans make mistakes and not always by accident.  In the future fans might ask if a mistake really is a mistake? Every suspension for gambling chips away at confidence in The Game, whatever game it might be.  What happens when we wonder if that error was accidental or that missed block was really just a miss; that the pass was not intentionally thrown an inch too high or too long or too short; that the goalie really did just miss that puck or that those two free throws that bounced off the rim could have gone in?

Our pro sports teams have spent decades emphasizing the integrity of their games. We worry that the lure of big money will erode the confidence we have as we watch from the games’ grandstand.  How can we know?

How can we trust what we see?

It appears to be too late for such concerns to be prohibitive of gambling involvement in sports.

Hightower’s article concludes with a comment from Karol Corcoran, the general manager of FanDuel, one of the biggest online gambling operators, who says, “We’re in an ecosystem with customers, we’re the operators, with the leagues with our data providers. It’s important for all of us that we build together a sustainable industry. And being very careful about integrity is part of that.”

The fox is in the hen house.   And it is talking about integrity.

We wish we could say we are comforted.

—-because the fox is always hungry.

We hope we can still love and trust our games five years, ten years, from now.

 

Knocking off the big guys and racing in the rain: last week in sports

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By Bob Priddy, Missourinet Contributing Editor.

(BASEBALL)—Cardinals vs. Yankees; Royals vs. Dodgers.  Didn’t happen the way the experts thought it should have.  At the end of the week, both teams had split their last ten games, which means they’ve been playing well above their season’s average.

(CARDINALS)—The Cardinals took two out of three against the Yankees with Jordan Montgomery turning back his old team for the rubber game.  Montgomery outpitched Yankee ace Geritt Cole to lift his team to 35-48.  They are 10½ games out of a wild card slot for the post-season and they’ll have to play at a .582 clip to finish the year at .500.

They have shown incremental progress since the Giants swept them in three-game set in mid-June, going 8-6 since, a .570 clip.

The Yankees are 46-38 but they have had a losing record since losing Aaron Judge with a toe injury.

The Cardinals made a roster move to start the week by calling up Luken Baker, who had a cup of coffee earlier this year when he came up and hit .286 in four games before being send down to the Memphis Redbirds, where he racked up 22 home runs in 64 games. The Cardinals have designated outfielder Oscar Mercado for assignment to make room on the roster for Baker.

(ROYALS)—The Kansas City Royals surprised the Los Angeles Dodgers by taking two out of three  from them to win their first series since mid-May. They still have the second-worst record in the American League at 25-59.  They started this week 21 games out of a playoff spot but team officials seem bullish on a much-better team within the next two years as the youngsters gain experience.

The Royals have only 15 players born before 1995 (Zack Greinke was born in ’83).  On their 40-man roster.

(ALL-STARS)—An indication of the lousy baseball seasons our Missouri teams are having can be found in the rosters for the July 11 All-Star game.  The only Cardinal picked is third baseman Nolan Arenado. He’ll be a starter.  The only other player from either of our teams is Salvatore Perez of the Royals, as a backup catcher.  Of some note is that another American League reserve is former Royals Second Baseman Whit Merrifield, reserve from the Blue Jays.

Before we go racing:

(FOOTBALL)—Vice Tobin, once a standout defensive player for the Missouri Tigers and later the head coach of the Arizona Cardinals who led the franchise to its first post-season victory in fifty years, has died. He was 79.

Tobin and his brother, Bill, were natives of Burlington Junction who played his high school ball in Maryville.  He was defensive back and later a coach for Dan Devine’s Missouri Tigers in the early sixties and mid-70s when the Tigers went 21-7-3 and were nationally ranked all three years.  He had six interceptions, returned punts, and played some halfback on offense—his first play as a halfback was a touchdown pass to Johnny Roland at California in 1962.

He was a defensive ends coach from 1967-70, including the strong seasons of 1968 and ’69 when the Tigers finished with top-ran rankings.  He called defensive plays under Al Onofrio during some of Onofrio’s most memorable wins against Notre Dame, USC, Ohio State, Alabama, and Nebraska and over Aubrn in the Sun Bowl. He coached in the DCFL with the British Columbia Lions before starting a 16-year career as an NFL coach.  He headed the Cardinals 1996-2000 and led them to a win over the Dallas cowboys in the first round of the 1998 playoffs. He later was a defensive coordinator with the Chicago Bears, Indianapolis Colds and Detroit Lions.

(NASCAR)—The streets of Chicago were nothing if not entertaining Sunday.  NASCAR ran its first street race in the modern era after a heavy downpour soaked the track—

(Michael Reaves, Getty Images/NASCAR)

Chicago got a record amount of rain for a July 2nd.  And a driver who had never competed in a NASCAR Cup race beat everybody to the finish line.

