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Sports; Thoughts on Pitchers’ Arms and a Lead Foot; Some Playoff Talk, Etc.

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By Bob Priddy, Missourinet Contributing Editor

(Arms)—-The human body was not designed to throw a baseball 100 mph, or throw a baseball overhand at all. And an awful lot of pitchers have scars on shoulders and elbows to prove it.

Here is what you will never see in baseball;  A pitcher who throws 25 innings in four games in two days, gives up only two earned runs, on only fifteen hits, and strikes out 24 batters.

Oh—and throws 364 pitches, as Laurin Krings did last weekend.

The human arm swings back and forth from the shoulder, and Laurin Krings demonstrated the body’s natural design for throwing things as she led the Missouri women’s softball team back through the loser’s bracket of the NCAA regional tournament. Missouri surprisingly lost its first game of the tournament, to Omaha, and then had to win four straight, including two against Omaha to advance to the super regional.

Krings threw two games on Saturday and two more on Sunday, including the final game that went into extra innings before the Tigers scored a run in the ninth to move on, 1-0.

The Super Regional is a best-of-three series between Missouri, the seventh seed and tenth-seed Duke.  The first game is Friday.  The second game is Saturday. A third game, if needed, will be Sunday. ESPN2 is broadcasting the games.

(Playoff Bound)—Post-season play is growing near for the first season of the United Football League and the St. Louis Battlehawks have locked down their place.  Their come-from-behind 26-21 win over the D. C. Defenders last weekend guarantees they’ll play for the XFL Conference championship on June 9.

The Defenders had taken a 21-20 lead into the closing minutes but the Battlehawks road the hands and legs of running back Wayne Gallman to the winning TD with two minutes left.  Gallman accounted for all of the 44 yards in the closing drive, with six rushing yards and a 38-yard reception, the longest play from scrimmage by either team all afternoon. He got the game-winning touchdown from one yard out, finishing with a team-leading 80 yards rushing.

The Battlehawks called on backup quarterback Manny Wilkins because starter A. J. McCarron is still recovering from the ankle injury suffered against Birmingham the week earlier.

Wilkins had not started a game since 2018 when he was playing for Arizona State.  He said afterward he felt “super comfortable” with the start. He passed for 126 yards and scrambled for 79 more yards on a dozen carries.

Next up for the Battlehawks: The Arlington Renegades, next Saturday morning, our time, in Arlington, Texas.  Its their last road game. They’ll finish up at home the next weekend and then move to the playoffs.  St. Louis is 6-2, the same record as the San Antonio Brahmas, their likely opponent in the divisional championship game.  St. Louis beat San Antonio earlier in the season. The Arlington Renegades are 1-8, last in the division.

The ‘Hawks are likely to be playing the Brahmas two weeks in a row.  They finish the regular season against them at home, then will have to beat them in the championship game to go to the UFL championship game, which will be played in the St. Louis Dome.

(BASEBALL)—Familiar story for the week.  The Royals continue to play steady, hopeful, baseball.  The Cardinals show some flashes but pessimism is traveling with them as they head for June.

(THE LOU)—If you can’t play well, you might at least LOOK good.

The Cardinals will become the latest major league team to unveil their “City Connect” uniforms next Friday against the Cubs.  So what’s a “city connect” uniform?

It’s a promotional gimmick that Nike is doing for MLB teams—uniforms distinctly different from the usual home outfits. They are “designed to reflect cultural aspects of each team’s home city, says one source we checked. The Cardinals are one of the last to show their cultural look. (By seasons end only two teams will no have donned these new duds—the Yankees, who just don’t do that kind of thing, y’know, and the Oakland Athletics, whose “cultural aspects” are in limbo because they’re moving from Oakland to Las Vegas.

Here’s the hottest new item in the team store, and undoubtedly coming to a shopping mall near you that sells sports-themed goodies:

This will be only the second time in the Cardinals’ 142-year history that they have worn red jerseys in a regular season game. The only other time was on August 28, 1999 when they wore red jerseys for their “Shirts Off Their Backs” promotion.  The ‘Birds will wear the special jerseys a dozen times this season.

The phrase “The Lou” refers, of course, to the city but it also is a reference to hometown rapper Nelly, who uses the phrase in talking about his home town. The caps are supposed to be reminiscent of the way the team looked in 1921.

The Cardinals started this week with a 6-3 win against the Orioles last night. Michael Siani’s first major league home run drove in the three runs that dictated the outcome.  Sonny Gray had a no-hitter into the sixth inning and ran his record to 6-2

Baltimore went into the game 29-15; the Cardinals went in at 20-26, no longer in the basement of the NL Central despite splitting their last ten games. Cincinnati had gone 3-7 during that span, falling a game and a half behind St. Louis.

The Redbirds have won six of their last eight after a seven-game losing streak. But they have been at .500 for only one day this season and no longer go into games with the fans’ expectation that they will win it.

(ROYALS)—Somehow, we missed the big unveil of the Royals’ new duds a year ago:

These outfits are loaded with cultural links to Kansas City.  The caps and the logo on the left side of the jersey represents the city’s famous fountains.  The two-tone blue of the shirts represent the traditional Royals colors as well as a salute to previous Kansas City teams—the Athletics, Monarchs, Blues, Bluestockings, and Packers, all of which have worn the darker blue. The “R” with the crown and the striping on the right sleeve recalls the team’s uniforms of the 80s. Not visible in the picture is “Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey,” sewn into the collar, honoring the team victory song written by—

Paul McCartney!!

The letter and number scripts also reflect the art deco architectural style that is seen in many downtown Kansas City buildings.

As for the guys who wear the uniforms, whatever the design, they continue to have a gratifying season with a turnaround from recent years that some fans have trouble grasping.  USA Today, which publishes weekly power rankings, has become a believer.

The newspapers Gabe Lacques writes that the Royals are up to number eight among all major league teams, their highest since the World Series of 2015. “Sure, things can still go sideways. But with Salvador Perez and Bobby Witt Jr. producing like MVPs, Seth Lugo pitching like a Cy Young winner and a young lineup in full bloom, the Royals are in the high-rent district until further notice. They’ve earned that much.”

The Royals picked up their 30th win of the year last night. The Royals scored six in the sixth and beat the Tigers 6-3.

Now, for things that travel faster than a fastball—

(INDYCAR)—In fact, the speeds are astonishing at Indianapolis again this year.

The field is set for next Sunday’s 108th running of the Indianapolis 500.

And there is a ton of stories, as there always is with this race.

Every year, speed is the number one story in the lead-up to the Indianapolis 500. This year’s field

Penske Racing, after dealing with a “scandal” that led to the suspension of three key officials for this race, the forfeiture of Josef Newgarden’s season-opening win and the loss of standings points for the other two team drivers, has rebounded with powerful performances since—including seizing the top three starting positions for the 500 next Sunday.

