(CHIEFS)—The Kansas City Chiefs remain undefeated after a workmanlike 22-6 win over the still-winless San Diego Chargers. The Chiefs are 5-0, undefeated in three games in the AFC West. The Chargers.  The Chargers are still looking for their first win after six games.

The Chiefs take on the Seatle Seahawks next weekend in Seattle. The Seahawks, with Kenneth Walker III on their side, won the Super Bowl this year. They’re split their first six games. Walker is now in the red and yellow, leading the league in rushing and giving a dimension to Kansas City’s offense that it hasn’t had in several years.

Parick Mahomes went 23/29 for 272 yards and one interception. The game was one of the rare times he did not pass for a touchdown. Walker added 128 yards to his year’s producito on 19 carries. He scored twice. He’s averaging 6.2 yards per carry—537 yards so far.

Harrison Butker was three for four in field goals; he has yet to hit one from 50 or more yards out. He missed half of his extra point tries.

(MIZBOO)— Saturday was one of those any give Saturdays.

We’d like to see the Ole Miss scouting report on the Missouri Tigers. They had them cold.

Missouri was not upset—Mississippi was a top-10 team–but the beat down the Tigers took was surprising. Clearly, Ole Miss had figured out a way to bottle up Missouri’s rushing game and how to riddle the Tiger Defense with both runs and passes. Missouri got the first three points of the game. Mississippi got the next 31, let Missouri runners get only 34 yards and kept the Tigers from scoring on ten straight possessions.

Missouri assisted in its misery with a badly kicked field goal and an interception at the goal line. The missed second-quarter field goal was the last time Missouri made it to red zone until the last part of the game when the goal line interception happened.

The Tigers ground game was grounded. Runners gained only 39 yards. The Tigers converted only six of 17 third downs, most of which were long. On average, Missouri was third and 7.8.

“You’ve got to figure out how to score,” said coach Drinkwitz, who also thought Missouri never got into “the rhythm of the game.”  The defense did but it wasn’t until the third quarter. But, “offensively, we were just pressing, we were pressing, we were pressing and we just weren’t able to do it.”

The loss might not be as severe as it seemed at the end of the game because Auburn upset #1 Georgia and #14, Unranked Florida toppled 7^th ranked Texas, Tennessee beat sixth-ranked Alabama. LSU, ranked 22^nd, dumped 16^th ranked Mississippi State.

Missouri drops to 2-2 in the conference, one of eight teams with two losses. Georgia, Kentucky, and Texas have one loss apiece. Alabama and Florida are 3-2. Missouri, LSU, Auburn, and Mississippi have split their four games. Texas and Oklahoma are 1-2.

Arkansas (3-4) is next up for Missouri after the bye week. Then it’s Texas and Georgia. Kentucky and Oklahoma will finish the season for Missouri.

(RATINGS)—ESPN dropped Missouri out of its top 25 after the loss to Mississippi but the AP and the Coaches put them back where they were two weeks ago—21^st and 22^nd.

(MIZHARDY)—Coach Drinkwitz says Ahmad Hardy still hasn’t started the two-week ramp-up to get on the active Tiger roster and he’s tired of being asked when Hardy will be ready.  Hardy is still in rehab for his off-season gunshot wound as Missouri heads into the seventh game of its 12-game season.  Drinkwitz says he’ll let everyone know when Hardy starts practicing.

It appears the earliest Hardy could be back would be for game ten.  As far as we know, Drinkwitz has not been asked bout red-shirting Hardy.

What Hardy’s role will be if he does come back this season is a matter of speculation with the emergence of Jamal Roberts, who ranks second in the national rushing statistics—by just seven yards.

(KICKED OFF)—Harrison Mevis, who stabilized the Los Angeles Rams’s field goal  kicking last year, has lost his touch…or his golden foot….and his job.  Mevis missed two field goals in last week’s Rams loss in overtime to the Buffalo Bills and the day afterwards, the Rams booted him off the team. He missed two field goals in a 37-34 Rams loss. The second one would have been a game winner. The second one, in overtime, was blocked.

Mevis, who was 12 of 13 last years is only five for nine this year and missed on 7 of 9 kicks from and 3 of 7 from forty yards or more. The Rams have called Blake Grupe off the practice squad to take his place.  Grup, who also has played for the Saints and the Colts is 18 of 27 in field goals in his career.

The Rams got one field goal out of his replacement, Blake Grupe, before Grupe injured a knee tackling a runner on a kick return. He had kicked a 44-yard field goal to give the Rams a 3-0 lead without ten minutes left in the first quarter. He’d been signed off the practice squad when Mevic was let go.

Grupe was the fifth kicker for the Rams in their last 57 games.

(MIZBB)—Tiger forward Annor Boateng has been ruled out for the season as he recovers from a knee injury suffered last January when he slipped going tor a dunk. Coach Dennis Gates thus has an opening in his lineup for Mark Mitchell if Mitchell keeps his court permission to play a fifth year.

Mitchell had committed to spend his fifth year with Kentucky before deciding to return to Missouri where he made the SEC All conference team twice. Nonetheless, a judge in Kentucky has ruled, for now, that he is eligible for a fifth year and has issued an injunction against the NCAA that sought to sideline him.

Gates, who testified for Mitchell in his most recent court case, says he did not discuss the return with Mitchell but he’d be glad to get him back. He said at the SEC Media Days, “When we were 0-19 (in 2023-24), that young man stepped foot on our campus, and the last two years, we were able to go to the NCAA Tournament. Call it what you may—sure, we lost in the first round the last two years—but I’ll always be here for Mark Mitchell, man. Without a doubt. That’s what it’s about. It’s not about using these young people; it’s about stepping foot in lockstep with them, every step of the way.”