The rain gauges at O’Hare International Airport had almost 2.3 inches of rain in them by noon, breaking a record dating back forty-one years.  It was too much water for the NASCAR Cup cars to take to the track even with their rain tires.

The race finally got underway ninety minutes late with some water still standing on the track, leading to cars sliding into walls or into tire barriers several times. The track, however, was dry by the time the race ended with New Zealander Shane van Gisbergen 1.3 seconds ahead of Justin Haley and Chase Elliott.

Kyle Larson and Kyle Busch rounded out the top five—a considerable accomplishment for Busch, who buried the nose of his car in a tire barrier on the fourth lap and had to be retried by a NASCAR safety truck.

Van Gisbergen is the first driver in NASCAR history to win a points-awarding race in his first race.  Until Sunday, only Joplin’s Jamie McMurray and Trevor Bayne held the record for quickest to win a Cup race. Both won in their second ones.  No driver has won a Cup race in his first start since Johnny Rutherford won a non-points qualifying race at Daytona in 1963.  (Jared C. Tilton, Getty Images/NASCAR)

Van Gisbergen, however, is no rookie in stock car racing. He has won the Bathurst 1000, a 621-mile road race back home in Australia three times.  He is a three-time champion of the V8 Supercars Championship—Australia’s NASCAR.

This is the Camaro that runs in that series:

(carscoops.com)

Van Gisbergen is hinting that he might join NASCAR fulltime in 2025 after doing “one more year in OZ.” He is only the sixth foreign-born driver to win a NASCAR Cup race.  Mario Andretti, born in Italy, was the first, in 1967.  Canada’s Earl Ross won in 1974.  Juan Pablo Montoya, born in Colombia, won his first Cup race in 2000. Australia’s Marcus Ambrose was a winner in 2011, followed by Daniel Suarez last year and Giesberger on Sunday in Chicago.

(FORMULA 1)—Max Verstappen, this time, as Spa-Francorchamps, Belgium.  But zealous race stewards penalized eight drivers various amounts of time for cars going outside the racing surface to improve or to defend their positions that it took some time after the race to decide who finished where.  In the end Charles Leclerc was second and Sergio Perez got the other podium spot.

July 4th came on July 3rd this year  

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Cartoonist Walt Kelly years ago had a popular cartoon strip called “Pogo,” about a possum and his animal friends who lived in a Georgia swamp.  Every now and then, one of them would proclaim, “Friday the 13th came on Wednesday this month!” or whatever day was appropriate.

So today we celebrate Independence Day. We can’t say we’re celebrating the fourth of July because that’s not util tomorrow.  And actually, there are several dates we can observe because the Declaration was a work in progress for almot a month before Congress adopted it.

John Adams thought July 2nd would be the day to be remembered. He wrote to wife Abigail 247 years ago today, “The second day of July 1776 will be the most memorable Epocha, in the history of America…It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires, and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forever more.”

Why July 2ns?

Let’s go back to June 7th when delegate Richard Henry Lee of Virginia proposed a resolution “that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.”

Four days later a committee of five—Adams, Roger Sherman, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Livingston, and Thomas Jefferson—was appointed to write a document expressing those views. Congress recessed until July 1 while the document was written.

Jefferson reluctantly took the job of writing the first draft.  But he alone did not write the Declaration.  Adams and Franklin were his chief editors.  His first draft contained about 1850 words.

The five-member committee made about four dozen changes. Other committees of the Continental Congress made 39 more. Jefferson made five.  In the end of the document was reduced by about 25 percent, to 1,337 words.

One immediate change was made by Benjamin Franklin in the most-cited part of the document—“all men are created equal”

The idea is not Jefferson’s alone.  He borrowed the sentiment from fellow Virginian George Mason, the author of the Virginia Declaration of Rights that had been adopted a month earlier, saying, “all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”

Jefferson re-wrote that idea:

“We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable; that all men are created equal & independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, & liberty,& the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these ends, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government shall become destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, & to institute new government, laying it’s foundation on such principles & organizing it’s powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety & happiness.”

Jefferson took an already wordy sentiment and made it even more wordy.

And this is where Franklin made a significant change.  He immediately removed “sacred and undeniable” and inserted “self evident.”  Franklin biographer Walter Isaacson says Franklin argued that the new nation was to be one in which rights come from rational thinking and the consent of the governed, not from the dictates or dogmas of religion.

The document mentions God or substitute names for God several times but it does so in neutral phrasing.  This is not a Catholic God.  This is not a Christian God—in those days there were plenty of people who believed Catholics weren’t Christians and Protestant belief organizations were actively splintering into different denominations with differing interpretations of God and the Scriptures.