Scott McLaughlin, driving a car sponsor/color combination made famous by four-time winner Rick Mears, Johnny Rutherford, Al Unser Sr., and Helio Castroneves, will start on the pole—the inside of the first row—with the fastest pole qualification run in Speedway history. He turned four laps with an average of 234.220 mph to edge 2018 winner Will Power and last year’s winner, Josef Newgarden, giving Penske all three starting positions for the second time in company history.

These three constitute the second-fastest front row in race history.  Last year’s first row averaged 234.181 mph. The three drivers on this year’s front row could manage “only” 233.981.

(The fastest four-lap qualifying run in Speedway history still belongs to Arie Luyendyk, who ran 236.986 in 1996 with each lap faster than the previous one. The last one was at 237.948, covering the 2 ½ mile squared oval in less than 38 seconds. But because Luyendyk qualified on the second day instead of the first, he could not start from pole.  His pole-winning run was called by the great Tom Carnegie, whose dramatic voice on the Speedway’s public address system was a Speedway legend for decade—Here it is: Bing Videos)

The fastest single lap in Speedway history was run by Luyendyk in practice for the 1996 race. The unofficial speed record is for a lap of 239.620.

While the Penske trio will lead the field to the green flag, a lot of eyes will be on the car starting in the middle of the second row.  Kyle Larson, whose career has been on dirt tracks and in NASCAR’s big tracks, has been something to watch as he climbed into a completely different kind of car for the first time.  He quickly adapted and was a factor on the speed charts from day one. Larson recorded the fastest qualifying lap by a rookie, 233.353.  The only rookie in Speedway history with a faster four-lap average is Tony Stewart who ran the ten miles at 233.100 in 1996.  Larson’s average speed was 232.846.

All of those speeds were recorded with only the qualifying driver on the track.  On race day there will be 33 of them, 32 of which qualified at more than 230 mph. Twenty-eight of them are within three miles-per-hour of McLaughlin’s pole speed.

The average qualifying speed of all 22 cars is 231.943, slightly slower than last year’s record field speed of 232.184.

The card won’t run that fast during the race; the fastest race lap ever recorded was by Santino Ferrucci two years ago, more than 227.3 mph.

Simple recitation of these numbers cannot convey what it is like to watch these cars and drivers in person, in real time running 230 mph on a track with a mere nine degrees of banking in the corners. When Ray Harroun won the first 500 in 1911, he averaged a little bit less than 75 mph.  The record speed for the entire race is 190.7 mph, by Helio Castroneves in 2021 when he won his fourth 500.

The track architecture is unchanged from 1911. Today’s drivers cover the same distance each lap, go through four corners with no more banking than Harroun had.

Nothing is guaranteed at this track.  Eight drivers with 12 combined victories will start the race, including two-time winner Takuma Sato, who goes off tenth, and four-time winner Helio Castroneves, who starts 20th. 

Former winner Scott Dixon could no better than 21st starting position, outside of the seventh row, and the 2022 winner, Marcus Ericsson—who finished second last year—struggled to even make the race this year and got into the field in the last hour of qualifying.

(NASCAR)—The All-Star race schedule was shortened to one night at North Wilkesboro because of rain that washed out the heat races on Friday night.  Joey Logano won the million dollar top prize in the Saturday race.

NASCAR’s longest race is Sunday night in Charlotte—600 miles.  Kyle Larson plans to finish the 500 in Indianapolis and get to Charlotte in time for the 600.

(FORMULA 1)—Max Verstappen had to work hard to get this one.  Lando Norris, driving for the resuscitated McLaren team, challenged him at the Imola Grand Prix and finished only seven-tenths of a second back.

Verstappen started from pole for the eighth straight race, which ties a record and won for the fifth time in seven races this year.

(Photo Credits: MU Athletic Department, Cardinals, Royals, Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Rick Gevers)

Miserable, Just Miserable

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The Missouri Constitution establishes a definite date each year for adjournment of the Missouri General Assembly.  This was one of those years when adjournment couldn’t happen soon enough.

This miserable session will be remembered as the session that a handful of Republican senators calling themselves the Freedom Caucus ran into the ground because a majority of their party didn’t buy their demands.  They accused the majority of their majority party of being RINOS, a nickname our former president likes to apply to any Republican who does not love him. There is considerable reason to consider far-out clusters such as this as the real Republicans in Name Only.

This will be remembered as the Session of the Filibuster.  The Freedom Caucus kicked off the session with a lengthy discussion of Senate procedure, filibustered for eleven hours trying to force colleagues to act quickly on bills making it harder for citizens to create laws through initiative petition. That led President Pro Team Caleb Rowden to strip four members of the Freedom Caucus of their committee chairmanships and (this seemed to be the most terrible punishment to some of them) took away their parking spaces in the Capitol basement.  Senators Bill Eigel, the ringleader of the caucus, Rick Brattin, Denny Hoskins and Andrew Koenig lost their prestigious positions, after which Eigel stopped action in the Senate for four more hours so he could question several Senators who seemed to support Rowden’s action.

Rowden calculated in late January that the Senate had been in floor session for 17 hours and 52 minutes in 2024. He said the Freedom Caucus had filibustered “things of no consequence whatsoever relative to a piece of policy” for 16 hours and 45 minutes of that time.

And it only got worse. But in the end, the filibuster bit the Freedom Caucus—uh—in the end.

As the session reached May and the crucial last couple of weeks, including the week in which the state budget had to be approved, the caucus stopped things cold for 41 hours—believed to be the longest filibuster in Missouri legislative history—because its priorities were not THE priority of Senate leadership.

But that filibuster record was to be broken in the final week when Democrats and some Republicans fed up with the Freedom Caucus’s behavior got in the way of final approval of the resolution changing the way the state constitution can be changed. Those who had lived by the filibuster died by the filibuster.

The final filibuster lasted FIFTY hours and change. It succeeded where the Freedom Caucus belligerency failed. The Freedom Caucus’ bull-in-a-china shop philosophy of government was repudiated by a Senate that seemed to, in this case at least, rediscovered bipartisanship. But the damage done by this group could not be reversed.

The 2024 legislative session was the least productive in modern memory—or even ancient memory, for that matter.  Only 28 non-budget bills were passed.

That beats the record of 31 in the 2020 session.  But remember, that was the Pandemic Session when the legislature did not meet for several days then operated on a limited basis for several other days.

Eigel disavowed responsibility for that miserable record.  “A lot of bad things that didn’t happen this session didn’t happen because of the people standing behind me,” he said in a post-session Freedom Caucus press conference. His words probably didn’t carry any water with Senators and Representatives who had worked hard and conscientiously on bills that would have done GOOD things only to see them disappear into the ongoing mud fight in the Senate led by Eigel and his band.