Another NIL transfer, C. J. Gunn, has won his court case to be on the roster.

Gates says he did talk to Mitchell but did not recruit him to return. “When you have a kid for two years, you don’t have to recruit anybody. … When you do things the right way, you don’t have to recruit. You just hold your arms open and give them a hug when they return.”

(SOCCER)—We rarely cover pro soccer in these columns but when a record is involved, it’s particularly newsworthy. The St. Louis Soccer Club played to a scoreless draw against the Vancouver Whitecaps last Wednesday to remain unbeaten for 21 straight games, breaking the record of 19 by the Red Bull New York team in 2016. . The tie also guaranteed St. Louis will be in the playoffs. St. Louis is 14-6-9 overall.  The streak has guaranteed St. Louis a spot in the MLS playoffs.

(ROYALS)—The Kansas City Royals have released some new views of their intended downtown baseball park. The project location is a partnership with Hallmark Cards, owners of Crown Center, near the proposed ballpark. The Kansas City architectural firm, Populous, is designing the stadium.

The new four-deck stadium built on part of an 85 acre space that will include a ballpark district (for example, Ballpark Village in St. Louis).    that also will include residential and entertainment space will hold 34,000 fans, about four-thousand fewer than fit into Kauffman Stadium. There will be space for about 3,000 more to stand.  About two thirds of the fans will be shaded by a canopy.

The stadium actually will be in a big hole in the ground. Builders will have to carve a 90-foot deep hole in he Kansas City limestone before actual stadium construction can start.

It will have a lot of fountains, a reference to “The City of Fountains” that Kansas City calls itself.  The city owns 48 fountains with more than 150 additional ones in private hands. The city says it has more fountains than any other city except for Rome. Fans will be able to ride streetcars to get to it. Groundbreaking is expected next June. The Royals’ lease on the K runs out in 2031.

Cost: $1.9 billion.

To the Track—-

(NASCAR)—Tyler Reddick, the hottest driver in NASCAR at the start of the season is heating up again just in time to make the chase to the Cup Championship hotter as the season roars to its end.  Reddick won the first three races of the year and added two more to go five for the first nine. Since then he has settled back into the field.

Reddick won his first race since April 19 at Kansas City and when he led the field across the finish line in Phoenix Sunday he went from 114 points out of the lead to just 56 behind Kyle Larson with three races left in the season. He still has six drivers ahead of him, though.

Christopher Bell, who finished fourth, also closed on Larson, is only five points back.

Larson was never in the picture. His car never ran well at Phoenix and he eventually finished 24th after a blown tire send him into the wall.

Ahead next week is unpredictable Talladega, always a crap shoot for everybody.

-0-

(INDYCAR)—Alexander Rossi and Alex Palou, the test drivers for IndyCar’s new chassis due to go into serious competition in 2028 wrung out the new deal on the Sebring Road Course last week. Rossi was in a Chevrolet-powered car. Palou’s engine was a Honda.The runs were the first for the IR-28 chassis on a rough road course after early tests on the smooth asphalt at Indianapolis. The Sebring runs were the first durability runs intended to learn how the cars handled under extended street-course conditions.

Perhaps as an indication of what’s to come came while Palou was on the track at the same time other drivers were doing some off-season tire testing with the current cars.  Palou “accidentally” passed Kyle Kirkwood in one of the current cars.  His runs also showed a weakness in the new car when a fueling system cropped up. It was quickly fixed.

(Photo credits:Palou and Kirkwood—Chris Owens, IndyCar; Ole Miss wins—Instagram; Royals Stadium—Populous

Emmitt Foster and an accomplice broke into the St. Louis County home of Travis Walker and his girlfriend De Ann Keys at 2 a.m. on November 20, 1983. Both men shot Walker, who died, and Keys, who survived to identify Foster as his accomplice.

Both were convicted. Foster drew a death sentence. The other man got life.

Foster’s time and appeals ran out on May 31, 1995.

The Missourinet had a policy from the time the death penalty was reinstated that we would witness all executions.  We felt that any time the state exacted its utmost penalty, it should not be done secretly and that representatives of the media had to be present.

I sent my reporter, Brad Farrell, to Potosi to cover Foster’s execution. At the time, the Missourinet was offering a wire service to our affiliates and the editor went with him.

Missouri had a problem when it re-enacted the death penalty because it had no facility capable of administering it in the state penitentiary old penitentiary.  The gas chamber gasket that sealed the chamber closed had deteriorated so badly that the chamber could not contain the cyanide gas that was used, provoking fears that everybody else would die, too.

Until a room could be modified into a death chamber at the Potosi prison the gas chamber was modified with the removal of the two chairs inside, creating enough room for a gurney on which the condemned prisoner would lie. Equipment was installed for the administration of the drugs.  So the first death penalty inflicted after re-enactment of it was done with drugs in the gas chamber.

At Potosi, as is the case now at Bonne Terre, there are three glassed-in areas around the execution chamber. Media and other state witnesses sit in one area while friends, relatives and spiritual advisors of the condemned sit across the chamber. The third area is for other witnesses with interests in the case.  When the prisoner on the gurney raises his head and looks past his feet, he can see those witnesses. In one instance, a man who killed a highway patrolman looked up and saw the area packed with men in the blue uniforms of the patrol.

