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King Lear and the Convicted Felon

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A Shakespearian tragedy, some are calling the Trump conviction, not noting the irony of associating someone such as our former president with the talents of a great author about whom he likely has never read, at least with any understanding or appreciation.

One definition of a literary tragedy is a work in which the main character has “a tragic flaw, moral weakness, or inability to cope with unfavorable circumstances.”

That pretty well matches the main character of the drama we are witnessing.   Unfortunately, it also describes many of his acolytes who by their support of him are becoming characters like him.

Which of Shakespeare’s 17th Century tragic characters most resemble the convicted felon/tar baby that many political hopefuls are eager to get stuck to with increased firmness—an old man who rewards those most loyal to him and in doing so is taught the hard way that rewarding loyalty has its penalties?

King Lear is the story of a old man who wants to pass on his estate to the one of his three daughters who loves him best. Two daughters tolerate him at best but flatter him to win his favor. The third daughter, the one he actually loves the most, thinks he knows the feeling is mutual and therefore doesn’t butter him up as her two sisters do.  He vainly falls for the adulation of the two, cuts out the one he loves the most, and gives his estate to the manipulative sisters. He alternates staying with the two winners who treat him badly. As he grows more addled, he is left a vagrant.  Too late he realizes his mistake in favoring the two manipulative sisters but he cannot correct it because his beloved youngest daughter dies.

One of those who stays loyal to Lear is the Earl of Gloucester, who muses in a late section of the play, “’Tis the times’ plague when mad men lead the blind.”

Writer Lawrence Noel interprets the line this way:

The time’s plague refers to it being a problem of the time or era. Referring to it as a plague suggests that it spreads widely and quickly. We might even think of it as being contagious.

Blind people relied on others for guidance, especially in unfamiliar territory. Madmen are insane and cannot distinguish between reality and fantasy.

Putting those elements together suggests that the audience is being told that one of the problems of the time is that those who must trust others to provide them with safe passage in the world are being led by those who do not see the world clearly or in its own state of reality, even for themselves.

As an excerpt, it reflects an attitude about the nature of politics that resonates with modern readers and playgoers in that faith in the clarity of our political leaders’ vision of the world has suffered some setbacks of late. They may assure the common people that we are blind to the realities which only they can see and so we must accept their leadership if we want to go anywhere new. If the leader’s visions are distorted or unhealthy, we are likely to suffer for them.

“When mad men lead the blind.”  The line is sometimes misquoted but that’s what Shakespeare wrote.

Writer and playwright Charlotte Ahlin, who was raised by two Shakespearean actors, has written, “His plays are surprisingly (and sometimes upsettingly) still relevant to our daily lives.” Some of the reactions to the hush money verdict verify her contention.

Many of our political leaders or political leader-wannabes are (in some cases) disappointing us in accusing the Biden justice system of persecuting our former president strictly for partisan political purposes and encouraging the public to ignore that the supposedly weaponized Justice Department is prosecuting two members of Biden’s party—Senator Bob Menendez and Congressman Henry Cuellar, AND that a holdover Trump appointee in the Justice Department is prosecuting Presidential Son Hunter Biden.

The hypocrisy—-

The depth of the betrayal of their integrity—

Their lack of political courage—-

Their disregard for the title of “public servant” that they have sacrificed in pursuit of power—

are appalling.

The damage they are doing to public confidence in one of the most important institutions that define the United States as an example of a republican democracy—a trial by a jury of one’s peers—seems to mean nothing to them.  They are willing to become hostages to the political whims of a man of a kind they likely would not want their daughters to marry. They kowtow to a king who demands to be flattered.

They are gladly capitalizing on leading the blind—the people who don’t know and don’t want to think—in a concerted effort to let our former president hold on to power regardless of the damage he has openly announced he will do.

Listen again to what many of them said about him after January 6.

Listen again to what many of them said about him in their presidential primary campaigns, brief though they were.

Listen to what he has said about them or about members of their families.

Look at the list of those who he promised in 2016 to hire (only “the best people”) for his administration and count the number who have faced criminal charges/financial ruin or jail sentences for their loyalty—or who have written books exposing his machinations.

No president in all of American history has had so many books by his once-closest associates written about his personal and politica l failings.

And wonder why those who are now attacking our legal system as weaponized and corrupt feel they have to read from the script (look for words such as “witch hunt” or “banana republic”) he peddles on social media or during obsequious interviews.

And then, ask yourself this:

Have you ever served on a jury or do you know anyone who has?

This bunch is suggesting the people such as you and your friends, who assumed the responsibility as jurors in his recent trial, somehow connived with the Justice Department to politically persecute this man who has openly claimed to be above the law. Anyone who has been on a jury, or who has been called for consideration to be on a jury, should be insulted by what these bed partners of the now-convicted felon are saying.

If Donald Trump was treated unfairly in his trial, it was the fault of his attorneys and, perhaps himself; there are a lot of people who say the lawyers crafted their defense of him at least partly because of his demands.

He had his chance to claim in court what he loves to claim outside of the court. As he has in the past, he said at the start of the trial that he would love to testify.  But in the end, he chickened out. Again.  He could have told his side of the story but, as he has done in the past, he did not.

—-Because he would have had to take an oath to tell the truth and he is incapable of doing so.

His lawyers helped pick the jury. To refresh your memory, here’s the kind of people they were, thanks to a compilation by NBC News.

Juror 1: A man who lives in West Harlem and works in sales. He is married, likes to do “anything outdoorsy,” and gets news from The New York Times, Fox News and MSNBC.

Juror 2: A man who works in investment banking, follows Twitter as well as Truth Social posts from Trump and said, “I don’t have any beliefs that might prevent me from being fair or impartial.”

Juror 3: A young man who has lived in Chelsea for five years, works as an attorney in corporate law, and likes to hike and run. He gets news from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Google.

Juror 4: A man who’s a security engineer and likes woodworking and metalworking.