The God in the Declaration is nature’s God, not a denominational God for a reason.

In Jefferson’s state of Virginia, between 1768 and 1774, about half of the Baptist ministers were jailed for preaching.  In Northampton, Massachusetts—Adams’ state—eighteen Baptist ministers were jailed in one year for refusing to pay taxes to support the Congregational minister in the town.

The sentiment about God had been voiced in the very first sentence of the Declaration that asserted that the colonies are separate from England and as a unified entity assume “among the powers of the earth and the separate and equal stations to which “the laws of nature and nature’s God entitle them.”

The Congress resumed its session on July 2 and the Lee Resolution was adopted and debate on the Declaration began immediately.  For the next two days, Congress made changes—the most significant one being the removal of a section that attacked slavery.

It was late in the morning of July 4 when the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration and the handwritten original with all of its changes was given to printer John Dunlap.  But until August 2, the only signature on the document was that of convention president John Hancock.

The document was not signed July 4th—the famous painting by John Trumbull showing the five-man committee turning in the document with other members seated behind them.

Most members of the Continental Congress did not sign the Declaration until August 27.  And there were stragglers: Richard Henry Lee, Elbridge Gerry (of gerrymander infamy), and Oliver Walcott did not sign until November 19.  And it was not until 1781 that Thomas McKean added his signature.

McKean had left Congress a few days after adoption of the Declaration to become a colonel in the Pennsylvania Association, a military unit despite its name created by Franklin.

They promised their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor when they signed the document.  Several, tragically, kept that promise.

Five of them were captured by the British, branded as traitors, and died after being tortured. A dozen saw their homes burned.  The sons of two of them were killed in the war. Nine of them fought in the war and died of their wounds or the hardships of the war.

Lives, fortunes, and sacred honor.  Those words and the passionate commitments behind them meant something in 1776.

As we honor them today, we should be haunted by those words and wonder what place they have in our political world today.

Could we survive yesterday?

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Someone asked me the other day, “If you could go back 150 years, what would be the first things you would notice?”

It took me about two seconds to come up with an answer—because I’ve sometimes thought it would be interesting to be able to go back as an invisible observer of the past.

“Color,” I said. “And smells.”

“And the water would kill us.”

The images with which we are most familiar are all one-dimensional and black and white.  Take that picture of great-great-grandfather and grandmother and imagine what a shock it would be to meet them on the street, in three dimensions, their flesh the same color as yours, eyes (perhaps) the same color as yours, hair—-well it might be the same color but it also might be pretty greasy with the men and not particularly clean with the women.

And they likely would have an odor about them, especially if you met them at this time of year.  Stale sweat for one.  Showers were unknown in most homes (indoor plumbing of any kind). Bathtubs were not as well-used as our tubs and showers are now.  Underarm deodorant was nonexistent.  Mum was the first underarm deodorant, and it didn’t come along until 1888, a paste applied under the arms, by hand.  Deodorant, not anti-perspirant.

Underwear probably went a few days before changing.

In those days, if everybody stank, nobody stank.

Last year, I was on the town square in Springfield, Illinois and I noticed a sign on one of the historic buildings denoting it as the former home of the Corneau and Diller Drug Store. The sign said the store had been opened in 1849 by Roland W. Diller and Charles S. Corneau, who installed a big wood stove circled by chairs, making the pace a popular place for mento gather and swap stories or discuss events of the day including politics, a subject that was appealing to Abraham Lincoln, whose law office was a short walk away.

Wife Mary purchased toiletries there “such as bear’s oil, ox, marrow, ‘French Chalk’ for her complexion, a patent hairdressing called ‘Zylobalsam,’ and ‘Mrs. Allen’s Restorative.”

It continues: “Because daily bathing was not yet customary, the Lincolns—like most other people—bought cologne by the quart!”

Visitors to the Steamboat Arabia Museum in Kansas City can purchase 1856 French Perfume.  It’s not the real stuff that was found when the boat was excavated but it is a reproduction.  The museum sent a bottle of some of the real stuff to a laboratory in New York that did a chemical analysis and reproduced the perfume.

It’s strong stuff.  But for hundreds of years, perfume often was not the olfactory decoration and attraction that it is today; it was a masking agent sometimes poured on and sometimes used to soak kerchiefs that were kept up the sleeves and used to waft away some personal unpleasantness of a companion.

So color and odor would be the first things to jolt us if we went back 150 years.

But the smells would not be confined to the people you meet on the streets.  The streets themselves would be pretty rank.

The New York Almanack published an article a couple of years ago observing that the city had 150,000 to 200,000 horses, each of which produced “up to 30 pounds of manure per day and a quart of urine…over 100,000 tons a year (not to mention around 10 million gallons of urine.”