Foster’s execution, the 12^th by drugs in Missouri, was a routine event until something went wrong.

The blinds covering the windows of the witness areas were always closed while the preparations are underway inside the chamber and are not opened until all prison and medical personnel have departed, leaving the inmate tightly strapped to the gurney and able to move only his head and his feet.

The blinds were opened as the first drug began to flow into Emmitt Foster’s veins at 12:03 that morning. Normally the inmate has only a minute or so to find his witnesses and mouth any words to them, as they mouthed words to him—there is no public address system in the chamber.  It usually does not take long for the first drug to knock out the inmate, for his head to drop to the pillow. The other two drugs that paralyzed breathing and stopped the heart usually produced a couple of gasps and then stillness. In four or five minutes, the blinds were to close and the announcement would be given in the witness areas that the procedure had been completed.

But not for Foster. When things did not appear to be going the usual way, Brad, who had witnessed three other executions saw him “gasping and slightly convulsing and I could see that he was still breathing,” as the St. Louis Post-dispatch reported. Brad remembers turning to his Learfield colleague and saying “Something’s wrong. This isn’t what I’ve seen before.”  When Foster was still alive seven minutes into the procedure, the blinds were closed.

When the Washington County Medical Examiner entered the chamber about 12:27 to find out why Foster was still alive he noticed that a strap on Foster’s arm was fastened too close to his elbow while the needle allowing drugs to into his veins was closer to his wrist, the strap serving as something of a tourniquet. He told other officials to loosen the strap and after that, “things happened quickly.” Foster’s heartbeat quickly fell and stopped within three or four minutes.

The blinds remained closed for twenty-six minutes, three minutes after officials had gone back into the chamber to figure out what was wrong, correct it, and then complete the execution. He was pronounced dead at 12:33.  The blinds were reopened so witnesses could see that Foster was dead.

The witnesses filed out. “We didn’t see him die,” Brad told me a few days ago from his home in Alexandria Virginia. He’s now an attorney for the Department of Veterans Affairs. He and our Learfield wire service editor refused to sign the warrants attesting that they had witnessed the execution. “I didn’t know what had happened. They could have put a pillow over his face,” Brad said.

The medical examiner later called the incident “a little error” and commented, ”It’s not like the guy suffered,” he said.

We had a discussion with State Corrections Director Dora Shriro a day or two after the event to resolve issues related to the refusal to sign the document. Somewhere in the state archives, probably, is that document.

The Post-Dispatch commented, “Why shouldn’t the public’s representatives get to see what happens when the best laid plans for killing a prisoner go awry?  The state tries to make executions seem so clinical and so painless that the harsh truth of what is happening recedes into the background. The government is premeditatedly lowering itself to a criminal’s level by taking yet another life. Emmitt Foster’s slow death and the state’s frantic reaction bring home once again what capital punishment really means—and make one more argument for no more executions.”

The Death Penalty Information Center, has counted at least 65 botched executions, 1982-present, most involving lethal injection in Tennessee, Idaho, Alabama, and Ohio because of problems hooking up intravenous lines.  Foster is twenty-second on the list, the only one from Missouri

Missouri has executed 90 more men since that night without a repeat of Foster’s death.

(Photo Credit–Missouri Department of Corrections)

We recently condemned, without using the word, the actions of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement goons who hauled four people out of the nearby town of Holts Summit and took them somewhere for some reason, apparently without warrants and taking special care not to identify themselves, somehow scaring the county sheriff enough that he didn’t want to know anything about what they were doing with these people.

We got some pretty strong positive feedback (thank you) and some negative feedback that basically boiled down to, “But they were criminals when they came across the border to begin with.”

There’s no disagreement that they broke the law by crossing illegally.  But that hardly justifies what Trump’s goons are doing to large swaths of people.  And there are numbers that prove that our president has turned this agency into a bunch of thugs.

An example of that attitude came to light during the weekend, a story about a youth baseball coach who confronted ICE agents armed with guns and tasers who approached some high school kids at a youth baseball camp practice in New York City and started asking them about their nation of origin and other issues. Coach Houman Wilder, who has a master’s degree in law and who has coached the Harlem Baseball Academy for years, stepped in, told his players to go to a nearby batting cage, and told the agents their actions were inappropriate. He told a The West Side Rag, an online news site covering the Upper West Side of Manhattan, “They started to talk about cuffing me, and that if the kids were here legally, what do they have to lose by answering. I told them that they still have their fifth and fourth amendment rights, and that they don’t have to speak to you or help with any investigation.”

He told MSNBC an agent told him, “I don’t care what the law says,” and called him a “YouTube lawyer” before leaving.

Wilder says the ball players are all American-born although their parents are from Africa, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic and many don’t come to practice now because their parents are scared.

You can watch the interview at Bing Videos

Associated Press reporter Melissa Goldin’s recent story reiterated Trump’s pledge to deport “the worst of the worst”—rapists, murderers, and child predators. (As we recall, he referred to them during his campaign as “animals.”)

He promised the largest deportation program in history. He’s determined to be remembered for that. And he will be. We believe he would not like how he will be remembered, but he won’t be around to write inflammatory overnight internet ravings of protest.

He says he wants to protect law-abiding citizens from these terrible people.

The problem is that most of these people ARE law-abiding, other than with the way they came here.

In kind of a strange way, perhaps, we should be complimented that people would be so desperate to seek opportunities and freedoms they don’t have elsewhere that they will break our laws by coming to this country illegally.  Most of us cannot fathom what we have meant to so many people from throughout the world.