Eigel has dreams of becoming Governor.  Denny Hoskins thinks he’d be a peachy Secretary of State. Andrew Koenig thinks being State Treasurer would be wonderful. Rick Brattin just hopes to get elected to another term in the Senate.

There are some folks who have watched them this year who hope they still don’t have parking places in Jefferson City in 2025.

The 50-hour filibuster deserves a closer look. We’ve taken that look to establish the exact length of it so that future observers will know when they have witnessed an even more regrettable example.

Incidentally, it is believed the longest filibuster by one person in Missouri history was Senator Matt Bartle’s futile effort to block some gubernatorial appointments in 2007. He held the floor for seventeen hours.

Creating News Deserts 

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A Facebook comment from Moberly noted last week: “The Moberly Monitor-Index (once a daily, now a weekly) made a brief reference to the situation on its Facebook account today as well, but I didn’t see anything on its website. Aside from any TV coverage from Columbia, that’s going to be the only local news outlet henceforth.”

The comment was about Alpha Media’s layoffs of all on-air employees at radio stations in Moberly, turning the station into just another satellite-provided bunch of programs with no local relevance.

The comment points to another alarming trend—the death of the local newspaper.

Small and medium-market newspapers have been swallowed up by Gatehouse (or as a friend of mine from one of those newspapers calls it, “Guthouse”) Media, including the Gannett chain.  Gatehouse now uses that name—Gannett, and other newspaper conglomerates.

The practice has been to buy small or medium market newspapers, hollow out the staffs, turn dailies into weeklies and weeklies into digital products as much as possible, again to the detriment of the local markets but to the great financial benefit of the corporation.

With gutted local newspapers and gutted local radio stations, we are seeing more and more news deserts being created.

At a time when we as a nation and we as a state desperately need more eyes on newsmakers and more diverse voices in our social dialogue—and more attention to local issues—we are getting less and what we are getting shows no industrial responsibility to giving consumers diverse viewpoints.

The corporate monopolization of our mass media is one of the greatest threats our country faces but one that gets little public attention.

More than a century ago this nation was crippled by the power of trusts, whether it was steel or petroleum or transportation trusts (even baking powder, which triggered Missouri’s biggest political scandal early in the last century) that limited competition  and put acquisition of corporate wealth above public interest, convenience, and necessity in so many parts of American life.

We are there again and media control is one of the most dangerous of all of those trusts.  Dwindling sources of information and increasing control of the remaining sources increases our national weakness.

An ignorant nation cannot be a free nation. And Alpha and Gannett/Gatehouse and their ilk are among the corporations that are controlling more and more of our information sources and reducing local service, replacing it with national voices that probably could not point to a map and show you where Festus, Moberly, Farmington, Lebanon or Bethany Missouri are.

Some degree of re-regulation of broadcasting is warranted requiring meeting a certain level of local responsibility. Some degree of trust-busting to provide an opportunity for more independence of opinion in our media is increasingly necessary.

While government can play a role—a carefully modulated role—in these ares is not beyond consideration, the ultimate responsibility for demanding greater diversity in media voces lies with the listeners, readers, and viewers of our electronic communications.

Letters to the FCC and to congressional delegations from places like these communities can carry some weight in Washington.  Boycotts from local advertisers, many of whom already rely on direct-mail or independent internet messaging, can carry weight with corporate broadcasting owners.

Newspaper corporations have one important thing that broadcasters do not have—the First Amendment. Government control of newspapers, as the FCC exerts licensing control over broadcasters, cannot exist and should not exist.

How anti-trust laws could be applied to newspaper conglomerates will be a difficult conversation, even more difficult than the conversations about internet abuses, although similar when the First Amendment enters the discussion.

Nonetheless, all of us are victims of those who control increasing percentages of our media outlets and see no responsibility for diversity of thought and opinion or of local involvement. We are victims only so long as we allow ourselves to be victims, only so long as we refuse to seek out challenges to our own ideas.

Why should we fear that?  Why should we let others tell us what to think and regard those who think differently as enemies?

The trusts were broken when they became so oppressive that the public forced governments to act.

We have reached that point now in our information industry. And we should not accept it.

Sports: Mizzou Chases a World Series Win; Cardinals get a win; Battlehawks Outbattled; and One Guy’s May 

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By Bob Priddy, Missourinet Contributing Editor

(MIZ)—The University of Missouri softball team enters the NCAA post-season tournament as the overall seventh seed, earning a home field regional tournament slot. They’ll play thefourth-seeded University of Omaha Friday afternoon in Columbia.

Omaha is 41-13.  The Lady Tigers are 43-15 after losing the SEC championship to Florida.  Indiana, the number two seed, and Washington, seeded third, also will be playing in Columbia. It’s a double-elimination tournament.

If Missouri wins it will be the host team in the super regional round, facing the winner of the Durham Regional that includes South Carolina, Morgan State, Utah, and Duke, the tenth seed. (ZOU)

(BASEBALL)—A bad week for the Cardinals and what is becoming a typical week for the Royals.

(ROYALS)—The off-season moves by the Kansas City Royals continue to make the front office appear to be brilliant strategists and buyers as the season reaches the one-fourth mark.   The Royals finished their week eight games above .500 and only one-half game out of first place thanks to a sparkling 12-strikeout performance against the Angels on Mother’s Day by Seth Lugo.  Lugo lasted eight innings and gave up one earned run in a 4-2 Royals win. Seventy-seven of his 112 pitches were strikes as he kept the Angels off the scoreboard until the sixth inning.

Manager Matt Quatraro says getting a dozen strikeouts on only 112 pitchers was “really remarkable.”

His performance has made him the American League ERA leader at 1.66.

(CARDINALS)—If the Royals’ front office seems brilliant for its offseason moves, the Cardinals front office continues to draw scornful looks from fans and media observers for what it did.  And it appears President of Baseball Operations John Mozeliak knows he might be on even less firm ground that manager Oli Marmol. During an interview Sunday on the Cardinals’ flagship radion station, KMOX, Mozeliak said he understood fans are not happy with him or with Marmol. “I think we have to just keep trying to go back, trying to get this to work….We understand that if it doesn’t, people are going to be held accountable and ultimately that starts with me.”

A few hours later, the Cardinals finally beat the Brewers on Mother’s Day to close out the week eight games UNDER .500.  Ryan Helsley, who hadn’t pitched in eight days, got the save in a 4-3 Redbird win.  That ended an eight-game losing streak stretching to last year against the Brewers.

Paul Goldschmidt had a pair of hits, including a home run, to break a 1-for-34 streak.

Cardinals’ starter Miles Mikolas staggered through the first inning, giving up all three Brewers runs on 42 pitches, before settling down and needing only 53 more pitches to shut down Milwaukee through the next five innings.

The Cardinals have won only two of their last ten games.

0-0-0

The ‘Birds got some discouraging news about Willson Contreras’ broken arm during the weekend. It had been thought he’d be gone for about eight weeks but the new prognosis is for him to be missing for about ten.