“By the end of the 19th century, vacant lots around New York City housed manure piles that reached 40 or 60 feet high. It was estimated that in a few decades, every street would have manure piled up to third story levels.”

Jefferson City’s streets didn’t produce that much manure and urine.  But New  York’s problems were the problems of every city in the country, including the capital city.

The manure on the dirt streets (such as High Street in Jefferson City) attracted flies by the thousands, millions.  New York once estimated that three-billion flies were hatched from street poop every day.  They were disease carriers. The dust from the streets and the dried manure mingled in the air, was inhaled and worn on the clothing.

And when it rained in the summer or when the show thawed in the winter, the streets turned into a gluey muck that was tracked into every business and home in town—except for the ones that required footwear to be removed before or upon entering—at which point socks that weren’t changed daily added their own atmosphere to life.

These conditions led to the rise in some communities of a new institution—the country club.  People needed a place in the country where they could breathe clean air, at least for a day or two.  Golf courses and horse-racing tracks developed outside of towns.

Missouri Governor Herbert Hadley, who suffered from a lung disease—pleurisy—bought a farm west of town and several prominent residents gathered one weekend for a big barn raising and cabin-building.  Later, a nine-hole golf course was created and thus was born the Jefferson City Country Club.

Sanitary sewer systems were rare. Homes had outhouses, often not far from the well that provided the house with water.

If we went back 150 years and took a drink of the water of the day, we probably would choke on the taste and if we dank a little too much, we might just die of a water-borne disease.  Even with natural immunity that residents of those times developed, the average life expectancy in the United States in 1880 was 40, a good part of it because of high infant mortality and primitive obstetrics that led to high mortality rates for women giving birth.

We forget how tough, how strong, our ancestors had to be to survive in such an environment.  The Missouri State Penitentiary kept a log of every Confederate prisoner it took in.  The average prisoner was 5-feet-7 and weighed 140 pounds.  Women prisoners averaged 4-feet-11.

Imagine wearing a wool uniform, marching ten or 20 miles a day carrying a heavy rifle and a 50-pound backpack, eating unrefrigerated rations and drinking whatever water you could find, even if it was downstream from a cattle farm.

The good old days weren’t very good.  The problem with going back to them is that we might not live long enough to return.

 

There comes a time……

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By Bob Priddy, Missourinet Contributing Editor

We normally talk about sports in these Tuesday entries but today we’re going to talk about a universal issue many who are not sports figures face.  Sports is the most obvious example, but the issue is common to all.

Sooner or later, we all have to face the fact that we have lost that fine edge that has enabled us to participate or compete at a high level in our careers.  For some it is a competitive fire.  For others it is acute enthusiasm for a job, a dulling of the drive for excellence. For others it is the onset of fatigue, the lessening of energy to do assigned tasks that might seem mundane to others but are important in the world in which the individual lives and works.

In sports it’s sometimes called “the loss of a step.”

The desire to continue something although one is no longer capable of doing the best work is common, even something so common as driving a car, an issue that is instantly uncomfortable and often hurtful in relations between parents and children.

The issue is played out most publicly in sports where retirement age comes early.

As we watch sports, we see the players as timeless, ageless, figures.  When they depart from the scene we watch from the grandstands or from our television sets as new uniformed figures take their place.  But sports are filled with the drama of aging and the surprise realization that someone who is 40 is old.

And it is a surprise to those who remember them that they are so old when they die—Heisman Trophy winner Charles White was 64 this year and Oakland A’s outfielder Sal Bando was 78. New York Knicks center Willis Reed was 80; Vida Blue, 73; and arguably the NFL’s greatest running back, Jim Brown was 87.

How can that be?

it is because memory is in the moment.  We see these people in our minds as they were when they were in the heat of battle.  How can they have gotten so old?

It is because the game, whatever game it is, is eternal and its participants are frozen in memory as they were.  We advance in years but our memories of them do not change. We are surprised that they have aged at the same rate we have.

Image it from the other side.  Imagine you are 40.  And you are old.  And you face leaving the arena because you aren’t good enough to be in it anymore. The game is ageless but you are not.

Our two major league baseball teams are dealing with this issue.  It’s most obvious with the Cardinals because they are dealing with high expectations this year. The stakes are less for the Royals, from whom not much was expected in 2023.

Both teams have pitchers who are, or who are becoming, shadows of themselves in their glory days.

A look at the Cardinals statistics after their trip to London lists nineteen pitchers used this year, based on earned run average.

Nineteenth on the list is Adam Wainwright, who is 3-2 in his nine starts this year. His ERA after his disastrous start against the Cubs in London is 6.56.  He has pitched 46.2 innings in those  nine starts. He’s allowed 71 hits and has given up 14 walks. He has struck out 24 batters.