The growing question of concern is who is going to protect us from Trump’s protectors.

Reporter Goldin has seen “nonpublic data” collected by one of the world’s leading libertarian think tanks, The Cato Institute, that shows almost two-thirds of the people picked up by ICE in the first eight months of this fiscal year had NO CRIMINAL CONVICTIONS. Of those with convictions, fewer than seven percent did violent crimes.

A little more than half, 53%, had immigration, traffic, or vice crimes.

(One of the founders of the Cato Institute, by the way, was Charles Koch, one of the Koch brothers who have poured hundreds of millions of dollars, at least, into Republican campaigns. Charles Koch remains as Chairman of the Board of Koch Industries. His brother, David, died six years ago. The Kochs have been strong supporters of conservative Republicans but they want nothing to do with Donald Trump.)

In the first five months of the fiscal year, ICE was arresting about 650 people a day. Then, at the end of the May, the power behind the throne—Stephen Miller—demanded 3,000 arrests a day. And the agents appear to be doing their best to do his bidding.

The AP story quotes the Transactional Records Clearinghouse as calculating ICE arrests jumped by thirty percent in May, compared to April, and another 28 percent in June and that that Cato Institute figures for the fourth months from February to May, show that ICE fed 421-454 “non criminals” a day into the system. But in the last two weeks of May and the first half of June, the numbers were 678 for the first two weeks and 927 for the second two weeks.

The AP also reported the Bureau of Economic Review put out a working paper two years ago showing that for the last century and a half, the incarceration rate for immigrants has been lower than for people born in this country and the gap has widened in the last six decades with immigrants SIXTY PERCENT LESS LIKELY to be incarcerated than American-born people.

Trump and his crowd like to dehumanize all immigrants by citing specific killings or rapes done by illegal immigrants, never mentioning how much greater, by far, are incidents of lifelong legal citizens committing those same crimes.

So let’s be clear about our view from this quiet hill:  Demagogues and dictators rise to power and try to stay in power by turning a segment of a nation’s population into dangers to society. They achieve dominance by making us afraid of our neighbors and the strangers we pass on the streets, or those who live in lesser neighborhoods or ethnic communities.

We always have to hate somebody, to fear somebody when the people we most must fear are those who paint others with the broad brush of dehumanization.

Should we turn a blind eye to those who are here illegally?  No.

Should we not care about immigrants who do deal drugs and who do commit terrible personal crimes?  No. We should arrest them and hold them as we would hold regular Americans. But our government does not round up the few who are dangerous. It is rounding up thousands of us in random raids and carting people off to undisclosed locations.

Just as we were posting this entry, a truly unnecessary tragedy was reported that is off-topic but is not surprising for this heartless administration. We must include it because it cries out for the telling of a story that is our conclusion.

The Atlantic reported that today (Wednesday), the Trump administration is going to incinerate 500 tons of USAID food for children living in war and disaster zones. It is part of the destruction of the agency that for years has carried a message of American kindness around the world. The magazine says that’s enough food to feed 1.5 million children a week and that it’s enough to feed every starving child in Gaza. It’s part of the sixty-thousand tons of food originally targeted for Sudan, which is battling a famine.  But The Atlantic reports that food cannot be delivered because the USAID has been gutted and its logistics experts have been fired.

These are not immigrants we are told we must fear and hate. These are children who will die because of one man.

Let’s look back to the 1950s when we were supposed to be fearful that our federal government was filled with Communists.

On a day in early June, seventy-one years ago, Senator Joseph McCarthy in one of his sensational hearings accused young Boston lawyer Frederick G. Fisher of being a member of a group he considered “a legal arm of the Communist Party.” Fisher worked with Joseph Welch’s firm, Hale and Dore. Welch was the lawyer for the Army in those hearings and had recognized that Fisher’s association with a left-leaning student group while in law school could be a problem. So he replaced him during the hearings.

But that didn’t keep McCarthy from attacking him.

McCarthy’s reckless accusation was stunning. For some reason, I was watching those events on our 13-inch Admiral black and white television set that day. I had no understanding of what the hearings was all about but what happened in a few minutes created in me a strong memory as I watched as a seething Joseph Welch, his voice shaking with emotion, barely controlling his composure, look McCarthy in the eye and say:

“Until this moment, Senator, I think I have never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Fred Fisher is a young man who went to the Harvard Law School and came into my firm and is starting what looks to be a brilliant career with us.… Little did I dream you could be so reckless and so cruel as to do an injury to that lad. It is true he is still with Hale and Dorr. It is true that he will continue to be with Hale and Dorr. It is, I regret to say, equally true that I fear he shall always bear a scar needlessly inflicted by you. If it were in my power to forgive you for your reckless cruelty I would do so. I like to think I am a gentle man but your forgiveness will have to come from someone other than me.”

When McCarthy appeared to pay no attention to Welch’s remarks and began another rambling insinuation, Welch cut him off:

“Senator, may we not drop this? We know he belonged to the Lawyers Guild.… Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency??”

There they are.  Three words for our time.

Reckless.  Cruel.

Children will starve because this administration has eliminated the people who could deliver it and the solution is to burn it.

Joseph Welch’s third word echoes from his  last sentence. It must be repeated and repeated and repeated today.

“Have you no sense of decency, sir?”

Decency is a word I have not heard lately, to our country’s shame. Nor, it seems, is it a word that is in any way familiar to our chief executive. He will shed no tears but all of us should.