Juror 5: A young woman who is a Harlem resident and works as a teacher. She lives with her boyfriend, loves writing, theater and traveling. She gets news from Google and TikTok and listens to podcasts on relationships and pop culture.

Juror 6: A young woman who lives in Chelsea and works as a software engineer. She gets news from The New York Times, Google, Facebook and TikTok.

Juror 7: A man who lives on the Upper East Side and works as attorney as a civil litigator. He enjoys spending time in the outdoors and gets his news from The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post and the Washington Post.

Juror 8: A man who’s retired but worked for a major wealth manager. He said he enjoys skiing, fly fishing and yoga.

Juror 9: A woman who is a speech therapist, gets news from CNN and likes reality TV podcasts.

Juror 10: A man who works in commerce, reads The New York Times and listens to podcasts on behavioral psychology.

Juror 11: A woman who works as a product development manager and watches late-night news and reads Google, business and fashion news.

Juror 12: A woman who is a physical therapist who likes running and tennis and listening to podcasts on sports and faith.

Alternate 1: A woman who works as an asset manager and likes to run, hang out with her friends and eat.

Pretty formidable list of persecutors who are tools of the Justice Department, don’t you think, especially since this trial was in a state court not a federal court where the Justice Department has a role?

The fact that it took this varied group only about eleven hours to unanimously convict our former president on every one of the THIRTY-FOUR charges speaks volumes for the strength of the case against him, the presentation of the evidence that supported all of those charges, and the inability of Trump and his lawyers to induce even one of the twelve to hang the jury.

There was nothing wrong with the justice system that day.

How strange it is that those sycophants, including several of our Missouri statewide candidates who also have swallowed gallons of the Trump Kool-Aid, to now expect a flawed justice system weaponized to get him and him alone to later exonerate a  president who tried during his own term to weaponize the Department of Justice.

Mad men. And some women leading “the blind,” people who don’t want to know but will blindly accept what they are told.  And the mad men are happy to lead them, happy to tell them.  And why?  Because they want power and lack the integrity to win it on their own standards.

They have, instead, attached themselves to arguably the least honest man in the country who spouts lies and lies and lies. And too many of our political leaders or leader wannabes are disgracing themselves in joining him in trying to disgrace those responsible citizens who fulfilled a sacred role in our society during his trial.

They have become dangerous in their service to an old king who thinks one-way loyalty is his privilege. They are the mad men.  We must not be blind to them.

Those who refuse to be blind can make sure they pay a price for their hypocrisy, their lack of integrity, honesty, and of courage when we vote in August and November.

 

Sports: Getting Over the Hump; For the Want of a Cup of Gas; UFL Playoffs

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By Bob Priddy, Missourinet Contributing Editor

(CARDINALS)—The St. Louis Cardinals went 13-12 in May, a record that might surprise some folks who once saw them nine games under .500 as late as May 11.  The Cardinals closed out the month winning 12 of their last 16 games and got to break even on the next-to=last day of the Month before losing to Cincinnati.

The turnaround was fueled by some bats waking up to support the pitching staff. The Cardinals hit only 19 home runs in April. In May they hit 30.  They had 23 more hits and scored 13 more runs in May than they did in April, most of that in the second two-thirds.  They stole 17 bases in May, only 11 in April.

The Redbirds were 13-13 in April, 1-3 in March.

(ROYALS)—The Kansas City Royals have shown consistency in the first two months of the season, posting identical 17-11 records in April and May.  As of the beginning of play last night,  Salvador Perez was seventh in batting in both leagues, with a .315 average.

Bobby Witt Jr. was ninth in batting at .313 and was second in stolen bases with 17.

(BASEBALL STATS, GENERALLY)—Going into last night’s games, ESPN’s ranking of the top 50 players in hitting and pitching listed these Missouri players.

Pitching—Royals Seth Lugo is number two behind Ranger Suarez of the Phillies in ERA, Suarez at 1.70 and Lugo at 1.72. Both lead the majors with nine victories. The Royals have two other pitchers in the top 50—Brady Singer is twelfth with an ERA of 2.63 although he’s only 4-2; Cole Ragens is 31st in ERA at 3.21 with a 4-4 record. The only Cardinals starting pitcher on the top 50 is Kyle Gibson, fiftieth, with a 3.60 ERA and a 4-2 record.

Masyn Winn’s .299 average ranks 14th among major league hitters.

(HAWKS)—It wasn’t particularly pretty, but the St. Louis Battlehawks locked in a home UFL playoff last weekend, slipping past their top division rival, the San Antonio Brahmas. 13-12. Both teams finish the regular season 7-3 but St. Louis won both of the regular season games and therefore gets home field advantage for the playoff fame next Sunday.

The ‘Hawks led 10-0 at the half but the Brahmas But the Brahmas reeled off twelve unanswered points in the second half and completed a two-point conversion that would have given them a 14-12 lead. But the Battlehawks won a challenge that maintained a San Antonio player was an ineligible receiver downfield.

(CHIEFS)—The Kansas City Chiefs are beginning the serious preparations for the 2024=25 (they hope) season this week. The last of the voluntary workouts begins today with the mandatory week-long spring training camp starting next Wednesday, the 11th.

(MIZ)—Former Tiger lineman Justin Smith is one of 77 players and nine coaches nominated for induction into the College Football Hall of Fame this year. Smith, a Jefferson City native, played for the Tigers, 1998-2000.  He was a Freshman All-American and made the national All-American first team in 2000. He still ranks fourth in sacks.  He had a long pro career with seven years with the Bengals and seven more with the 49ers.  Inductees will be announced early next year.

Tigers Roar and So Do Engines

(NASCAR)—There’s a car in there somewhere—

We thought it would be the yellow car of Ryan Blaney who had the race in hand, especially after this chief challenger, Christopher Bell, developed engine trouble.  But it was the blue car of Blaney teammate Austin Cindric that did a furious burnout at the start-finish line at Worldwide Technology Raceway just across the river from St. Louis.