85 base runners in 46 innings in nine games.  He’s averaging five innings a start.  He was hoping to win his 199th career victory on Saturday.  He wants to finish his career with 200.

He is part of a pitching staff working hard to rise to mediocrity.  The pitching staff’s overall ERA is 4.43, hardly contender level.  Even Jack Flaherty, counted on to be the staff ace despite his injury history and MIA status during most of last year, is at 4.95 and has a losing record at 4-5. Only one Cardinals pitcher has a winning record. And he’s being mentioned in the numerous entries by various speculators as possible trade bait as the Cardinals look for a physical magic bullet that will save 2023 for them.

Wainwright will be 42 before the season ends. He is the third-oldest player on an active major league roster behind Pittsburgh pitcher Rich Hill, who is 43, and San Diego DH Nelson Cruz, who will be 43 on July l.  The eighth-oldest active major league is Royals pitcher Zack Greinke, who is 39 (forty in October).

Greinke lasted 4.2 innings last Friday, gave up nine hits and a walk and dropped to 1-8 for the season. His ERA is 5.31 as we write this.  In sixteen games, he’s lasted 81.1 innings. He’s given up 89 hits and 11 walks, 100 baserunners in those 81 innings. His stats are similar to Wainwright’s, remembering that Wainwright’s season start was delayed by injury.

Wainwright’s situation is attracting more attention because the expectations for the Cardinals this year were light years greater than those of the Royals.  But neither is having the kind of retirement season they want; neither is providing a veterans’ spark for their teams.

For most of us, stepping away from what we have loved to do during our working lives comes at an advanced age.  It would certainly seem to be easier when you are 65 or 70 or more than to realize you can’t keep up any more and you’re only 40 or 42 or in many cases, even younger.

We focus on Wainwright today because more was expected of his team—and him—this year.

Wainwright is a painful problem for the Cardinals. Each start in a season where every game is growing in importance is a crap shoot now.  Sentimentally, it would be a shame for him to come up short of his personal career goal. But there comes a time when sentiment doesn’t outweigh winning.

This isn’t like an office. Millions of people including tens of thousands in the grandstands are not watching the deterioration of talent in an office.  The personal goal of one player cannot outweigh the necessity of success by an entire team.

It is not beyond possible that Wainwright or Greinke could be a small part of a trade although they won’t bring much in the baseball market this year.

It is not likely to be much comfort to Wainwright, but here are some guys, among many, whose baseball cards we once had or would have gotten if we’d continued collecting who came up short of 200 wins: Trevor Hoffman  197; Claude Osteen 196; Larry Jackson,  David Cone and Dwight Gooden 194.  There also are a bunch of old-timers, some who are in Cooperstown, who didn’t get there.

42 years old.  And you’re too old to play a game you’ve played since you were in single digits. Both Wainwright and Greinke had announced earlier this would be their last years.  Now, perhaps, the lyrics of a popular sing might be making themselves heard, ever so softly in the backs of their minds.”

“Should I stay or should I go?”

And the opposite surely has crossed the mind of management, especially the Cardinals management—“Should he stay or should we let him go?”  Are these roster spots better filled with players of the future rather than shadows of the past?

The poet A. E. Housman wrote many years ago of those who “slip away from fields where glory does not stay,” and recalled, “Early though the laurel grows it withers quicker than the rose.”

The game Wainwright and Greinke are playing this year after their glory has fled and their laurels have withered is one that many fans will think is one game too many. And the Cardinals are running out of time to play with sentiment.

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Okay, now let’s get to the box scores. This is Tuesday, and it is sports day, after all.

(CARDINALS)—The Cardinals split two home games with the Cubs. But they had to go to London to play those games.  The Cardinals are playing .500 ball in their last ten games, a noticeable improvement. They split four during the weekend and went 5-5 in their last ten games, a step up from earlier results. But the ‘Birds were still 32-45 as they returned from London, last in their division, third worst in the league behind the Rockies and the Padres.

(ROYALS)—The Royals have had a relatively successful 10 game run.  Four of their 22 victories have come during that time and they finished the weekend by splitting four with Tampa Bay, the team with the best record in the league. The Royals have failed to win ll straight series.

On to Racing:

(NASCAR)—Ever get hit by a flying chunk of watermelon?  Your correspondent has—a couple of weekends ago when NASCAR visited Worldwide Technology Raceway and driver Clay Chastain, with help from the irrepressible Kenny Wallace smashed a watermelon during a pre-race stage show and threw the pieces into the audience.