(If you want to watch that dramatic moment that many believe turned the Senate against McCarthy, here it is from PBS:  Bing Videos)

(BASEBALL)—We hit the all-star break and take a look at where our teams are and who they have picked to shape their futures.

(CARDINALS)—The Cardinals  are five games above .500, third in the division, but 4½ games behind the Mariners in the fight for a playoff spot. Nobody on the team is dominating the squad. Sonny Gray and Steven Matz are a combined 14-5. Ryan Helsley has 19 saves in 33 appearances. Offensively, Wilson Contreras and Lars Nootbar each have a dozen home runs. Contreras is hitting .253 but Noot is only hitting .235.  Victor Scott II has 23 stolen bases but would have a whole lot more if he was hitting better than .235.  Jordan Walker is in at only .210.

(ROYALS)— The Kansas City Royals are three games under .500 at 47-50 with one of last year’s star pitchers dealing with a rotator cuff problem.  Cole Ragans is on the IL with a 2-3 record and a 5.18 ERA after having 21 quality starts last year and going 11-9.

An emerging star is rookie Noah Cameron who struck out eight in six and two-thirds innings Sunday to lower his ERA to 2.31. But he’s only 2-3, a record that underline how much the Royals struggle to score. He’s carving a place in the Royals record book, though.  He has tied Steve Busby’s record of five quality starts to begin a career—five. He and LA’s Fernando Valenzuela are the only pitchers in the history of the major leagues to pitch at least six innings and allow one or fewer runs in their first five starts.

Michael Wacha, after a solid year in ’24, is 4-9 despite a presentable 3.94 ERA and All-Star Kris Bubic is only 7-6 despite a 2.48 ERA. Seth Lugo is only 6-5 while giving up only 2.67 earned runs per nine innings.

Power is coming from three guys—Vinnie Pasquantino with 15 homers; Bobby Witt with 14, and Salvador Perez with 13. Rookie Joe Caglianone, brought up in hopes he’d add some offensive lightning, is hitting only .140 although he’s hit some tape-measure home runs.

(FUTURE)—In three or four or five years, we might be hearing some of these names in the starting lineups for our major league teams.

The Cardinals first draft pick was Tennessee’s lefty Liam Doyle who helped his team defend its college championship and led Division 1 in strikeouts for a lot of the season. He’s a fastballer (95-97 mph) who can get it as fast as 99-100. He averaged 15.4 strikeouts per nine innings.

The Cardinals reached down to a high school for their second choice, shortstop Ryan Mitchell from Houston, Texas. There are questions about his hitting style and it’s not clear whether he’s better at short or second.

The Redbirds returned to Tennessee for their third pick, right hander Tanner Franklin, who has a fast ball that can touch 102. He also has a low 90s cutter. Franklin is seen as a reliever.

Jack Gurevitch from the University of San Diego is a first baseman with a lot of raw power but scouts say he needs to improve his discipline at the plate.

One player from Missouri was picked by the Cardinals, catcher Chase Heath from the University of Central Missouri. He was picked in the 20^th round, the 600^th pick.

(ROYALS—The Royals had five picks on the first day, with outfielder Sean Gamble of  IMG Academy as their number one. He’s a Des Moines native, left handed contact hitter. Their second choice was infielder Josh Hammond, also in high school—at Wesleyan Christian Academy in North Carolina. He’s been drafted as a shortstop although he pitched for USA Baseball’s U18 team. His bat is what drew interest—.471, six homers and 29 RBIs in 19 game.s

The second round pick was Tulane relief pitcher Michael Lombardi who had 73 Ks in 42 innings.

Although Texas A&M lefty Justin Lamkin was 5-7 this year in 15 starts, the Royals liked his control and his three-pitch repertoire. He had 98 strikeouts and just 19 walks in 84.1 innings.

The last draftee for KC is righty Cameron Millar, a high schooler from Martinez, California. He’s 6-2, fastball-changeup guy.  He has signed to play college ball at Arizona.

(MIZ—DRAFT)—Two Missouri Tigers were taken in late rounds of the baseball draft. Infielder Jason Lovich was picked in the 14^th round by the Yankees and Sam Horn—once considered a leading candidate as a football quarterback at Mizzou—went in the 16^th round to the Dodgers. Horn is a redshirt sophomore at MU.

Lovich, in three years at Mizzou, hit .311 in 108 games and ranked sixth in the SEC with a .357 average this year.

Horn, who came to Missouri as a two-sport athlete, only played five games for the Tigers this year after missing all of 2024 after Tommy John surgery. This year he struck out 14 batters in 10.2 innings.

If he stays at Mizzou, he will be one of four competitors for quarterback. Drew Pyne, who filled in for a couple of games last year, is back. Beau Pribula has been brought in at a good price to be the leading contender. Freshman Matt Zellers also is listed in the depth chart.

Moving along—very fast

(INDYCAR)—Pato O’Ward and Alex Palou picked up wins at the Iowa Speedway last weekend and Penske Racing saw a weekend of promise turn to ashes.

In Saturday’s race, Penske’s Josef Newgarden started from pole and led the first 232 of the race’s 275 laps only to see O’Ward seize the lead because of a pit stop bobble by Newgarden’s crew and hold on for the win.

But the race was the best of the year for the Penske team as its driver finished 2-3-4.Will Power joined Newgarden on the podium and Scott McLaughlin, who started 27^th after wrecking in qualifying, worked his way to fourth.  Points leader Alex Palou came home fifth.