He was the team’s leading hitter, with a .280 batting average when he went out. Backup Ivan Herrera is hitting .263.

(Battlehawks)—The St. Louis Battlehawks and the Birmingham Stallions went into their weekend game with combined records of 11-1, the Stallions having the unblemished record.

And they still do—but it was a nail-biter.

St. Louis got a team-record 61-yard field goal from Andrew Smyzt to stay within three of the Stallions at the half, and took a 20-17 lead into the fourth quarter—the first time all season Birmingham had trailed going into the last quarter. But Birminghan got the final score on a touchdown pass from Adrian Martinez to Kevin Austin Jr., with 5:23 left, the sixth lead change of the game.

The ‘Hawks, down 30-26, got the ball back on a blocked punt with 40 seconds left, 47 yards from the end zone. But they couldn’t finish a final drive and left for home with a 5-2 record, tied with the San Antonio Brahmas for the lead in the XFL Division. St. Louis, however, has a tie-breaker win in San Antonio.

Quarterback A. J. McCarron hobbled to the sidelines with an ankle injury late in the fourth quarter after taking a low and late hit. He returned to finish the game but was limping perceptibly.  Coach Anthony Becht told reporters yesterday that he doesn’t know yet if McCarron can play next weekend against the D. C. Defenders. He says McCarron will be evaluated day-to-day.

Speeding right along—

(IndyCar)—It’s May and that means racing at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

Practice begins today for the Indianapolis 500 with 34 cars competing for the 33 starting spots in the race Memorial Day Weekend. Qualifying is set for next weekend.

But first, there was the traditional May-opening race on the road course.

Indianapolis, IN – during the INDYCAR Sonsio Grand Prix at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. (Photo by Joe Skibinski | IMS Photo)

Defending series champion Alex Palou started from the pole and raced to a 6.6-second win ahead of Will Power, going back-to-back in the May road course race.  But the race was far more intense than that, with eight drivers seeing the lead and fourteen lead changes—including the first lap when Christian Lundgaard, who started third, grabbed the lead from Palou early on the first lap.

Lundgard led 35 of the first 42 laps but was third at the end. Palou led the last 23 laps. Lundgard was third, ahead of Scott Dixon and Marcus Armstrong.

The win puts Palou into the points lead again, up twelve on Power who has three second-place finishes in four races this year.

It was a solid day for Chip Ganassi racing, whose cars finished first, fourth and fifth. Palou’s win is the third straight for Ganassi on the Indianapolis road course. Scott Dixon won the fall race last year.

Power had the best finish of the three Penske team drivers. Scott McLaughlin finished sixth after starting thirteenth and Josef Newgarden, who started fourth, fell back to seventeenth at the end.  Penske’s teams were short some personnel who have been suspended for the month’s races because of the push-to-pass controversy at St. Petersburg.

Colton Herta, who started the race as the points leader, had a difficult day, starting 24th because he ran out of gas while qualifying and then being bumped off the track by teammate Marcus Ericsson early in the race, dropped to fourth in the standings although he rallied back to seventh. Ericsson wound up sixteenth.

(Doing the Double)—The most closely watched driver in today’s two practice sessions (weather permitting) will be Kyle Larson, who will try to coordinate qualifying at Indianapolis next Saturday with the NASCAR All-Star Race that night at North Wilkesboro, North Carolina.

Larson hopes to run the full 500 and then fly to Charlotte for NASCAR’s annual Memorial Day 600 mile race that night.

Friday is the first day he’ll be challenged to wear two hats, or helmets.  IndyCar practice is scheduled for noon-6 p.m. Practice in Noth Wilkesboro for the All-Star Race is scheduled from 4-4:50 p.m. with qualifying going from 5:50-7 p.m. His team has lined up newly-retired Kevin Harvick to practice and qualify his car Friday night, if needed.

If Larson and his IndyCar team are satisfied on Friday with the way he’s running, he could leave Indianapois early enough to get to North Carolina.

Saturday is more complicated by the qualifying procedures at Indianapolis. Qualifying on Saturday starts at 11 a.m. and goes to 5:50 p.m.  Drivers can try to improve their starting position with additional qualifying runs. At some point, Larson and his team will have to decide when he will or or if he will go to North Wilkesboro for qualifying there.

Sunday will be another challenge.  If Larson is one of the twelve fastest qualifiers, he’ll be part of a shootout scheduled for 3:05-4:05 Sunday.  If he is one of the six fastest drivers in that contest, he’ll be part of a second shootout from 5:25-5:55 to determine who will start from the pole and the starting positions for the first two rows on race day.

The NASCAR All-Star Race starts at 8 p.m.  He should be able to make the start even if he’s part of the fast six shootout. Flight time, Indianapolis to North Wilkesboro is about an hour.

Then there’s race day.

(All of these times are Eastern Daylight Savings times, by the way.)

Hendrick Motorspots, his NASCAR team, has made it clear that Larson’s top priority on Memorial Day Sunday is the Charlotte 600-mile race that night.

If the Indianapolis 500 starts on time and has no serious interruptions, it should be over in plenty of time for Larson to make it to Charlotte for the 6 p.m. start of the NASCAR race.

But if the 500 start is delayed or if the race is interrupted by weather or on-track events that endanger his ability to start the race in Charlotte, he’ll park his McLaren car in Indianapolis and head east. He told reporters last weekend he’s not sure who will make the call but at a certain point, “I have to leave because the 600 is the priority and chasing another championship is the priority.”

Recently retired IndyCar driver Tony Kanaan is a standby driver for the 500 but he’ll only drive the McLaren entry if the start of the race is delayed long enough that Larson has to leave for Charlotte.

Kanaan cannot replace Larson in the car once the race has begun. IndyCar rules prohibit relief drivers. If Larson has to leave for Charlotte while the 500 is still underway, the car will be parked and he will be scored in the standings on the basis of the number of laps he ran.

The hope, of course, is that those race-day contingencies don’t need to be used and Kyle Larson will become the fifth driver to compete in both of those major races on th same day.  John Andretti was the first to try, in 1997.  Tony Stewart did it twice, 1999 and 2001. Robby Gordon tried The Double in 2002 and the next year, and Kurt Busch did it in 2014.

Nobody has won either of the races the year they did the double.  Tony Stewart was 9th in the 500 and 4th in the 500 in 1999 then was sixth in the 500 and third in the 600 in 2001; Kurt Busch was sixth in both races in 2014.

(NASCAR)—Brad Keselowski’s long dry spell is over.

Keselewski finally picked up his 36th NASCAR Cup victory at Darlington after 110 races without seeing victory lane. The win is the first for a Ford this year and his first win as a part-owner of Roush-Fenway-Keselowski Racing.

The race’s intensity, which would spill over into the pits after the checkered flag, picked up as Keselowsky, pole-winner Tyler Reddick, and Chris Buescher fought for the win during the last thirty laps.