One of them hit my shin.  I asked some nearby fans if they wanted to take it and get Chastain to autograph it but nobody was interested so I took it to the nearest trash container.

Chastain, a fourth-generation watermelon farmer, likes to climb on top of his car if he’s won a race and hurl a big green watermelon onto the track, smashing it t the finish line.

He didn’t get the chance at WWTR but he did get the chance Sunday at Nashville when he finished eight-tenths of a second ahead of Martin Truex Jr., who picked up his fourth straight top five finish of the year. It was a “perfect” race for Chastain, who got his third Cup win.  He started from the pole for the first time and led the most laps (99 of the 300) on the 1.33-mile Nashville Fairgrounds track.

Denny Hamlin, Chase Elliott, and Kyle Larson filled the top five slots.

Elliott has to win to get into the chase for his second championship. A victory is his only way in to the playoffs because he has missed seven of the 17 races this year, six because of injury, and one more because of a one-race suspension for an in-race incident with Hamlin.

NASCAR takes to the streets of Chicago for the first time next weekend.  It’s the first time the series has ever run a street race, which is more common in INDYCAR.

(INDYCAR)—INDYCAR competitors hope to chip away at Alex Palou’s 74-point huge championship points lead when they run at Mid-Ohio this weekend, starting the second half of the series season.

(FORMULA1)—The Grand Prix of Austria is next on the F1 schedule.

 

 

 

Expungement  

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We’ve written about this before. This is an unfortunate update

Eddie Gaedel presented major league baseball with a peculiar problem in 1951 when St. Louis Browns owner Bill Veeck sent him to bat in a game against the Detroit Tigers.

You’re probably familiar with the story. Gaedel, who was described by Veeck as “by golly, the best darn midget who ever played big-league ball.”

Eddie was three feet, seven inches tall.  He weighed sixty pounds. His uniform number was 1/8.  Actually it was the uniform of the Browns’ nine-year old batboy, William DeWitt Jr., now the Chairman of the Cardinals.  Detroit pitcher Bob Cain walked him on four straight pitches. Gadel scampered to first base where he was quickly replaced by Jim Delsing.

American League President Will Harridge was not impressed by the stunt. He accused Veeck of making a mockery of baseball. He voided Gaedel’s contract and ordered Gaedel’s appearance from the baseball records.

Veeck argued that striking Gaedel from the record book would have to mean the game was never played because Gaedel had been the leadoff hitter and if there was no leadoff hitter there could be no other hitters either.  Harridge finally allowed Gaedel to have his place in the record books a year later.

The story of Eddie Gaedel comes to mind with word that some mental midgets in Washington want to expunge from the records of the House of Representatives the two impeachments of Donald Trump. Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who has to please people such as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Elise Stefanik (she’s the Republican Conference Chair) because they granted him his tenuous hold on the Speakership, will let their resolution be heard by a House committee that can decide whether to send it to the floor for debate.

Such is the looney world into which our Congress has sunk.

Eddie Gaedel did lead off a major league baseball game regardless of Veeck’s motives (he was quite a promoter in his day and was known for his stunts).  Donald Trump was impeached twice by the House.  Erasing the record does not erase the facts whether you’re three-feet-seven or  you’re six feet-two, whether you’re a paid performer in a major league uniform or whether you’re a (well, we’ll let you form  your own thoughts about the equivalency of Eddie Gaedel and Donald Trump).

The official score cards of that day in 1951 list Gaedel on the Browns’ roster and somewhere in attic trunks might be the unofficial score cards kept by some fans who were witnesses to that day’s events.  The scorecards don’t lie. The news accounts don’t lie.  Will Harridge finally admitted the official records of baseball couldn’t lie, either.

Thousands of pages of the Congressional record have been printed and circulated recording those events although the idea that members can “revise and extend their remarks” for that record make it less officially accurate than baseballs statistics. It is, nonetheless, on printed pages that cannot be recalled from those that have them.

Expunging the impeachments from the House records would mean the Senate was playing some kind of a weird game on February 5, 2020 when it acquitted him of a charge that will not exist (somehow) in the House record, if this airheaded movement is approved by the full House.

The second impeachment has always been questionable.  It happened after Trump had taken his boxes of shirts and shoes and pants and documents to Mar-a-Lago.  The Senate on February 13, 2021, thirteen months after Trump and his boxes went south, voted 57-43 to convict him.  But a two-thirds majority was needed, so Trump was acquitted—allowing him to crow loudly that he had been completely cleared of any wrongdoing in the events of the previous January 6.

And once again, the Senate spent a day dealing with something that the great thinkers in the House now want to declare never officially happened.

One of singer Paul Simon’s greatest songs is “The Boxer.”