Blaney, the defending NASCAR Cup champion still looking for his first win of 2024,who had made his last pit stop was just one lap before Cindric’s last stop, ran out of gas on the next to last lap, had just enough fuel to run the last two laps and to celebrate the win. His tank went dry just before he got the white flag signaling one lap was left.

Cindric had not won a race in 85 outings since becoming a rookie winner of the Daytona 500 at thes start of the 2022 season and had recorded only one top-ten finish this year.  He admitted afterwards that he had become so unfamiliar with the NASCAR winners’ rituals that he almost fell off the roof of his car when he shut it down and climbed out to celebrate.

“It was like my first time all over again, it’s been so long.”  He said his win “is everything. It’s absolutely everything,” but he acknowledged that the third-place car in the race wound up winning because the two better cars—of Blaney and Bell—encountered late problems.

Bell wound up seventh with teammate Martin Truex Jr., bump-pushing him to the finish line. Truex, who had run into problems early and was far out of contention, finished 34th.  Blaney coasted the final lap and was credited within finishing 24th.

Blaney finished 24th after coasting around the track with a silent engine.

(INDYCAR)—Years ago, IndyCar driver Tom Sneva was called the “gas man” because he stood on the gas and became the first driver to turn official 200 mph laps at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and was the fastest qualifier for the 500 four times.

There’s a new “gas man” in IndyCar today, Scott Dixon, who still goes fast at the age of 43 (he’ll be 44 next month) has been winning a lot of races because he “makes fuel,” or stretches his fuel loads father than other drivers.  Last weekend’s race on the streets of Detroit added another example of that nickname by stretching his fuel to finish a full second ahead of Marcus Ericsson.

 

It’s his 58th career win, second to the legendary A. J. Foyt, who had 67 wins his career. Dixon made only two pit stops while most other teams made four or more. “A lot of guys that you know are going to be racing for a championship had a rough day,” he said of the race. His win has elevated him to the top of the point standings, twenty points ahead of last year’s champion, Alex Palou, who finished 16th, and 33 up on Will Power, who was sixth.

(Photo credits: Bob Priddy)

This Was a Just a Farm Once. This is About What Grew There 

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By Bob Priddy, Missourinet Contributing Editor

This was farmland once.  Flat. Open. Three hundred-twenty acres owned by a family named Pressley. The city was five miles, a few hours’ buggy ride, to the east and south.  But then a guy named Carl Fisher showed up—this was late in 1908—and with three partners bought the place for $72,000.

In time, the railroad would bring passenger cars loaded with people to this place. In time, automobiles would navigate the muddy roads to the countryside. Eventually there would be paved streets and Pressley farm and the agricultural land around it would turn into a small town and people would build hundreds of homes and businesses and schools on farmland around the farmland where Fischer and partners James Allison, Arthur Newby and Frank Wheeler had invested an additional quarter-million pre-World War I dollars into their new business venture.

Four years after buying the Pressley farm, the four partners laid out a planned residential/industrial community that would not rely on horses and instead would emphasize the automobile.  Many of the residents would work at a chemical company and an engine manufacturing company.

They named their town for their business venture.  Speedway. It’s now a town of about 14,000 people entirely surrounded by Indianapolis, just across Indianapolis’ Sixteenth Street from the first race track in the world to bear the word “speedway” in its name.

The race track these four men built covers 253 acres, not counting the areas around the track that cover hundreds of acres more and are used for parking, camping, tail gaiting,  partying, concession stands and 14 holes of a golf course (the other four holes are on the infield).

And every May, this former farm field becomes a shrine.

Various comparisons have been made to show how massive the development of the site by Fisher and friends has become.  It’s big enough, it is said, to hold SEVENTEEN Yankee Stadiums.  It’s big enough to hold all fourteen Big Ten Football stadiums.  Put another way, says the IndyCar Series, it could hold EIGHT nationally and internationally-famous sites;

Trains no longer bring thousands of spectators to the “Greatest Spectacle in Racing.”  There are wide, multi-laned streets and nearby intestate highways and on a few days each year those streets and roads become huge traffic funnels pouring tens of thousands of vehicles ranging from beater cars to multi-million dollar luxury motorhomes to this 253 acres.

A crowd about forty or fifty-thousand people larger than the entire population of St. Louis descended overnight on this area, drivers and passengers often stalled in enormous traffic jams for three or four hours, the smart ones turning off their vehicle’s engines because they weren’t going to move a vehicle’s length for several long minutes.

Only a few could park inside the track.  The front yards of residential areas with their two-lane streets around the track became private rental parking areas for race fans. Huge open fields turned into parking areas by today’s Speedway owners were packed.

Knowing they would face all of this, they came.

Knowing very bad weather was moving in from the west, they came.

Knowing they might not see a race because of another storm system was behind the first one, still they came. A hundred thousand.  Then two.  Then three.  And then as many as fifty thousand more.

And then came the lightning. And the rain.

The grandstands were ordered cleared with tens of thousand of people taking refuge under the concrete floors of the giant infield front-stretch grandstands and in the tunnels under the track and other safe places.

All those people. In those crowded spaces. Many of them brought coolers full of food and drink because the race was going to be underway at lunch time.

Hungry people.

Thirsty people.

Wet people

People knowing the weather might mean no race at all that day.

And you know something?

We saw no fights.  Nobody got stabbed or shot (at least nobody that we’ve heard about in these two days after all of this).

345,000 people, one out of every one-thousand people in this entire United States, jammed into 253 acres of damp disappointment.

And nothing happened while nothing was happening.

Then it quit raining.  And the track-drying machines came out, marvelous pieces of engineering designed only to transform two and a half miles of wet asphalt into dry asphalt.

It is in situations such as this that people-watchers have a field day.

The fans looked for ways to entertain themselves before the race could start—including appropriately-attired folks rooting for children in a footrace near the souvenir stands, including a volunteer flag man at the finish line.

(The track is nicknamed “The Brickyard” because the pavement for the race for many years was millions of bricks.  Today the finish line is a yard of bricks.)