Keselowski and Reddick raced each other door-to-door after the final restart on the 261st lap of the 293 lap race. Their heated battle allowed Buescher to get past both of them three laps later, shortly before Reddick was able to get ahead of Keselowski and start chasing down Buescher.

With nine laps left Reddick tried to go inside of Buescher but couldn’t hold his car low and took Buescher with him into the wall as he slid up the track.

That left the door open for Keselowski, who held off Ty Gibbs by 1.2 seconds at the end.

While Keselowski was celebrating on the track, Buescher was unloading on Reddick in the pits. “We got wrecked. That one’s clear as day. Don’t need any cameras to tell us,” he told Reddick. Reddick’s move, he said, “is just something you know isn’t going to work.”

Reddick readily admitted he fouled up. ““I I made a really aggressive move and was hoping I was going to clear him. When I realized I wasn’t going to, I tried to check up to not slide up into him, but, yeah, I wish I wouldn’t have done that. I completely understand why he is that mad. He did nothing wrong…Just trying to win the race, and to take myself out—that’s one thing—I can live with that, but just disappointed it played out the way that it did, and I took him out of the race as well.”

While one streak ended, another continued.  Denny Hamlin led one lap, his seventeenth race in a row in which he has led at least once.

(Photo Credits: MU; Joe Skibinski-IMS, Bob Priddy)

 

 

Guillotines for Fun and Profit

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Alpha Media owns more than 200 radio stations across the country.  Its recruiting web page is loaded with corporate-speak buzzwords about “having a passion for great radio” and a “highly-functioning, best-of-class team on all levels” that goes about “building strong relationships in our local communities.”

“If you are looking for an environment where management has a passion for our business; in working hard to provide the best possible live and local radio in the industry; and in having fun, then Alpha Media is for you,” it says.

You will excuse a lot of people in Moberly, Festus, Lebanon and the Farmington/Park Hills areas if they gag on those words. They’ve been stabbed in the back by the owner of their legacy radio stations.

Alpha Media assassinated local radio in those communities last week, laid off—with no notice—entire on-air staffs including some folks who had been everybody’s neighbors for decades.

In place of the voices who talked about local things including local sports, weather, and events, listeners of radio stations in those markets will be hearing syndicated programs from Alpha. Unfortunately, this kind of thing is not new.

Local radio has been dying by self-inflicted corporate wounds for a long time.

Your loyal observer, who believed throughout his professional career and continues to believe in the value of local radio, is astonished by the total hypocrisy of Alpha Media claiming it is “working hard to provide the best possible live and local radio in the industry and having fun.”

That’s precisely what these stations have been providing for decades.

Having fun?

If you think running a guillotine is lots of yucks, you’d probably be in total agreement with Alpha’s actions in these three communities. .

These radio stations were once owned by a man named Jerrell Shepherd, a small market radio entrepreneur who believed radio stations should not just be IN communities, they should be OF communities. The idea that grandpa or grandma might hear their grandchildren’s names mentioned during broadcasts of local high school sports events; the idea that the new president of the Lions Club would talk about an upcoming peanut sale fund-raising event; the county fair livestock auction; the hospital auxiliary ice cream social; Sunday morning church services; what the city council or school board did last night; that people might instantly go to their local radio station when bad weather approaches or has arrived—street closings, lunches at the schools or the senior center, obituaries—-are immaterial.  But those were and are part of being a locally responsible corporate citizen, especially in markets this size.

But that was then; this is now. The Hell with being a locally responsible corporate citizen.

The big-growth media companies, more interested in bottom lines than community responsibility and identity, only want to make money. And that’s why the familiar voices went to work one day last week and were told they would no longer have a job at the end of their shifts.

The “best possible live and local radio in the industry” became a lie that day in those towns.  And the definition of “having fun” became gallows humor.

Reporters from various central Missouri media who contacted Alpha to get an explanation have received nothing back.  A full-page ad in the local newspapers explaining, without the corporate doublespeak, why ditching true local radio is justified would be a courteous thing for Alpha to do. But don’t count on it.

There is no doubt that local newspapers and local radio stations have faced some struggles as more business is done through the internet.  And the issue with some businesses is not that they don’t make a profit—they just don’t make a big enough profit.

Employees reduce profits in all kinds of businesses which is why all kinds of businesses are finding ways to dump workers (Notice how few people at McDonald’s take orders at the cash registers lately?).  It would be nice if Alpha explained that to the people in these towns who no longer have a radio station they cared about because it cared about them.

Satellites and the internet allow for cutting the overhead of a radio station by allowing layoffs of as many of those dollar-consuming staff members as possible, replaced by voices of strangers from who-knows-where and who are unlikely to ever set foot in places like Moberly, Festus, Lebanon, or Farmington.

Broadcasting used to be regulated by the Federal Communications Commission which required broadcasters to operate “in the public interest, convenience, and necessity.”  But the industry back de-regulation in the Reagan years and got it.

I was part of a national professional organization that supported de-regulation because we thought some regulations stifled public discussion of important issues more than it promoted it.

We supported it because it required stations to meet certain standards of public service that really were hollow standards.  We believed that serving the public did not mean government dictating, in some instances, what had to be said before a counter argument could be aired.

We were wrong.

We never anticipated the homogenization of broadcasting that comes with owning hundreds of stations, with the death of local programming thanks to satellite-delivered syndicated shows—Rush Limbaugh being the first of the great influencers, a man who is considered the savior of AM Radio.

But now, we are faced with asking, “Saved from what?”

Radio began to lose its soul when communities became markets; when stations became properties, and when staffs became overhead expenses.

Part of the answer to “saved from what?” was delivered last week in Moberly, Farmington, Lebanon, and Festus.

Alpha Media is advertising for new employees at the Missouri stations it has hollowed out. The openings listed on the company web page say something about how it will provide “the best possible live and local radio in the industry.”  The company wants a business office part-timer and a part-time board operator/production assistant and a business office/sales assistance person. They want an Integrated Marketing Consultant (Sales) for their stations in Bethany and Moberly and on-air programmer/board operators in Farmington and Festus.

Local news people? Local sports people?  Local talk show hosts?  Those are the people who are “live and local.” The company isn’t looking for any of them.  Board operators are the ones who throw a switch in the studio to bring in a syndicated show off the satellite or internet.  Production assistant?  Well somebody has to record or produce commercials—if sponsors want to buy them now.

What has happened in these markets and is happening in broadcasting generally also is happening in the newspaper industry. We’ll look at that on Wednesday.

If Our History Were Written West to East 

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Ignorance of history is helping fuel the controversial White Christian Nationalism movement. There are plenty of people in our political world who prefer to keep things that way.