It doesn’t refer to our ex-President but the title comes to mind as we have thought of him in this discussion, as does the chorus:

Lie-la-lie
Lie-la-lie-lie-lie-lie-lie
Lie-la-lie
Lie-la-lie-lie-lie-lie-lie, lie-lie-lie-lie-lie
Lie-la-lie-lie-lie-lie-lie
Lie-la-lie
Lie-la-lie-lie-lie-lie-lie, lie-lie-lie-lie-lie

Expungement would be a lie-lie-lie-lie-lie.

Eddie Gaedel is still in the baseball record books.  Donald Trump deserves the same honor in the Congressional Records.

 

Notes From a Quiet—

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Road.

Your traveling correspondent has been on the road for a month, from Cincinnati and Indianapolis to Illinois to Colorado and Texas.

He has not been to Auxvasse.

Auxvasse is the home to 1,001 people.  At least it was in the most recent census.  It has a total area of three-quarters of a square mile.  It’s a few miles north of Kingdom City, the crossroads of Missouri.  You might catch a glimpse of its former small business district as you flash past it on Highway 54.  The town tavern has survived.

It originally was called Clinton City when it was platted in 1873 but changed its name to honor a nearby creek because the postal service was easily confused by the presence of another town in Missouri named Clinton, with no “city” on the end. It has had a post office since 1874. It is the largest populated area in Jackson Township of Callaway County.

Blogger Tom Dryden, who might be the most famous person to come from Auxvasse—because of his blog—notes that the town website refers to the community as “the third largest fourth class city” in the county.  He says I have been pronouncing its name incorrectly, Oh-vawz.  No, it’s “Of auze.”

Dryden wrote a loving tribute to his hometown in his October 23, 2016 entry. I suggest you check him out at TOMDRYDEN.COM.  He has written some other things about the town and its people, too.

Dryden admits the town is so insignificant he cannot convince his car’s GPS system that it exists, which led him to concede in his May 14, 2012 blog entry, “When you’re from Auxvasse, you can’t go home again.”

I can appreciate his love for his town because I grew up in a couple of small towns in Illinois—one of about 1,500 people (Mt. Pulaski) and the other of about 3,300 when we moved there (Sullivan), probably considered big cities when Tom was a kid.

Now I live in a REALLY big city. Jefferson City (43,228 people in the most recent census).  And Auxvasse has been irritating me for decades.

(By the way, we made an interesting discovery on our way back from Albuquerque last weekend.  We drove through Wichita, which has a listed population of 397,552 in the 2020 census.  St. Louis claims 301,578.  Wichita, Kansas is bigger than St. Louis!!.  Sedgewick County can’t hold a candle to St. Louis County, though, so St. Louis is still a bigger metro area)

Tom Dryden’s GPS doesn’t know where Auxvasse is. But he’s wrong. He CAN go home again. The Missouri Department of Transportation makes sure of that. Interstate 70 exit 148 has a big green sign—

Maybe it’s a conversation piece designed to keep drivers bored by hundreds of miles of billboard-ugly, mostly straight, highway alert by trying to figure out (a) how to pronounce that top word and (b) why it is important enough to be on the highway sign.

“Hey, Maude, get out yer Triple-A guidebook and look up Ox-Vassy and see what’s there.”

“It’s not listed, Claude.”

“They why do you suppose Missouri wants you to go there?”

Well, why does it?

Why doesn’t the sign say “Jefferson City?”  It’s only the state capital, you know.  It’s only the place where the department has its headquarters.

Heck, with Kingdom City’s development into almost-Effingham West, why isn’t Kingdom City on the sign?

We are left to ponder whether Auxvasse has the distinction of being the smallest town in Missouri, or in America, to be listed on an Interstate Highway exit ramp sign.

But it just irritates the sock off me that Jefferson City apparently is less important to the department than Auxvasse is.   I will confess, however, that there have been some times when I’m just one more tired and semi-dangerous driver on the road late at night, that seeing that sign has kicked up the mental processes just enough to make it the last 30 miles or so home safely.  That and the Coke I get at the Kingdom City McDonald’s drive-through window.

Congratulations to Auxvasse, though.  Every day, tens of thousands of people go past a sign that says it is more significant than the capital city of the state. If I lived in Auxvasse, I’d be proud of that.

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SPORTS: Second Redbirds surge in the offing?; Royals likely to win 20th game before July; Palou tightens grip on INDYCAR lead; Verstappen again (ho hum) in F1

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By Bob Priddy, Missourinet Contributing Editor

(CARDINALS)—There’s no shortage of questions in the St. Louis Cardinals clubhouse these days.  One of the big ones is who will finish the year in a different uniform and the second one is a follow-up: will possible changes be made soon enough to salvage the season and eke into the playoffs.