(Incidentally, the real flag man for the race, known as the Chief Starter, is Aaron Likens and he has just brought out a book called Playing in Traffic, My Journey From Autism Diagnosis to the Indy 500 Flagstand.)

Patriotism is always big at automobile races.

And coveralls with the Speedway logo accessorized with “gold” chains, again with the famous winged wheel logo that has in one form or another represented the great old track from its earliest days.

After years of personal experience people watching at the Speedway, we can note that you have seen only the most moderate of outfits typical of the events. (We’ll do a commentary on going-to-the-car-races clothing in a later entry.)

Driver Pato O’Ward, one of the young guns and one of the favorites, entertained fans by signing hats and shirts dropped from the grandstands into the garage area.

Or chatting with fans—

But the intense work paid off on the track.  The asphalt turned a lighter gray and it was time to go racing, time for 32 men and one woman to hurtle at 230 miles an hour into a near-flat left turn, the first of 800 left turns they would make before the finish, fighting to get through each of those turns ahead of the other cars.

The skies remained grey; although the weather outlook brightened; maybe the entire race could be run before the next storm.  Time to roll out the cars In the end, only one car would complete the challenge of making those 800 left turns ahead of all others in one of the most dramatic races in the 108-year history of the Indianapolis 500.

Time on the grid for a few moments with family—Josef Newgarden showed his two-year old son, Kota, the “office” where he would spend the next three hours or so defending his championship of the 500.

The race lasted one minute and eleven seconds short of three hours  and featured 49 lead changes among 18 drivers, more than half of the starting field, the last lead change coming time when Kota’s dad broke O’Ward’s heart by passing him on the outside of the next-to last turn and holding on to the finish.

It’s Newgarden’s second straight 500 win, both coming with a last lap pass—his victim last year was the 2022 winner, Marcus Ericsson—who had held off a last lap charge from O’Ward that year.

O’Ward remained slumped in his car for a time after the finish, his helmet still on, admitting later, “It was wet in there.”

Newgarden is the sixth driver to win two of these races in a row.  He will try in 2025 to become the first to do a threepeat.

Helio Castroneves almost did it after winning the race in his first two years and finishing second in 2003.  Al Unser Senior also finished second after winning in 1970-71.

Bill Vukovich came with eight laps of winning in 1952 before a part of his steering failed, returned to win in ’52 and ’53 and died while leading on the 57th lap of the 1955 race.

Wilbur Shaw came close to winning not three but FIVE straight.  He won in 1937, was second in 1938, won the next two years and crashed while leading with 48 laps to go in 1941. That was the year a fire roared through the garage area.  It is believed some of the water used to fight the fire washed chalked words “use last’ from an out-of-balance wheel that collapsed, causing his wreck.

But we’ll have to wait a year to see how that pans out.

Thousands of fans remained in the stands as evening clouds thickened and the light grew dimmer while Newgarden and his wife took the traditional victory lap in the pace car then kissed the bricks and went on to celebrate until the late hours.

Newgarden’s victory was worth almost $4.3 million of the nearly $18.5 million in prize money. O’Ward got more than one million for being second.

Thousands of the fans were deadlocked for hours in their parking lots as traffic oozed  back to the nearby interstates or moved through downtown Indianapolis.  This reporter’s car didn’t turn a wheel for more than three hours in the parking lot and was another hour, at least, before getting to his overnight accommodations—with a stop at a gas station because he was down to his last thirty miles of reserve fuel and would have run out had he not shut off his engine for at least 45 minutes of the three hours it took to get to his parking space in the morning and never firing it up again until seeing other cars start to move.

By Monday evening the former farm field was quiet and empty, except for volunteers earning money for their groups by picking up tons and tons of trash left behind by the one-out-of-one-thousand Americans who found themselves packed into those 253 acres where one of the nation’s greatest holidays was celebrated.

(NASCAR)—NASCAR star Kyle Larson left Indianapolis as the race’s Rookie of the Year but disappointed with his 18th place finish.  Larson was among the five fastest qualifiers in his first IndyCar ride, and was running sixth when he drove too fast into the pits with seventy laps left. He had to do a drive-through penalty that set him too far back too late in the race to recover all the positions he had lost.

Still, he was only 9.4846 seconds behind Newgarden at the end of the 500 miles and averaged 167.6 mph. Newgarden averaged 167.8.

Larson had planned to run the 500 and then jet to Charlotte for NASCAR’s 600-mile traditional Memorial Day race. But bad weather, including rain and lightning, caused NASCAR to decide to end the race after 249 of 400 scheduled laps with Christopher Bell declared the winner.  Brad Keselowski racked up another second-place finish, his third runner-up finish of the year.  Larson had arrived at the Charlotte Speedway in  uniform and helmet on just as the race was stopped because of rain.  NASCAR determined restarting the race would make it end at about 3 a.m., Monday, at best and decided to call it a night. Larson never got to turn a lap for the second half of his “double.”

But there is next year.  The deal between Hendrick Motorsports and McLaren racing in IndyCar us a two-year contract.

0-0-0

After the Charlotte race, former NASCAR champion Tony Stewart and his partner, Gene Haas, announced they would be shutting down their team at the end of the year.  Stewart-Haas fields four cars in the series this year but will sell all four of its franchises for several million dollars.  The team has two championships and 69 victories. Stewart is driving a full National Hot Rod Association schedule (His wife is an NHRA competitor) and Haas wants more time to spend with his Formula 1 team.

(FORMULA 1)—The Grand Prix of Monaco is the third major race held on America’s Memorial Day Weekend.  Ferrari’s Charles LeClerc became the first Monaco native to win there.

Now the stick and ball sports that usually lead these entries;

(MIZ)—The Missouri Women’s softball team lost the last game of the super regional tournament to Duke Sunday. Duke goes to the world series. The Tigers come home with a 48-14 season record. (ZOU)

(BASEBALL)—The Cardinals are heating up as the warmer weather settles in.  They won 8 of their last ten after Sunday’s weekend wrap up and had moved in top third place and were only one game under .500.  Sonny Gray is up to 7-2 now.

