Arkansas Sports 360 - ArkansasSports360.com

8/16/2010 at 1:18pm

What we learned this weekend:

We spent it in St. Louis, and I still contend that the Gateway City has a higher heat index factor than anywhere else in the world. When it's 92, it shouldn't feel like its 107, but it does in St. Louis, and it did on a sweltering Saturday afternoon at Busch Stadium III. We sat through a game in 115-degree heat index in breeze-less Busch II a few years back, and this felt almost the same.

On the field the Cardinals melted. The woeful Cubs, who had only won two games since July 27, were victorious Saturday, and Sunday as well.

We sat through Saturday's game, which drew the biggest crowd in St. Louis since opening day, in some wonderful seats thanks to a brother-in-law. Some observations:

* When Chris Carpenter can't locate his curveball, big hitters will smack his fast ball. If the Cubs had any major league hitters to go with Derrek Lee and Aramis Ramirez, they would score runs in bunches.

* I've never understood the Cardinal "insiders" love affair with the grown-on-the-farm Colby Rasmus and the belief that he would be the next Jim Edmonds. He's 24 with lots of years ahead of him still, but when does the major league great everyone seems to be expecting begin to show? Everybody has an off day; Rasmus has a lot of them. Saturday may have been his worst yet, and we saw it in person: two swinging strikeouts, another K looking, and then a first-pitch awful attempt at a sacrifice bunt that ended up being a pop up for a crucial late-inning out. (Manager Tony La Russa was sitting the game out on suspension, "sitting" as in up in a pressbox booth, so who knows if he was sending any kind of strategy signals down to the dugout braintrust. We hope he had nothing to do with having Rasmus bunt; even facing Cubs left-hander Sean Marshall, you have a lefty Rasmus with power swinging away, especially if he can't bunt to begin with.)

* Besides Rasmus' inability to bunt, light-hitting shortstop Brendan Ryan also has been maligned by Cardinals media for his weak bunting prowess. So, in the ninth inning and with no outs and a runner at second in a 3-2 game, what does the backup Cards braintrust do but have Ryan try to bunt the man to third. Only, Ryan mimics Rasmus and pops it up, foul, only the Cubs catcher drops it. Ryan steps right back in and pops up another bunt attempt that is caught for the inning's first out. Immediate rally killer, as the next two batters go down with barely a whimper and the Cardinals lose. It seemed to haunt them early Sunday as the Cubs roared to an 8-2 lead after four innings and held on for a 9-7 win and a series victory.

* Maybe we can chalk this up to what is always said about rivalries, and the Cubs and Cards definitely have one: You can throw out the records when the two bitter enemies face off. The Cardinals were in first place and on a roll, and yet the beleaguered Cubs, with a retiring manager, little offense and a shaky pitching staff, took two of three. Derrek Lee hit four home runs during the weekend. He turned down a chance to go to a pennant contending club. He's stupid. But he's an impressive specimen who still smashes the baseball a long way.

* Cardinals Sunday start Kyle Lohse griped about having to pitch another minor league rehab last week (for Memphis on Triple A) after a disconcerting show in Double A Springfield against our Travelers, the worst team in the Texas League. Turns out he probably needed to stay down at Springfield the way the Cubs knocked him around. Lee hit two homers off him, and then Lohse couldn't get any of the five batters he faced in the fourth inning out. Even Cubs pitcher Ryan Dempster had a hit.

The Cardinals invested $41 million in Lohse three years ago. St. Louis has lost 21 of the 32 games he's started in that time.

Meanwhile, the Reds added Homer Bailey off rehab to their young, talented pitching staff, and he merely threw a 2-0 shutout of Florida. The Reds are beating everybody but the Cardinals. The Cardinals can get inspired to beat the Reds, but are 16-15 against the Cubs, Brewers and Astros in the NL Central.

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Good thing I was in St. Louis instead of Fayetteville, because I had this nice-looking LSU ballcap I was planning to wear had I attended Arkansas' Saturday scrimmage.

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Everyone seems to have an opinion one way or another whether Dustin Johnson should have been penalized two strokes for grounding his club in a sandy area deemed a bunker in Sunday's final round of the PGA Championship at Whistling Straits. It meant that, instead of making a playoff with eventual winner Martin Kaymer and runner-up Bubba Watson, Johnson dropped to fifth overall.

The local rules had been stipulated from the get-go: All sandy areas were to be considered bunkers and played as such, and the Rules of Golf say grounding of the club in a hazard is a two-stroke penalty. Yes, there might have been some confusion because spectators had been standing in this sand area, and this spot was outside the gallery rope. It wasn't maintained like a regular trap, and in many cases courses view these as "waste areas" that can be played as if the ball were in the rough, with no penalty for grounding the club.

But Johnson should have gotten SOME kind of penalty simply for blasting his ball so far right off the tee, into the spectators. He shouldn't have found the decent lie he did and been able, conceivably, to reach the green in two and two putt for par (he hit his shot over the green, chipped on and just missed a 7-footer that momentarily would have had everyone thinking he'd won the tournament).

The gods of golf didn't let Phil Mickelson get away with his ridiculous drive in the 2006 U.S. Open, the one that went so far left it caromed off a corporate tent and bounded back toward the 18th fairway. He still messed it up and lost.

Johnson and his caddy should have known the rule in use. It was posted. Better yet, it should have dawned on the golfer that if there were sand around the ball, maybe grounding the club wasn't allowed without penalty. That's generally the case at any course: in sand, don't ground club.

And better yet, put that drive down the middle about 290-300 yards instead of trying to hit it 350 plus and maybe we're talking about Dustin Johnson, PGA (and U.S. Open) champ of 2010. The guy's got immense talent.

Don't get us started on Bubba Watson's poor choice of shots on No. 18 in the playoff. These go-for-broke guys may make the Tour exciting on a week-to-week basis, but they sure seem to break their chances for glory with silly decisions in the majors. Mickelson may have won three Masters as well, but he's in the same mold.

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The Florida hat-wearing reporter from Saturday's scimmage at Fayetteville, Renee Gork Capshaw, reportedly lost her job with a sports radio station in the area after her little run-in with UA coach Bobby Petrino (if you missed it, she asked one question in a press conference and then Petrino said he wouldn't answer another query from her because of her choice of hat).

What her station decided to do is its business, but we have to think Arkansas' sports media office had to take note of all her tweeting going on from practice and would have considered limiting her access if that didn't change immediately. We're all told on the front end that cell phones are not allowed at practice. Yet, this radio station employee and at least one other radio personality) from NWA have been regularly tweeting from Hog practices. (It's OK to tweet from outside the practice area, but to do it every other minute would require a lot of running around).

Meanwhile, message boards were all a-twitter during the weekend not of the scrimmage or its standouts or the ankle injury suffered by safety Rudell Crim, but by news and opinion about the Gator hat-wearing reporter.

At least Hog fans have their priorities in order.

E-mail: jharris@abpg.com

Tagged: St. Louis Cardinals, Bobby Petrino, Dustin Johnson, Renee Gork