The Cardinals finished the calendar week 4-6 after taking the last two from the Mets and claiming a series for the first time in almost a month.  Nolan Arenado refused to let the Cardinals give away the last game of the series in New York with homers at the start of the game and the winning home run in the ninth inning Sunday.

Some good news appeared to be coming with the start of a new week. Lars Nootbar is back with the team after a one-fame rehab in which he went four for five with a pair of homers and four RBI.  He’s been out since May 29 with a back injury, running his total games missed this year to thirty.

His return, along with that of center fielder Dylan Carlson, re-complicates the team’s outfield situation, particularly with Jordan Walker’s impressive return from the minors.

The Cardinals began the new week with a game against the Washington Nationals at 29-43 and picked up their 30th win Monday night, their third straight win. Jack Flaherty pitched an out into the 7th inning, gave up all six of the Nationals runs and was down 5-0 at one time. But Brendan Donovan and Paul Goldschmidt hit home runs back-to-back in the fifth inning to give the Cardinals a lead in a game they eventually won 8-6.

(NO THANKS)—Cardinals fans seem to be taking David Freese’s rejection of his election to the team’s Hall of Fame well and the team says he’s always welcome at the stadium anyway.  Freese, who always will be a hero to Cardinals fans for his solid career in St. Louis and his heroics in the 2011 World Series says he has thought long and hard about the selection before deciding his off-the-field character more than offset his on-field accomplishments and therefore leaves him unworthy of the honor.

(ROYALS)—The Kansas City Royals ended a 10-game losing streak during the weekend and now stand only one win away from 20 victories for the season.

The victory Saturday had its historic moment when the Royals stunned the Angels by coming from six runs back to win the game on a walk-off hit by rookie Samad Taylor.  Taylor became only the second player in team history to have a walk-off hit in his first major league game.  Kevin Seitzer was the first, in 1986.

The 10-9 win on Saturday ended a 178-game streak in which the Royals lost when they were trailing by at least six runs in the 7th inning or later.

It was business as usual on Sunday, however, when the Angels got back-to-back homers on back-to-back pitches from Shoehei Ohtani and Mike Trout in the fifth inning leading to a 5-2 Angels win.

“Third time through the order got me,” said Royals starter Zack Greinke, who stated the obvious after the game: “I’ve got to figure out how to go deeper and get guys out the last time through.”

The Royals and the A’s tie as the worst teams in Major League Baseball with 19 wins.  The Philadelphia-Kansas City-Oakland-soon-to-be Las Vegas Athletics are THE worst, though, because they’ve lost three more games than the Royals.

The Royals had a 4-1 lead on the Tigers going into the 7th, but the Tigers ripped them for five runs and won the game 6-3, dropping the Royals to 19-52.

Now, to get away from stick-and-ball stuff:

(INDYCAR)—Alex Palou is threatening to run away with the INDYCAR championship this year.

His victory at Road America during the weekend is second in a row and his third in the last four races.  His only non-win in that string was the Indianapolis 500 where he started from the poll but finished fourth.  His average finish in the last seven races is 2.85 and his 74-point lead is the biggest margin for a points leader in the series since Scott Dixon was 74 up on Josef Newgarden after ten races in 2020.

The Road America race marked the halfway point in the INDYCAR season. Eight more races are left.

Palou won his first championship two years ago, in the final race.  But his run this year threatens to end a 17-year streak in which the INDYCAR championship has been decided in the final race of the season.

Palou isn’t interested in racing to protect his points lead. “We’re going to focus on scoring wins because that’s the way we can score more points. That’s the best way.”  But the last eight races of the year are races in which he has done well in the past including Mid-Ohio, INDYCAR’s next venue. He’s finished on the podium there in the last two races.

Palou seized the lead late in the race at Road America (which is in Wisconsin) as Colton Herta had to ration his fuel to make it to the end of what was a furious race that featured 444 on-track passes, 386 of them for position.  INDYCAR says 110 of the passes were among drivers in the top ten and 32 happened within the top five.

(FORMULA 1)—The Formula 1 race in Montreal was, by contrast to the INDYCAR event, a snoozer.   Max Verstappen led every lap to give Red Bull its 100th F1 victory.  Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton contended themselves with getting on the podium.

How about the only American team running in Formula 1?

Haas Racing has never threatened to be a top-tier team and this year is no different. Haas drivers have only eight points this year and the team ranks eighth out of ten teams competing.  Driver Niko Hulkenberg has six of those points, good for 13th in the driver standings (Verstappen has 195 and a 69-point lead on his closest competitor). Kevin Magnusson has the other two points and sits 18th out of 20 drivers.

(Photo Credits:  Rick Gevers, Bob Priddy)