To base our understanding of our nation’s history on Jamestown, Plymouth, Pilgrims and Puritans and interpretations of their reasons for coming here—and the reasons behind more than a century of explorations before they arrived—is a grave mistake. It shortchanges our future as a nation and as a nation’s people.

One of the best cases for understanding our history differently is in a letter written by our great poet Walt Whitman after he had been invited to compose a poem to celebrate the 333rd anniversary of the settlement of Santa Fe, New Mexico.  It is dated July 20, 1883. It is critical of those who think our history began on the rocky shores of Massachusetts and Virginia.  The invitation to deliver the poem arrived too late, he wrote, so he had to decline. “But I will say a few words off-hand.”

We Americans have yet to really learn our own antecedents, and sort them, to unify them. They will be found ampler than has been supposed and in widely different sources. Thus far, impressed by New England writers and schoolmasters, we tacitly abandon ourselves to the notion that our United States have been fashioned from the British Islands only, and essentially form a second England only—which is a great mistake. Many leading traits for our future national personality, and some of the best ones, will certainly prove to have originated from other than British stock. As it is, the British and German, valuable as they are in the concrete, already threaten excess. Or rather, I should say, they have certainly reach’d​ that excess. To-day, something outside of them, and to counterbalance them, is seriously needed.

Thus seething materialistic and business vortices of the United States, in their present devouring relations, controlling and belittling everything else, are, in my opinion, but a vast and indispensable stage in the new world’s development, and are certainly to be follow’d​ by something entirely different—at least by immense modifications. Character, literature, a society worthy the name, are yet to be establish’d​ , through a nationality of noblest spiritual, heroic and democratic attributes—not one of which at present definitely exists—entirely different from the past, though unerringly founded on it, and to justify it.

To that composite American identity of the future, Spanish character will supply some of the most needed parts. No stock shows a grander historic retrospect—grander in religiousness and loyalty, or for patriotism, courage, decorum, gravity and honor. (It is time to dismiss utterly the illusion-compound, half raw-head-and-bloody-bones and half Mysteries-of-Udolpho, inherited from the English writers of the past 200 years. It is time to realize—for it is certainly true—that there will not be found any more cruelty, tryanny, superstition, &c., in the résumé of past Spanish history than in the corresponding résumé of Anglo-Norman history. Nay, I think there will not be found so much.)

Then another point, relating to American ethnology, past and to come, I will here touch upon at a venture. As to our aboriginal or Indian population—the Aztec in the South, and many a tribe in the North and West—I know it seems to be agreed that they must gradually dwindle as time rolls on, and in a few generations more leave only a reminiscence, a blank. But I am not at all clear about that. As America, from its many far-back sources and current supplies, develops, adapts, entwines, faithfully identifies its own—are we to see it cheerfully accepting and using all the contributions of foreign lands from the whole outside globe—and then rejecting the only ones distinctively its own—the autochthonic ones?

As to the Spanish stock of our Southwest, it is certain to me that we do not begin to appreciate the splendor and sterling value of its race element. Who knows but that element, like the course of some subterranean river, dipping invisibly for a hundred or two years, is now to emerge in broadest flow and permanent action?

If I might assume to do so, I would like to send you the most cordial, heart-felt congratulations of your American fellow-countrymen here. You have more friends in the Northern and Atlantic regions than you suppose, and they are deeply interested in development of the great Southwestern interior, and in what your festival would arouse to public attention.

Very respectfully &c.,Walt Whitman

Here we are, 141 years after Whitman’s letter, being encouraged by the “seething, materialistic and business vortices of the United States, in their present devouring relations, controlling and belittling everything else.”   Whitman’s letter still calls on all of us to realize history written west to east is a valid subject and that the more comprehensive history will bring about “character, literature, a society worthy the name…through a nationality of noblest spiritual, heroic, and democratic attributes.”

It is a national shame that so many prefer “devouring relations, controlling and belittling everything else” to understanding the reverse geographical truths of our history that will allow us to achieve “the broadest flow” of the representative democracy we only partially understand, and in only partially understanding it continue to further disadvantage our country.

(Photo Credit: PBS “The American Experience”)

 

Sports: Muddling Along for Some; Finishes Within the Blink of an Eye For Others

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(Baseball)—Our two major league teams could do no better than .500 ball for the last ten games and for one of them, that was a big disappointment.

The Cardinals were played a three-game series against the worst team in baseball this year and managed to lose two out of three.  The White Sox, losers of 14 of the first 15 road games this year won the last two games of the series againt the Cardinals to drop St. Louis four games under break-even for the year.  They’re 15-19, last in their division. The game was the first of the year for Dylan Carlson. He went hitless in three at-bats.

The Royals bullpen gave up a tying run to the Rangers in the ninth inning Sunday and a winnig run in the tenth.  The Rangers now have won six series in a row against Kansas City in the last three years.

How much have the Royals improved since 2023?  The Royals are 20-15 through their first 35 games of 2024. Last year, after 35 games, they were   9-26 and did not reach twenty wins until their 73rd game.

(ROYALS vs. CARDS)—-Here is a quick look at the reason the Royals are five above .500 and the Cardinals are four below it:

The Royals have scored 161 runs. Their pitchers have given up 117.

The Cardinals have scored 118 runs. Their pitchers have given up 150. Last night, in their loss to the Mets, they went one for six with runners in scoring position and in their last few games they’ve gone 10 for 55 and are now a season worst five games below break even.

(FOOTBALL—BATTLEHAWKS)—The St. Louis Battlehawks’ 22-8 win over th Houston Roughnecks has set up THE big game of the year in the UFL. Next Saturday the Battlehawks (5-1) square off against the undefeated Birmingham Stallions (6-0).

The ‘Hawks had only one good offensive quarter, the second, when Quarterback A. J. McCarron was 17 for 21 with a pair of touchdowns.

The game drew almost 33,000 fans.

Birmingham remained undefeated with a 39-32 win over the Memphis Showboats (1-5).

The game next weekend matches the top survivor of the XFL against the top survivor of the USFL before the two leagues merged.  It will be a stern test for St. Louis.  Birmingham went into last weekend’s game leading the league in total yards, rushing yards, yards per reception, total offense, all-purpose yards, first downs, field goals made, punt return yards, sacks, rushing touchdowns allowed, scoring allowed and first downs allowed.

Now the fast stuff:

(DERBY)—Normally we don’t pay much attention to racing that only goes one lap, but this year’s Kentucky Derby was exceptional so we’re making an exception.

We know that Mystik Dan won the Derby by a nose or noses in 2:03.34.  The Derby says Sierra Leone finished second by a nose and Forever Young by a nose, however many tenths of a second a nose is.

(NASCAR)—NASCAR doesn’t do noses.  Kyle Larson inched past Chris Buscher by one one-thousandth of a second to win the weekend race at Kansas Speedway, the closest race finish in NASCAR’s 75-year history).   Buescher took the lead on the start of the overtime period but gave Larson just enough space to pull even with him on the outside of the last turn and beat him to the line in a photo finish.