O’Ward, who has three second place finishes this year,  became the sixth driver in Indycar history to win in his 100^th career race. The last driver to do that in the series was Patrick Carpenter in 2002. The first four are Indycar Legends—Rodger Ward, A. J. Foyt, Mario Andretti, and Bobby Unser.  O’Ward also won his 50^th start.

His win is the first for a Chevrolet-powered car this year.

Things fell apart early for Penske cars on Sunday.  McLaughlin was knocked out on the fifth lap in a tangle with Devlin  DeFrancesco and finished 26^th. Power left with mechanical issues and finished 24^th.  Newgarden led some laps but could only make it to 10^th.

The Sunday race produced a seventh winner’s trophy for the year for Alex Palou, who saw his points lead build.  Palou had a dominant day, running in front for 192 laps and finished just ahead of Scott Dixon. Marcus Armstrong tied his best career finish by crossing the line third.

Saturday’s winner, Pato O’Ward, could only muster a fifth-place finish.

Palou has a 129-point lead on O’Ward as the Indycar season heads into the last third of its schedule.  Kyle Kirkwood, who has three wins this year, and went into the weekend in second place, had disappointing results and dropped to fourth in the points behind Dixon.

The series moves to the streets of Toronto next weekend.

(NASCAR)—-Another road course. Another dominating win for Shane von Gisbergen. His win at Sonoma is his third of the year and puts him as the number four seed for the playoffs. Denny Hamlin, Kyle Larson, and Christopher Bell won their third races earlier.

Van Ginsbergen started from the pole and established solid leads throughout in a record-setting or tying performance, leading a record 97 of the 110 laps around the 1.99-mile course and finishing more than 1.1 seconds ahead of Chase Briscoe.

It is his third straight win from the pole on a road course, equaling Jeff Gordon’s string stretching over the 1998 and 1999 seasons. The win in his 34^th start is the fourth of his Cup career, the fastest a driver has won four to start his career since Parnelli Jones did it in  1967 in start number 31. He broke Jeff Gordon’s record of 92 laps led set in 2004.

Nobody else led more than four laps.

Only six races are left before the 16-driver playoffs. Competition for the 16^th spot is fierce after twenty races. A. J. Allmendinger has it but five drivers are within twenty points, three within ten.

Next up for NASCAR is the short track at Dover.

(photo credits: O’Ward and Palou—Bob Priddy; von Ginsbergen—NASCAR (Meg Oliphant/Getty Images)

(It is always interesting when one has been away for a while, even for a week or so, that things haven’t changed—they’ve only occurred—during the absence. We’ll try to catch up on sports today).

(BASEBALL)—This is the last week before the All-Star game Monday night in Atlanta. Brendan Donovan of the Cardinals will be a National League reserve. Bobby Witt Jr., will be a reserve shortstop for the American League. Kris Bubic has made the AL pitching roster.

Neither team has a player in the home run derby.

The Royals are going to take a look at 2015 Cy Young Award winner Dallas Keuchel, now 37, and under a minor league contract. He was cut by the Brewers a year ago and hasn’t thrown a major league pitch since. He finished last year in Japan with the Chiba Lotte Pirates where he pitched 40 innings and had a 3.60 ERA.

Since his big year with the Astros, Keuchel has bounced around with the Braves, White Sox, Diamondbacks, Rangers, and the Twins. He’s 103-92 in his career with a 4.04 ERA. He’ll begin his attempted return in Omaha and could make two-million dollars if he climbs back to the major league roster.

The Cardinals roster is standing pat for now but there’s all kinds of speculation about what will happen between now and the trade deadline.  Noland Arenado says his shoulder is feeling better and he hopes he can come off the IL this week. He’s still the talk of the speculators when it comes to being trade bait.

The Royals continue to muddle along with a sub-.500 record. The Cardinals continue to be the surprise team of the year despite some embarrassing performances in the last week or so—three straight shutouts at the hands of the Pirates, and Miles Mikolas’s tendency to throw home run balls (21 so far), becoming the first Cardinals pitcher to give up six in a single game (among the ten hits and eight earned runs the Cubs got in the first six  innings of their blowout of the ‘Birds., six of the homers came in the first three innings, a Chicago record, off Mikolas).  MLB.com’s John Denton calculated the home runs totaled 2,441 feet, almost a half-mile.

(RIVALRY)—-Missouri and Illinois in this case, and in football.  The Tigers and the Fighting Illini had agreed to an eight-game series stretched though ten years.  But Illinois AD Josh Whitman has announced that series has been cut to six games.

The games will be played in Columbia and in Champaign-Urbana, not on a neutral St. Louis field. The first one will be in 2027, seventeen years after the most recent of their 24 games. Missouri has won seventeen of them including the 2010 game,  23-13. Missouri has won the last six games against Illinois.

(UF/NFL)—-Another former Missouri Tiger has performed well enough in the recently-concluded United Football League season to be given a shot at playing in the NFL. In this case its Yasir Durant, a former tackle for the Tigers, who has signed with the New England Patriots.

He was a starting offensive lineman for the DC Defenders, the UFL champions.

He’s joining Marcus Bryant, who was picked by the Patriots in the seventh rough of this year’s draft. Bryant played his final year at MU.  Both will try to make the team at left tackle.