The Royals continue to be the prime candidate for comeback team of the year and were 13 games above .500 before last night’s game against the Twins. The Royals didn’t get their 34th win last year until August.

The Royals had not had an American League Player of the Week since Vinnie Pasquantino in August, two years ago.  Bobby Witt broke that dry spell last week when he went 10 for 26 in six games with four homers and 11 RBIs. One of those homers was his longest ever, 468 feet.

(HAWKS)—The St. Louis Battlehawks  dropped to 6-3 last weekend as the Arlington Renegades turned three interceptions and two fumbles into a 36-22 victory.  The ‘Hawks are still in the running for the top playoff spot in the XFL Division, though.

Quarterback A. J. McCarron missed his second game because of a bum ankle. He’s considered day-to-day.

(Photo Credits: Bob Priddy, Rick Gevers)

A “Day” in the Life of the Senate

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This Senate Journal for Monday, May 13, 2024 also is the journal for Tuesday and Wednesday because of a record filibuster, led by Democrats demanding so-called “ballot candy” be removed from a resolution saying no constitutional amendment could be adopted unless it carried in a majority of the state’s eight congressional districts, even if the overall vote was favorable. Democrats, already opposed to the resolution, objected to language added by the House duplicating existing law but making the proposal more appealing to the public—the “ballot candy” opponents wanted removed.

This might be dry reading to those who are not as immersed in state government as your obedient servant has been for most of his life.  We are doing this to place these events in a better record than the Senate Journal provides.

The journal for the “day” that turned into the “fifty-hour filibuster” led by the ten Democrats in the 34-member Senate is covered on pages 1059-1061 of the daily journal (the daily journals are compiled at the end of the session into one large volume, thus these page numbers pick up with the journal page number of the preceding day).  The rest of “Monday’s” journal is made up of messages from the House telling the Senate it has approved its own bills, has changed Senate bills and needs Senate approval of the changes, requests for conference committees to work out differences between the two chambers on various bills, and other routine legislative business.

Because the House of Representatives’ rules limit debate time, filibusters do not occur there.  But the Senate has no such restrictions and a parliamentary procedure called “moving the previous question,” which—if approved—immediately ends debate and calls for a vote, is seldom used.

Because the journal is a record of actions, not a by-word recording of the debates, the only indication that a filibuster occurred is the listings of the names of those who presided over the chamber at various times. The number of names is an indication of the extensive length of the filibuster.  The fact that there are no journals for Tuesday and Wednesday is another indication.

Legislative “days” are not calendar or clock-determined.  A legislative day ends with adjournment. In this case, a “Monday” lasted until Wednesday on the calendar while, for journal purposes, the legislative day was still Monday.  Adjournment in this case did not occur until some Republicans crossed party lines to join the Democrats in sending the bill back to the House with a request for a conference.  The House on Thursday rejected the Senate’s request, telling the Senate to pass the House Committee Substitute.   Senate leadership knew that the minority Democrats would resume their filibuster if the bill was returned to the floor unchanged and would run out the clock at 6 p.m. on calendar Friday.  Because there was no use spending the last day of the session in a filibuster, the Senate adjourned after a ten-minute session Friday.

We have consulted the Senate archived recording of this long “Monday” to ascertain the exact amount of time the filibuster consumed.  We have done this because this event was unprecedented in Missouri legislative history and smashed a previous unprecedented 41-hour filibuster a few days earlier by the right-wing Senate Freedom Caucus.

Monday, May 13, 2024:   Sponsor Mary Elizabeth Coleman moved that the Senate adopt House Committee Substitute for Senate Substitute Number 4 for Senate Committee Substitute for Senate Joint Resolutions 74, 48, 59, 61, and 83.  That sounds complicated but it represents the path the bill had taken to that point.

There were five similar resolutions on this issue filed in the Senate.  A Senate Committee combined those resolutions into one but not before the entire Senate had debated the bill and three substitute versions were voted down, leaving the fourth that gained enough voter for passage.

The amended and combined Senate resolution went to the House where a House Committee substituted its version. The House passed the revised bill.  The changes had to be approved by the Senate before the proposition could be put on a statewide ballot.

Monday, May 13 was the first day of the last week of the 2024 legislative session. Democrats, outnumbered more than 2-1, knew the clock was their greatest friend when it came to getting this proposition changed or killed.  They launched a filibuster that blocked a vote that surely would have sent the issue to the November ballot.

Our legislature records its debates and archives them.  We went to the May 10 audio journal and tracked how much time was spent on this bill in each day.  The Senate archive recording resets to 0:00 at the end of each 24 hours.

Day One, Monday, May 13.

0:00:00—The Senate begins its “day” with a prayer from Reverend Stephen George.

0:04:52—Senator Mary Elizabeth Coleman moves Senate approval of  HCS/SS4/SCS/SJR 74, 48, 59, 61 and 83.

0:06:15—Senate Minority Leader John Rizzo makes substitute motion to send the bill back to the House and to ask for a conference committee to work out the differences between the House version, which had “ballot candy” added to it, and the Sente version.  This is the beginning of the filibuster.

“Monday” part one (Monday-Tuesday on the traditional calendar): 24 hours, of which 23 hours, 53 minutes and 45 seconds were spent filibustering the resolution. Running filibuster time: 23:53:45.

“Monday” part two (Tuesday-Wednesday on the traditional calendar): all 24 hours were involved in the filibuster. Running filibuster time: 47:53:45

“Monday” part three (Wednesday on the traditional calendar); 02:15:36  Roll call vote begins.  Roll call results announced: 02:18:06. The motion to send bill back to the House passed 18-13, with eight Republicans crossing party lines. The filibuster is official ended.

02:24:41: The Senate adjourns until Thursday morning.  “Monday,” the longest known “day” in Missouri Senate history, has finally come to an end.

Total filibuster time: 50:11:51

Total time of “Monday, May 10, 2024” in the Missouri Senate: 50:24:41.

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.