The top four cars (17 Buescher; 5 Larson; 9 Chase Elliott; 19 Truex, just outside the picture) finished within 0.0075 seconds.  (By contrast, the average eye blink is a full tenth of a second so they really did have four cars finish the race in the blink of an eye, or less!)

It’s Larson’s second win of the year as he enters a month that will end with him racing 1100 miles on Memorial Day Sunday.

(FORMULA 1)—Lando Norris is the talk of Formula 1 this week after winning the Grand Prix of Miami by almost eight seconds over the usually-dominant Max Verstappen.  Norris was driving a McLaren with the latest chassis upgrades and kept Verstappen at bay in the latter stages of the race.

Verstappen struggled for speed all weekend.

(INDYCAR)—IndyCar begins its “month of May” (an anachronistic phrase for the Indianapolis Motor Speedway’s preparations for the Indianapolis 500)  next weekend with a race on the Speedway’s road course.

In the old days, the Speedway would be open for practice for the first couple of weeks of May, with qualifications for the race spread through two more weekends and the race on Memorial Day itself. Now, such preparations are less necessary and the road race will be next weekend with practice for a week and qualifications on the 19th, final preparation runs on the 24th and the race on the 26th. A crowd of more than 300,000 is anticipated—that’s about one out of every one-thousand people in this country.

(Photo credits: NBC News; NASCAR)

 

 

How to be a Leftist With One Word

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The word is “Democracy.”

The denigrating reference to one of the most honored words in our American existence was stunning when I read it.

“Democracy” seems to have become a bad word for some people.

The Jefferson City newspaper had an article yesterday about whether our city council elections should become partisan political elections again.  The City Charter adopted three or four decades ago made council elections non-partisan.  But in last month’s city elections, the county Republican committee sent out postcards endorsing candidates.

All of them lost.

A new political action committee established to oppose a Republican-oriented committee that killed a library tax levy increase last year had its own slate last month. All of the non-GOP candidates won, which prompted a leading member of the GOP-oriented group to comment in the paper that the new PAC, as the paper put it, “used leftist buzzwords like ‘transparency’ and ‘Democracy’ on their website.”

Friends, when things have gone so far out of whack that “Democracy” is nothing more than a “leftist buzzword,” our political system is in extremely perilous condition.   And if the same side considers “transparency” to be something that is politically repugnant, it appears that a substantial portion of our political system has abandoned one of the greatest principles of our national philosophy—-that government of the people, for the people, and by the people should not hide what it does from its citizens.

City councils are the closest governments to the people.  Elections of members of city councils should focus on the issues that most directly affect residents of wards and cities, not on whether candidates can pass party litmus tests or mouth meaningless partisan rhetoric.

The Jefferson City newspaper spent weeks publishing articles giving candidates’ opinions on the issues that confront citizens living on the quiet (and some noisy) streets of the city. Voters had ample opportunities to evaluate candidates on THEIR positions, not whether they were an R or a D.

Bluntly put, the county Republican committee did not respect the non-partisan system that has served our city well for these many decades.  And to have one of its leading characters dismiss words such as “transparency” and—especially—“Democracy” as “leftist buzzwords” is, I regret to say, a disgrace.

The (Robert) Reich Stuff 

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We subscribe to several newsletters at our house, liberal and conservative, because we kind of want to take the pulses of the various parts of the political spectrum. One of those we enjoy is by Robert Reich.

He worked in the administrations of Republican Gerald Ford and Democrats Jimmy Carter, and was Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Labor. He also was part of President Obama’s economic transition advisory board.

He’s been the Chancellor’s Public Policy Professor at UC-Berkeley for eighteen years. He used to be a lecturer in government at Harvard, and a prof of social and economic policy at Brandeis University. Time magazine said he was one of the ten best cabinet members of the Twentieth Century (2008) and ranked sixth on the Wall Street Journal’s list of Most Influential Business Thinkers.

So it appears he has some pretty solid bipartisan credentials.

A few days ago, he explained why prices remain high despite the slowing of inflation. His explanation recalls a warning I heard thirty years ago or more from Abner Womack, an Ag-Econ professor at the University of Missouri, a co-founder of the Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute.  He warned of the dangers of vertical integration in the agriculture industry—a time when only a few companies controlled the agriculture industry from providing the seeds, providing the fertilizer, processing the harvested product, and marketing it to consumers, and doing the same thing with the livestock part of agriculture. In effect, he was talking about the growing tendency of creating agricultural monopolies.

In his column on February 16, Reich began with a chart:

The chart shows corporate profit trends from 1946 through the third quarter of 2023.

This, he says, is why President Biden is not getting the credit he deserves to improving the economy—-corporate monopolities are unnecessarily increasing prices, or charging the same prices but reducing the size of the products.  For example, he says—

“In 2021, PepsiCo, which makes all sorts of drinks and snacks, announced it was “forced” to raise prices due to “higher costs.” Forced? Really? The company reported $11 billion in profit that year. 

“In 2023 PepsiCo’s chief financial officer said that even though inflation was dropping, its prices would not. Pepsi hiked its prices by double digits and announced plans to keep them high in 2024.

“How can they get away with this? 

“Well, if Pepsi were challenged by tougher competition, consumers would just buy something cheaper. But PepsiCo’s only major soda competitor is Coca-Cola, which — surprise, surprise — announced similar price hikes at about the same time as Pepsi, and also kept its prices high in 2023.

“The CEO of Coca-Cola claimed that the company had “earned the right” to push price hikes because its sodas are popular. Popular? The only thing that’s popular these days seems to be corporate price gouging.” 

And that is why, he explains, consumer prices are still high even though inflation is down and prices are rising “far more slowly” than in the past couple of years. However, those trends are not reflected in the prices of the products.  The result is that the corporations can “get aay with overcharging you” because corporations have few competitors who can force them to lower prices to compete for customers.

Why are prices thirty percent higher than they were in 2020?  Because “four companies now control processing of 80 percent of beef, nearly 70 percent of pork, and almost 60 percent of poultry.”  He suggests, but offers no proof, that these companies coordinate price increases.

Reich says it’s time federal antitrust laws be enforced, noting the Biden administration has been more aggressive in this field than any administration for the last forty years. It has acused the meat industry of price fixing. The administration is suing Amazon with “one of the biggest anti-monopoly lawsuits in a generation.”

He points to legislation suggested by Senator Elizabeth Warren and others. She says, “Giant corporations are using supply chain shocks as a cover to excessively raise prices and sometimes charging the same price but shrinking how much consumers actually get.”  Among other things, the bill would force public companies to divulge more about their costs and pricing strategies.

But, he says, don’t expect this idea to go far because Democrats have only a slim majority in the Senate and Repulicans have a slim majority in the House that enables them and their business allies to blame the Biden administration instead of solving the problem by going after that important constituency for the GOP.