Durant played 34 games for the Tigers from 2017-2019 and has been in and out of the NFL several times since. He made the Kansas City Chiefs roster in 2020 as an undrafted free agent and played in eleven games, mostly on special teams. He was traded to the Patriots and played seven games for them in ’21 before he was waived. He also made the rosters of the Broncos and the Saints but only saw action in two of their games.

Durant has made brief stops at the Denver Broncos and New Orleans Saints since then, but only played two NFL snaps between those two teams. In the UFL, he played every offensive line position except center for the Defenders. The center was another ex-Tiger, Michael Maietti.

Durant is the second former Tiger who played in the UFL this year to get an invite to move up. Place kicker Harrison Mevis, who played for the Birmingham Stallions this year, has been signed by the New York Jets.

(BLUES)–The St. Louis Blues will look similar, but not the same, next season as they did in the one just finished.  They’ll be sporting new duds, easily recognizable but more modern, or as Marketing Officer Steve Chapman put it, “We want to honor everything that has taken place to get us to where we are today. But we want to focus on what we’re doing next.”

The new blue home jersey looks something like the jersey worn for the 2017 Winter Classic that was held at Busch Stadium.

The white jersey for road games is reminiscent of the jersey worn for the 2022 Winter Classic in Minnesota.

The change in four years in the making. It started in 2021 when the Blues hired Mississippi-based Rare Design to come up with the new schemes:

You’ll have to wait until September.  You could have bought one a lot sooner but the National Hockey League was busy ending its contract with Adidas and signing on with Fanatics.

-0-

(PORTER)—Michael Porter Jr., who was never healthy enough to recognize his potential at Mizzou, has been traded from the Denver Nuggets to the Brooklyn Nets. Denver gets Cam Johnson and a gives up a first-round draft pick in 2032. Denver also frees up some salary space because Porter’s $179.3 million contract signed in 2021 pays him $79 million in the next two seasons while Johnson will get only $44 million.

Porter was highly-regarded in Denver as one of the key players in the Nuggets’ NBA title year in 2023. This year he averaged 18.2 points, seven rebounds and two assists per game. He was a 50% shooter from the field, almost 40% from three.

(BOOKER)—Another big NBA contract involves  Devin Booker, who did not play for Missouri but his father, Melvin, did in the Norm Stewart Era.  The Phoenix Sun have decided to built the team around him and will pay dearly for it. Reports say Melvin’s kid has agreed to a two-year, $150 million contract extension that will keep him with the team until he’s 33. In the next five years, he’ll make $321 million.

Booker averaged 25.6 ppg, seven assists and four rebounds a game last season.  He’s a four-time all-star and holds the team’s scoring record.

Dad Melvin played pro basketball for fifteen years but only a couple of years in the NBA, 32 games with the Houston Rockets, Denver Nuggets and the Golden State Warriors on callups from the development league before going abroad with teams in Asia and Europe.

Catching up to the speedsters:

(INDYCAR)—Alex Palou beat the heat at Road America to race into the Indycar history books, taking his sixth win in the first nine races of the year, equaling A. J. Foyt’s start of the 1975 season.

Palou took the lead when Scott Dixon had to pit for a splash-and-go with three laps left and finished ahead of Felix Rosenqvist and Santino Ferrucci, who continues to elevate A. J. Foyt’s team in the series. David Malukis, who spun into the gravel on the first lap, rallied back to finish seventh in the other Foyt Car.  Dixon dropped to ninth because of his late fuel stop.

Louis Foster, had had his first pole start of his Indycar career, wound up 11^th.

The air temperature of 96 degrees and a track temperature of 131 degrees challenged the field and left some drivers getting water bottles thrown over the fence to them at the end of the race.

o-o

At Mid-Ohio last weekend, Dixon proved once again he’s a master at stretching a gallon, held off Palou by about four-tenths of a second to pick up his first win of the year, extending his streak to 21 years with at least one win.

Dixon had help from Palou, who appeared to be on the way to his seventh win when he made a mistake with just over five laps to go that let Dixon slip past.  The win is number 59 for Dixon, who now trails  only A. J. Foyt, who had 67 Indycar wins.

Especially significant, however, is that he has won a race in 23 seasons and is still a contender as he nears his 45^th birthday for a seventh series title, which would tie Foyt’s record.

The win is the tenth of the year for Honda. The only other engine manufacturer in Indycar, Chevrolet, has yet to put a car in victory lane. However, it does provide the Corvette pace cars, who it runs ahead of the field for a while.

The race was another major disappointment for the sport’s leading team—Penske Racing. Josef  Newgarden’s rear wheels locked up just after the start that caused a spin that also took out Graham Rahal. Will Power’s car caught fire on pit road early in the race, putting him in 26^th place at the end, one spot better than Newgarden. The best that Scott McLaughlin could do was a 23^rd.

The team known for its dominance of the sport has started P1 in only two of the ten races, has only eight top five finishes combined, and a dozen top tens. The three Penske cars have led only 133 laps this  year (only one by Power and 27 by Newgarden).

Missourians wanting to catch an Indycar race have another good opportunity next weekend when Palou, et al, run at Iowa.

(NASCAR)—Georgia native Chase Elliott’s 44-race non-winning streak ended at Atlanta with a last lap pass of Brad Keselowski.  It’s his 20^th career win in a race red-flagged for fifteen minutes because of rain in the first stage and stopped again for nine minutes after a crash that involved more than half of the cars.