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)

 

 

The Jontay Thing

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Just as Monday’s entry was being written came news of the tragedy of Jontay Porter, the Columbia kid, ex-MU Tiger, fringe NBA player who is the first person permanently banned from the NBA since Jack Molinas was banned 71 years ago for betting on games he played with the Fort Wayne (now Detroit) Pistons.

The Porter case is of special interest not only because of his Missouri roots but also because Missourians might be deciding whether sports betting should be legalized in our state—and what that might mean to the confidence we have in our big-time sports teams and their games.

Alex Kirschner, writing for Slate.com says Porter “did things worse than anything Pete Rose ever got up to.”

Jeff Zilgitt of USA TODAY was equally unforgiving when he wrote, “In all of Jontay Porter’s idiocy, he provided a service to other professional athletes who might consider placing bets on games in which they are direct participants or in which they have insider knowledge to provide to gamblers. It’s almost impossible to pull it off in a world of legal, regulated and monitored gambling. It’s even more impossible when you’re as blatant as the NBA says Porter was.”

Kirschner  notes that sports leagues “make a lot of money off of people betting on their games…It’s a cash grab, yes.  But from the leagues’ perspective, it’s also a payment in exchange for tolerating certain risks. Sports leagues profit from betting but they are also terrified of it.” 

 Porter, he says, committed two sins and flirted with a third.  He disclosed privileged information to bettors and manipulated in-game outcomes. In Porter’s case, he took himself out of a game early so he would not meet projected performance levels.  The third circumstance that terrifies leagues, says Kirschner is outright throwing of games. “The single easiest way to threaten a league’s multibillion-dollar business is for people to doubt that they’re watching a game left to chance…If that goes, everything could go.

Porter is only 24 years old. Kirschner says his career is in the dumpster because he has been involved in the biggest betting scandal involving a player since sports wagering was legalized in this country in 2018. “If the Black Sox were a 10 on the scandal scale,” he writes, “Porter probably is a 6 or 7.”

Zilgitt darkly predicts this will happen again. “Someone always thinks they can beat the system, and maybe someone can but not Jontay Porter and his simple attempt at trying to make extra money. It’s inevitable, just as it was inevitable it happened in the first place.” Porter, who has spent most of his pro career in the NBA’s minor league, was being paid $410,000 this year to play for the NBA’s Toronto Raptors. The league investigation says he made $22,000 on the bets he placed on the game from which he removed himself, claiming illness.

The “idiocy” that Ziglitt attributes to Porter is explained by Kirschner who writes that the kid used the gambling companies that partner with the pro leagues to place his bets—-and those bets are monitored by the leagues. “If Porter were collaborating with underground bettors and bookies, his activity would have gone undetected,” he wrote.

In Kirschner’s view, pro sports teams are just asking for this kind of problem.  Sports wagering companies are aggressively advertising their “services,” leading to greatly expanding participation in betting. He bluntly observes, “A bigger pool of bettors means a bigger pool of potential crooks. In a subtle but real way, the NBA courted the Porter scandal.”

Pro sports leagues fought against sports wagering until the U. S. Supreme Court legalized it nationwide in 2018.  Once it was legalized, the leagues had no choice but to get in bed with the betting industry.  Pessimists might be forgiven for wondering if they’ll stay on their separate sides of the bed.

And whose reputation is damaged by this scandal?  Not the gaming industry.  It’s sports and those who play them.  A player has been banished for life. Pro sports worries whether its fans think its product is genuine and honest.

Zilgitt quotes NBA Commissioner Adam Silver saying the Porter case “raises important questions about the sufficiency of the regulatory framework currently in place, including the types of bets offered on our games and players.” Zilgitt notes Silver has advocated federal regulation of sports wagering and suggests outlawing or limiting certain kinds of bets.

Not considered by either columnist is what role state regulatory agencies can play or should play in terms of disciplinary actions against casinos that handle such bets or wagering companies that process them. In this case, the hammer has fallen on the player, deservedly so, but those who took, paid, and processed his bets appear to be facing no penalties.

Missouri’s pro sports teams are gathering signatures to get a statewide vote on a constitutional amendment legalizing sports wagering.

The proposal mirrors bills introduced in this year’s legislative session that grievously disadvantage the state and the programs that rely on gambling income for their budgets.  The Missouri Gaming Commission has warned that the legislation pushed at the Capitol by gaming interests does not raise enough revenue for the commission to adequately regulate sports wagering. Nor does it do anything to punish the betting industry that produced the measley $22,000 that Porter won.

“Measley,” as in how little he gained compared to how much he has thrown away.

The Porter scandal is a tragedy for him and for sports in general.  How will Missouri voters see the issue now that one of our own has become a self-induced victim of a system we are being asked to approve?  He might be the first but nobody expects he will be the last.

If Missourians approve the proposition, will they also undermine trust in the games that they love?  How many Porters are needed before we wonder about every missed free throw, every error, every missed tackle, every overthrown pass, every wide shot on goal?

(If you want to read the full articles on which we’ve based two entries):

Jontay Porter NBA betting scheme is a lesson in stupidity (usatoday.com)

Athletes beware: Jontay Porter NBA betting scheme is a lesson in stupidity (msn.com)

Sports: Norm’s In; Going Opposite Directions; New AD on the Horizon? And a Few More

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By Bob Priddy, Missourinet Contributing Editor

(NORM)—Former Missouri Tiger basketball coach Norm Stewart finally is getting his place in the Hall of Famous Missourians at the State Capitol.  The bust will be unveiled at 1 p.m., May 1 in the House Chamber. It later will be moved to the rotunda, joining more than three dozen other busts of famous Missourians.

Stewart turned 89 in January.

His teams rang up a record of 731-375 in 38 seasons as a head coach, 634 of them at his alma mater.

(BASEBALL)—One of our teams finished last week at 13-9.  The other one finished at 9-13, with some folks remembering last year when the team started 10-24.

