Fan Stop Central

Pitchers Max Lanier and Fred Martin, and second baseman Lou Klein “jumped” the Cardinals following the 1946 season in order to join the Mexican League.

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Harrison J. Weaver, St. Louis Cardinals trainer from 1927 to 1955, was also the inventor of the nasal filter (for athletes with hay fever) as well as foam rubber insoles for athletic shoes.

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Cardinals catcher Ted Simmons led the team in RBI for seven consecutive seasons.

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Former Cardinals outfielder Ethan Allen (1933) authored several books on baseball technique including Winning Baseball and Baseball Play and Strategy.

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Kyle Busch took the checkered flag at Bristol Motor Speedway on Sunday, winning NASCAR’s first Car of Tomorrow venture and giving Chevrolet its 600th victory. But, is that really the big story? Who cares if Kyle Busch won this or any other race? Fan Stop Central wants to know more about this Car of Tomorrow.

So for that, we turn to NASCAR.com and David Caraviello:

BRISTOL, Tenn. — Poor little Bristol deserves so much better than this.

It’s been good to NASCAR, it really has. It’s given the sport its most compelling competitive venue. It’s proven that with the right combination of aggression and theater, Nextel Cup racing can thrive even in the kind of remote, Southern setting NASCAR is moving away from. It’s shown that day or night, despite sometimes snow and ice and always a dearth of decent hotel rooms, 160,000 souls will unfailingly make their twice-yearly pilgrimage to the hills of eastern Tennessee.

And this is how it gets treated. By serving as guinea pig for a new type of vehicle that, however commendable the intentions, sucked much of the life out of Sunday’s event at Bristol Motor Speedway. This on the heels of last year’s fall race, usually a fiesta of frayed nerves under the hot lights, which the looming Chase for the Nextel Cup turned into a sit-in by cautious drivers scared at missing out on a title.

Now there’s the Car of Tomorrow, which made its debut Sunday in a Food City 500 full of drivers fighting tight vehicles that only wanted to travel in a straight line. It’s a noble effort to develop a racecar that in theory makes the driver safer, costs less and equalizes competition. But what a shame that venerable Bristol, the toughest ticket on the circuit, had to host a rolling science project rather than its typical Nextel Cup event.

Even the winner was disappointed. “From my perspective,” Kyle Busch said, “it wasn’t a very good race.”

Sure, there were 14 lead changes among 10 different drivers, and David Ragan’s fourth spin of the day forced a green-white-checkered finish that spiced up the end. But Bristol races have always been about drama and action, two things notably absent from Sunday’s race. Just as they were absent from last year’s fall event, where cautious leaders wary of Chase contention drove as if their cars were made of glass. Two duds in a row at Bristol is not what 160,000 people pay to see.

Not everyone agreed. Runner-up Jeff Burton: “I didn’t think the race was any different [Sunday] from the race we had last year. That’s my point of view. I may be wrong, but from my point of view, it seemed like just another race at Bristol.” NASCAR VP for competition Robin Pemberton: “Probably 99 percent of the time, you have really good races here. From the tower, I thought it was a good race.”

Sunday’s event was unfortunately in that last 1 percent. Hey, it wasn’t the 1973 March race that Cale Yarborough somehow won wire-to-wire. But it had no energy, no vitality, no juice. There were some long green-flag stretches where the leaders were strung out the length of a frontstretch, and it seemed — oh, the heresy — like a miniaturized California.

“When I got up front into the top-six, top-seven, [early leader] Tony Stewart was gone. He was checked out. Second place was five car-lengths ahead of third place, which was three car-lengths ahead of fourth. We just kind of got strung out there in the front. I was running around there like 12th, 11th, 10th, and I looked up front and there was nothing going on,” Busch said.

“I said, ‘Oh, this is a great race.’ The spotter came over and said, ‘There’s a logjam behind you.’ I’m like, ‘There’s a logjam because people can’t turn.’ They’re sliding up the racetrack, they’re bumping into each other just trying to make way and get through traffic and what not. When you’re out front, you can’t pass all that well. I got tight in traffic, and then late in the race when Denny [Hamlin] came up to pass me, I was loose. At Bristol, that’s definitely not very cool.”

Busch didn’t try to hide his disdain for the new car, which will also be used in next week’s race at Martinsville. NASCAR decided to begin the rollout on short tracks, and gather information about the vehicle’s performance before moving on to larger venues where aerodynamics are more of a factor. Before the race, Busch told crew chief Alan Gustafson that he hoped he would win the COT’s maiden voyage so he could tell everyone “how terrible it is.” And he did just that.

“It just doesn’t turn,” he said. “For me, it’s not very fun to drive. It’s a hard car to race around the racetrack with other competitors, because it just doesn’t have the maneuverability. You can’t really pass that well. With the old car, if you were tight, at least you could maneuver it a little bit. You could go up the racetrack, you could try to come back down and shoot through a hole. With this thing, whenever you start sliding, the front tires continue to slide. It’s almost like they’re on skis out there.”

To be fair, NASCAR is in a delicate situation. The sanctioning body is trying to build a new car that it believes will make life better for drivers and teams alike. No one expected the transition to be an easy one. But few also expected an event like the one that unfolded Sunday, when the only real action was Jeff Gordon’s rally from 27th to third, and rookie Juan Montoya bumping people out of the way.

“It was really hard to get a good balance on the car,” said Donnie Wingo, Montoya’s crew chief. “You were going to be tight no matter what you did.”

NASCAR makes changes, and the racing at wonderful little Bristol pays the price. First the Chase, then the COT. On Monday they start tearing down walls and getting ready to replace the concrete racing surface. No one seems willing to simply leave the place alone.

The opinions expressed are solely of the writer.

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