The win locks Elliott into the ten-race run for the NASCAR Cup and moves him to fifth in the points standings. He’s the 11^th driver to claim a playoff spot in the field of 16. Atlanta was the 18^th race of the year. The playoff field will be set after 26 races.  Non-winners filling out the field will be determined by points. Bubba Wallace has the 16^th spot after Atlanta, but he has a little cushion over Ryan Preece, who is 23 points behind him. Others hoping they can rally to get in are Erik Jones (49 points back), A. J. Almendinger (minus 59), and Carson Hocevar, 62 points out.

Chicago belonged the SVG—Shane van Gisbergen, the Australian race driver who made his NASCAR Cup debut two years ago by winning a race on the streets of downtown  Chicago in a drenching rain picked up his second win in the last three races by running off at the end of this year’s event, also run under increasingly threatening skies.  In fact, he swept both the Cup race but the Xfinity race the day before. He started on the pole in both.  He had a two second lead on the last lap when the caution came out and froze the field because a broken brake rotor sent Cody Ware’s car head-on into the tire barrier at more than 90 mph.

Ware radioed his crew that he “needs help,” but it took more than 30 seconds for NASCAR to thrown the yellow flag and for a rescue crew to get to his car.   He was able to climb out and was released from the track medical center after a checkup.

NASCAR says there was no television camera that captured the severe impact of the crash, which led to the delay in showing the caution flag.

Van Gisbergen’s win makes him the 12^th driver in the playoffs. The race also saw a tightening of the points race for the sixteen playoff positions.  Bubba Wallace’s 28^th place finish and Ryan Preece’s run the seventh put Preece just two points behind Wallace for the 16^th playoff slot.

(Photo credits:  Blues jerseys–Steve Roberts-Imagn Images; Dixon—Bob Priddy; Penske Logo—team Penske; All Star Game logo—sportslogos.net)

(CARDINALS)—The St. Louis Cardinals have opened the week with four two-run homers by four different players to beat the Cubs and pull to within a half-game of first. Place.  The 8-2 win is the Redbirds’ sixth in their last seven games.  Matthew Liberatore pitched seven strong innings and had plenty of over-the-wall support from  Alex Burlison, Brendan Donovan, Lars Nootbar, and Nolan Gorman.

Reliever Andre Granillo, just called up from Memphis, got his first strikeout, his first save, and his first win in a Chicago doubleheader.  He picked up his first major league win by throwing four pitches in the first game of a doubleheader as the Cardinals got a run in their next at-bat.

(ROYALS)—The Royals dropped to 38-40 with a loss Sunday to the Padres.  They next face Tampa Bay, a team that is 43-35.

Rookie Jac is still adjusting to major league pitching but he has ripped two considerable home runs and has made a sparking grab over the wall to keep a home run from being a home run.

Although he’s only hitting .203, there’s another statistic that is important for Royals fans to recognize.  He had yet to record his first strikeout.

Last week, Salvador Perez continued his outstanding June with his 282^nd career home run. His season batting average is .235 but he’s catching up to respectable levels, hitting .280 in the first nineteen games in June. He already has 41 RBI.

(MIZFB)—The recruiting never stops in college football and Missouri is up to five pledges for the class of 2026. The latest signee is Chicago three-star running back Maxwell Warner, the 26^th best player and number one running back in Illinois.

(MIZZBB)—Missouri’s basketball team is looking at a pretty tough schedule for the 2025-26 season. Nineteen of their 31 scheduled games will be against schools that made the NCAA tournament last year. Ten of their opponents were in the big tournament earlier this year.

The first game is November 3 against Howard University.

Now for the horsepower set:

(Indycar)—The Indycar prime time Sunday night race at World Wide Technology Raceway near St. Louis a few days ago was such a hit with television viewers that more oval races might be scheduled in the future.  The primetime broadcast of this year’s race, won by Kyle Kirkwood, drew 96 percent more viewers than watched the race in 2024 and for the first time in nine years, more than one-million viewer tuned in to the first two races after the Indianapolis 500.

Penske vice-president Bud Denker says the audience numbers for younger viewers was encouraging. He told RACER magazine. “The other thing that was so terrific was the 18- to 34-year-old trend we’re seeing, We’re up 56 percent now for the season in the 18- to 34-year-old category. So that’s mega for us with new viewership.”

Alex Palou won his sixth race of the year at Road America last weekend, leaving the series with only two winning driver through the first nine races.  Three-time winner Kyle Kirkwood finished fourth. Felix Rosenqvist and Santino Ferrucci joined Palou on the podium.

The last time and Indycar driver won six of the first nine races of the year was 1975 when A. J. Foyt did it.

Rosenqvist finished two seconds back but nobody had anything to challenge Palou after him. Ferrucci was 17 seconds behind.

Rosenqvist had the fastest lap of the race.  You can ride along with him at:

Felix Rosenqvist Sets Fastest Lap at XPEL Grand Prix

Indycar moves on to the road course at Mid-Ohio in two weeks.

(NASCAR)—Chase Briscoe withstood the intense pressure of teammate Denny Hamlin and last years series champion, Ryan Blaney for the last 34 laps of the NASCAR race at  Pocono. All three drivers with trying to stretch their fuel to the end.

Briscoe won his first race for his new team—Joe Gibbs Racing—by about seven-tenths of a second over Denny Hamlin. Blaney held on for third.

He beat the master of the Pocono Raceway; Hamlin has a record seven wins on that track and his finished first or second ten times. His win makes him the 11^th driver to qualify for the 16-driver competition in the season’s last ten races that will decide the NASCAR Cup champion.

(Photo credit: World Wide Technology Raceway; Bob Priddy—Palou at WWTR)