(KANSAS CITY)—The 13-9 record isn’t the only statistic that shows how much the Royals’ season is a turnaround from last year. Here’s another one:

The Royals were held without a run by Baltimore on Sunday, their first shutout of the year. Last year they failed to score fifteen times.  Seth Lugo took his first loss and gave up his first home runs of the year after winning three straight to start his season and not giving up a homer in 41.1 innings.

Kansas City is led this year by catcher/first-baseman Salvador Perez, who starts this week hitting .333 with six homers and Bobby Witt, Jr., at .300. The pitching is among the best in baseball with a 3.18 ERA, which normally would be an outstanding year for an individual, let alone a team.  The pitching continues to carry the team, which is batting a cumulative .237, Perez and Witt notwithstanding.

(CARDINALS)—The Cardinals on theother hand are 9-13.   Wilson Contrares has the longest hitting streak in Major League Baseball, 14 games, at the end of the playing week.  Shortstop Masyn Win and Contreras are above .300 at the plate but the ‘Birds as a team are hitting only .219. But with an offense like that, the pitching staff’s 3.95 ERA, solid thought it be in today’s game, isn’t good enough.

The Optimist Award for 2024 goes to Sonny Gray, the pitching ace who says the Cardinals are going to turn things around big-time soon. Gray is doing his part, going 2-0 without an ERA and an 11-0 strikeout to walk ratio in his first two starts. Sunday, a dozen of the 19 outs he got were strikeouts. He did give up his first walk of the year and his first home run and that was enough for the Brewers in a 2-0 shutout.

(FOOTBALL)—As we were going to press (as they used to say in the journalism biz), reports were coming out that the new Athletic Director at the University was going to be Laird Veatch, the AD at Memphis for the last five years.

It’s a return for Veatch, who supervised fund raising for the athletic deaatment, 2000=2002. He later was the general manager of Mizzou Sports Properties in 2003, coordinating external media operators for Learfield Sports, which has multimedia rights with Tiger sports teams.  His first big job, other than lining up all of the NIL deals, will be raise half of the money for the $250 million dollar make over of the north end of Memorial Stadium.

(BATTLEHAWKS)—A big offensive day for the St. Louis Battlehawks coupled with a solid offensive day gave them a 32-17 win over the Memphis Showboats and a 3-1 record. St. Louis again led the UFL in attendance with 31,575 people in the Dome.

‘Hawks quarterback A. J. McCarron threw the ball an all-time high of 45 times, completed 35 of them for 222 yards and three touchdowns. Running back Jacob Saylors rushed for 103 yards. The defense gave up only 127 yards and let Memphis convert only one of ten third and fourth down attempts.

(Playing with Engines)

(INDYCAR)—Nobody INDYCAR “makes fuel” as Scott Dixon does.  He proved it again with his win at the Grand Prix of Long Beach.

Dixon went about 50 of the race’s 85 laps without refueling and had to hold off Josef Newgarden, who was closing the gap with ten laps left before   Newgarden was hit from behind by Colton Herta’s car.Herta went on to finish second, about one second behind Dixon.

The win extends Dixon’s record of having at leat one victory to twenty consecutive years.

(NASCAR)—The “big one” didn’t happen until the field was roaring toward the checkered flag at Talladega Superspeedway. With cars crashing ahead of him, and more crashing behind him, Tyler Reddick kept his foot on the floor and steered out of harms way to the win.

The crash was triggered when pole sitter Michael McDowell tried to block Brad Keselowski but touched Keselowski’s car at 200 mph and turned into the wall.  Reddick let the wrecking cars move out of his way while he slipped Keselowski for the win.

(FORMULA 1)—Max Verstappen adds the trophy for the Chinese Grand Prix to his shelf, posting a 13 second victory over runnerup Lando Norris.

(Photo Credit: Bob Priddy)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sports: A Big Vote; A Crash; Two Wins; A Closing Rush

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by Bob Priddy, Missourinet Contributing Editor

(STADIA)—It’s election day in Kansas City and the future of the Royals and the Chiefs might be determined.  The election is on the continuation of a special sales tax used to build, renovate, or keep up the places the Royals and the Chiefs play.

Baseball season has finally OFFICIALLY begun.

—but not well for our major league teams.  Both could snag only one win in their first weekend series.

(KANSAS CITY—The Royals had three solid starts against the Twins had no offense in the first game and a blown save in the second game. But the third game was a Royals offensive display.

Starters gave  up just two runs in 19 innings in the series.

Cole Ragans set a Royals record on opening day with nine strikeouts in six innings. He gave up two runs and that was one more than the Royals scored.  Ragans, who was impressive after a midseason trade last year, broke the opening day strikeout record set by Wally Bunker in 1970 and tied by Danny Duffy eight years ago. But the Twins won 4-1.

The Royals wasted a good start by offseason acquisition Seth Lugo in their second game. He and Twins starter Joe Ryan hooked up in a pitchers duel through six innings.  Lugo struck out four, walked one and allowed just two hits.  Ryan retired the first ten Royals he faced before giving up a double to Bobby Witt Jr., in the sixth. Reliever Steven Okert gave up a single to M. J. Melendez to give the Royals a 1-0 lead. But the Twins tied the game in the eighty and got four more in the ninth to win it 5-1.

Brady Singer gave the Royals their third quality start Sunday with seven shutout innings and ten strikeouts, giving up just one walk, and three hits. Salvador Perez’s three-run homer in the first inning was all he needed but the Royals pile on eight more runs, four of them coming on additional homers, to rack up an 11-0 win, their first victory of 2024.  It was the first five-homer game at home since July 22, 2017. It was the 25th game in club history to feature five home runs.

Michael Wacha’s first start for the Royals was a no-decision in which he lasted five innings and gave up only three hits. Unfortunately they all came in the fourth inning and resulted in three Baltimore runs that tied the game.  The Orioles won 6-4 last night on a two-run walk-off homer by Jordan Westburg, his first career walk-off hit. Bobby Witt Jr., and Salvador Perez both homered for the second straight game.