So ends Robert Reich’s basic economic course for the day. He’s clearly a liberal but that doesn’t automatically mean he’s not worth appreciating any more than a conservative’s thoughts are automatically worthy of dismissal.  And those who wear the label “conservative” honorably will find some points of agreement with him, perhaps.

Late in the 1890s and early 1900s, it was popular in politics to be a “trust buster.”  Reich has suggested targets for a new generation of them.

It’s time to get started.

Getting their Chances: Getting a Big Win; Two So-So Weeks in Baseball; and the Fast Stuff 

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By Bob Priddy, Missourinet Contributing Editor

(MIZ)—The NFL was paying attention to the Missouri Tigers in 2023, evidenced by the dozen players either drafted or signed as undrafted free agents.

Six players were drafted, the most since 2009 and only one short of the record set in 1981.

Defensive Lineman Darius Robinson was a first-rounder, the 27th pick, by Arizona; Cornerback Ennis Rakestraw was a second rounder, picked by Detroit; Linebacker Ty’Ron Hopper went to Green Bay in the third round and Javon foster was Jacksonville’s pick in the fourth round.  Jaylon Carlisle (Colds), and Kris Abrams Draine (Denver) were fifth round picks.

Corey Schrader was quickly picked up by the 49ers as an undrafted free agent.  The Carolina Panthers will give kicker Harrison Mevis a look. The Jets are interested in offensive lineman Marcellus Johnson while the Buccaneers have signed Xavier Delgado, another offensive lineman. And running back Nate Pete has signed with the Dallas Cowboys. The Detroit Lions have invited defensive lineman Josh Landry to their rookie mini-camp.

Four guys are hoping somebody will call: Defensive lineman Realus George jr., defensive end Nyles Gaddy, Linebacker Chad Bailey, and linebacker Ben Straatmann. (ZOU)

(BATTLEHAWKS)—The St. Louis Battlehawks made the fourth quarter a nightmare for the DC Defenders during the weekend, handing the Defenders their first home lost in their four seaons in the XFL and, now, the UFL.

The ‘Hawks led only 17-12 at the half but capitalized on the Defenders’ two fourth-down failures, a blocked punt, an interception, and a fumble to bury DC 45-12, the most lopsided victory in Battlehawks history.

The ‘Hawks blew the game open with about nine minutes left when Quarterback A. J. McCarron hit Hakeem Butler for an 80-yard touchdown pass.  It’s the longest play in the UFL this year and the longest scoring play in the Battlehawks’ history.

(BASEBALL)—Our two MLB teams had 4-6 weeks, the Royals losing three in a row.  The Cardinals missed a chance to reach .500 with a 12th-inning loss on Sunday to the Mets. Former Cardinals center fielder Harrison Bader drove in the tying run and scored the winner in a 4-2 Mets victory.

The Royals have moved to Detroit for a midweek series. They’re still four games above .500.

Need Speed?

(INDYCAR)—IndyCar got the race it needed at Barber Motorsports Park last weekend after a tough week that saw three drivers for the sport’s leading team penalized for having the push-to-pass mechanism in the year’s first race.

Josef Newgarden’s season-opening win at St. Petersburg was taken away as was the third-place finish by teammate Scott McLaughlin. Their third teammate, Will Power, was fined but he was not disqualified. Pato O’Ward has been given the St. Petersburg victory.

Newgarden and McLaughlin used the push-to-pass button, which should have been disabled, during the race.  The button increases engine power for a few seconds in passing situations. It had been used in recent testing and was supposed to have been removed for the race.

Both drivers said they did not realize they were not supposed to have that capability.

The fact that the problems occurred with Team Penske only increased the embarrassment throughout the sport and cast a shadow over IndyCar in the days leading to last weekend’s race. Team owner Roger Penske also owns IndyCar and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. His teams for decades have been known for their strict professional discipline and ultra-high race organization and preparation. The situation revealed a crack in that perfection and several competitors were quick to react.

Newgarden and McLaughlin said they were not aware they could not use the P2P button. Newly-crowned St. Petersburg winner Pato O’Ward appreciated Newgarden taking one for the team but “I truly feel like him taking the fall for something that he needs a team of people to help with…I think it’s a bit unfair to him.”

But Colton Herta, who drives for Andretti Global and who finished third in the revised standings from the St. Petersburg race, was less forgiving. He flatly called Newgarden’s comments “a lie.”

Newgarden, whom some might regard as a physical embodiment of the Penske image, was emotional when he met with reporters before the race last weekend. He struggled with his composure as he denied being “a liar,” and apologized for the incidents. “I’ve worked my entire career to hold myself to a very high standard and clearly I’ve fallen very short of that in this respect. It’s a difficult thing to wrestle with…It’s crushing…I don’t ant that win on my books, either. If it was tainted, I don’t want to be near it. Unfortunately, it is.”

“You can call me every name in the book; you can call me incompetent, call me an idiot…call me stupid…but I’m not a liar,” he said.

Newgarden went out afterward and topped the Friday practice speeds but could not match those numbers in qualifying. He started eighth and finished sixteenth in the race.

The closely-contested race that featured a lot of close, sometimes too-close, competition went to McLaughlin, with Power chasing him at the end.  McLaughlin led 58 of the 90 laps on the 2.3-mile road course and cranked out the hottest lap of the day at more than 122 mph.

Herta, who finished eighth, retained the series points lead by one over Power.

IndyCar moves to Indianapolis now for the leadup to the Indianapolis 500, starting with a race on the infield road course on May 11.

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McLaren driver David Malukas is now a FORMER McLaren driver. He’s been released because his wrist injuries from a pre-season mountain biking incident still has not healed sufficiently to allow him to drive.

Malukas signed a contract last September hurt himself in February.

McLaren has used substitute drivers for the first four races but says it needs someone in the seat permanently.

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Longtime IndyCar driver and official Wally Dallenbch has died at age 87.  He stated in 13 Indianapolis 500s. His best finishes were a air of fourths in 1976-77. After hanging up hishelmet, he served as competition director and chief steward for about 25 years of CART (Championship Auto Racing Teams) after its split from IndyCar.

(NASCAR)—Win number three for Denny Hamlin this year, this one coming at Dover.  He beat series points leader Kyle Larson by .256 second. Hamlin’ win, his 54th, ties him with the legendary Lee Petty.

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Newly-retired Kevin Harvick will be back in a seat next month for NASCAR’s All-Star Race at North Wilkesboro Speedway.  He’ll qualify Kyle Larson’s car whle Larson is in Indianapolis qualifying for the 500.  Larson plans to “do the double” on Memorial Day Sunday—run the 500 and then jet to Charlotte for the 600 mile race there that night.

(FORMULA1)—Formula One had the weekend off. Next up: The Grand Prix of Miami next Sunday.