(CARDINALS)—The Cardinals also avoided a sweep in their season-opening series against the Dodgers but could have won twice with better bullpen performance in the final game of the series.  They had the Dodges down 4-1. But in the eighth, pinch-hitter Max Muncey homered with a man on to give the Dodgers the 5-4 lead that they protected in the ninth.

Center fielder Victor Scott II showed flashes of his potential in the series. He’s on the roster because of injuries to some of the Cardinals’ outfielders.  In the finale of the series Sunday, he was on base three times and scored twice. Starting pitcher Steve Matz gave up only five hits in in five and two-thirds innings, to go with two runs.

The Cardinals won the middle game of the three game set with Paul Goldschmidt’s ground out in the tenth inning bring home the winner in a 6-5 game. The Redbirds had taken a 5-3 lead by scoring all of their runs in the seventh thanks to some Dodger mishaps—a hit batter, a balk, and a catcher’s interference.  Lance Lynn was good for four innings in his first outing for the Cardinals in seven years. He did not return after a 35-minute rain delay.

The Cardinals opened a series last night against their former manager, Mike Schildt, in San Diego. Kyle Gibson shut down the Padres on four hits through seven innings while the Cardinals feasted on five Padres pitchers for 14 hits in a 6-2 win. Wilson Contreras and Brendan Donovan had their first homers of the season.

Cardinals officials say Lars Nootbar could be back in a few days. In a simulated game during the weekend, he batted four times and got in five innings of work. He’ll probably get some playing time at Memphis in midweek before coming off the IL Thursday.

Pitcher Sonny Gray reportedly will come off the IL in about a week.

(FOOTBALL)—The UFL season has opened in a stunning way for the St. Louis Battehawks, who lost to the Michigan Panthers on a last-second 64-yard field goal by someone who hasn’t kicked a field goal since high schools.

The Battlehawks had a comeback 16-15 lead when Michigan’s Jake Bates got a kick-three with three seconds left.  The Battlehawks had scored two touchdowns in the last quarter to take the lead.

The kick by Jake Bates caused some NFL eyes to pop open. The Detroit News has reported some NFL teams already have contacted him. He can’t sign with anybody until the UFL season ends June 2.

(ATTENDANCE)—The UFL drew far fewer people to its four opening weekend games than watch NFL games.  The Battlehawks-Panthers game drew 9,444 grandstand people. The other games ran the total to 45,918, a number likely to be bigger next weekend when the Battlehawks play at home. Last year St Louis led its league in attendance.

(CHIEFS)—The Kansas City Chiefs have signed a new backup quarterback—Carson Wentz, who gets a one-year deal to replace former Missouri QB Blaine Gabbert who has entered free agency after going 18 for 35 in passing with no touchdowns and three interceptions but getting his second Super Bowl ring. He got his first one as Tom Brady’s backup at Tampa Bay.

Wentz was Matthew Stafford’s number two guy with the Rams last year. He has a Super Bowl ring from his time with the Eagles.

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Chiefs receiver Rashee Rice has lawyered up after a six-car crash in Dallas during a freeway race between a Corvette and a Lamborghini.  Nobody was seriously hurt but it appears Rice and the other driver ran from the scene without learning if anyone had been hurt. His lawyer says he’s  cooperating and “will take all necessary steps to address this situation responsibly.”  Police think Rice was driving the Corvette.

A spokesman for the Chiefs has told KCMO Radio the team will “react accordingly” after it has the facts.

(BLUES)—The St. Louis Blues are trying to put together a late-season run that will let them slip into the Stanley Cup Playoffs.  But their loss to the San Jose Sharks during the weekend pushed them closer to the brink of missing them.

They bounced back last night with an overtime win in Edmonton. Brando Saad got his 25th goal of the season 2:09 into the overtime period to pull the Blues within three points of the Los Angeles Kings for the final playoff spot.  The Blues have gone 8-2-1 in their season-closing rush The Blues have seven games left.  The Kings lost to the Jets last night and have eight games left.

(BASKETBALL: BEARS)—Cuonzo Martin is back in Missouri, at Missouri State. He’s been there before. Martin last coached at the University of Missouri and was fired after two winning seasons out of five and a 78-77 record.

Martin led the Missouri State Bears for four years before leaving after the 2020-2011 season and a record of 61-41 that included the school’s only regular season Missouri Valley Conference championship. He has a five-year deal at $600,000 a year with bonuses.

(BASKETBALL: TIGERS)—Mizzou is keeping Robin Pingeton as its women’s basketball coach although then-Athletic Director Desireé Reed-Francois said Pingeton needed to get the Tigers back to the NCAA Tournament to keep her job.

Reed-Francois is gone. Pingeton is back for her fifteenth season although her team finished 11-19 this year.

Pingeton is paid $400,000 a year base salary. In her fourteen seasons she has taken the Lady Tigers to the NCAA Tournament four times, the last appearance being 2019, and to the Women’s NIT six times.  She’s 236-200 in her tenure at Mizzou.

Now, the circle sports:

(NASCAR)—Denny Hamlin has captured his second win of the season, a second in three weeks, but he has several critics who say he cheated.

NASCAR has a line at which points the leading car can accelerate toward a green flag on a restart. Numerous observers think that Hamlin sped up before getting to the line, gaining an advantage over Martin Truex, Jr., that he was able to hold to the checkered flag.

Hamlin had taken the lead coming out of the pits after the final caution flag and said after the race, “I wasn’t going to let them have an advantage that my team earned on pit road.”

Truex had led 228 of the 407 laps including 54 in a row before the final caution with two laps left.  Joey Logano and Kyle Larson slipped past him on the final laps.  Chase Elliott was fifth, just ahead of Christopher Bell who had started 29th.

(INDYCAR)—More testing has been run on the hybrid power system that INDYCAR wants to start using after the Indianapolis 500. Thirteen drivers from six teams ran 988 laps, more than 2400 miles, on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course.

Two other teams, Penske and Andretti Global, practiced with the regular powerplants, which will be used on the road course race at the start of May.

(F1)—Formula One returns to action next weekend with the GP of Japan.