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Chris Duncan hit a home run in the first inning of Tuesday's game against the Astros that elicited an entire dictionary's worth of hyperbolic verbs. The ball was ripped, tattooed, crushed and, dare I say, dry humped.

The prodigious blast, which you can see here, came off former Cardinal Woody Williams and easily reached the upper deck of Houston's Minute Maid Park. But how does Duncan's shot measure up against other Cards homers this season?

Hit Tracker Online lists detailed data for each and every big-league home run. Using some fancy math, which is explained here, and factoring in conditions like wind, ambient temperature and altitude, the site calculates, among other things, how far a home-run ball was hit, and how fast it was going when it left the bat.

According to Hit Tracker, Duncan’s homer on Tuesday left the bat traveling 113 mph and flew 432 feet. Or it would have flown that far had the upper deck not blocked its descent back to earth.

Surprisingly, of Duncan's 21 home runs in 2007, good for second-best on the team, this was not the biggest and baddest. In May he hit one 435 feet off of Detroit's Justin Verlander, and on July 21 he powered an impressive 438-foot shot against Atlanta's Buddy Carlyle. Nor was Tuesday's homer his hardest-hit ball of the season -- that honor goes to his first, a 426-foot screamer that left the bat at 117 mph (also in Houston).

Duncan, whose homers average 403.3 feet, just barely misses out on leading the team. Albert Pujols' team-leading 31 homers have averaged 403.8 feet. Pujols also boasts the team's longest dinger (sorry Dunc), a 462-foot blast off the Cubs' Ryan Dempster in April, as well as the hardest-hit homer, a ball that left bat traveling a hair under 119 mph in June.

Other lengthy swats include a 454-footer by Jim Edmonds and a 447-footer by Adam Wainwright.

To put the numbers in perspective, Hit Tracker lists the longest home run in baseball this season at 482 feet, mashed by Arizona's Tony Clark.

The site also offers info on some historic Cards homers, most impressive of which is Mark McGwire's bomb at Cleveland's Jacobs Field in 1997, which is estimated to have traveled 512 feet, clearing a 19-foot fence and 23 rows of bleachers before denting the park's Budweiser sign. Also included are Mac's 1998 homer that hit the Post-Dispatch sign in old Busch Stadium (470 feet, 120 mph off the bat), and Pujols' walk-off homer against Brad Lidge in the 2005 NLCS (455 feet, 119 mph.)

-Keegan Hamilton

Celebrate good times! C'mon, it's a celebration!

-Unreal

Doggone it! Unreal was just assembling a feast of our Michael Vick trading-card collection for the feisty pug that hangs out downstairs. Turns out a Cape Girardeau woman has already cornered that market -- check out the Southeast Missourian's and Sports Illustrated's reports here and here.

eBay, however, reined in the bidding -- it appears to have ripped Rochelle Steffen's mangled card collection off the site sometime yesterday. A call to eBay hasn't been returned.

In the meantime, a Lab named Lilli in Western Pennsylvania is marking her territory on the auction portal. Twenty eBay bidders so far are vying for a Michael Vick trading card that Lilli mauled and put up for bid today.

-Unreal

Of this we can be reasonably sure: Robin Leach will never arrive in St. Louis to shoot an episode of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Leach's famous tagline, "Champagne wishes and caviar dreams," don't compute in Missour-uh. And we certainly don't have those bus tours like they do in Hollywood -- the ones that showcase the megamansions of movie stars and entertainers.

In St. Louis our celebrities -- for the most part -- are professional athletes or reclusive business owners who've amassed fortunes selling pharmaceuticals, libations and rental cars. And while their homes may be magnificent, to our knowledge no one has ever thought of putting them on tour.

Until now.

Introducing Virtual Globetrotting, a Web site that provides tours of exotic locales the world over, including our very own St. Louis. We stumbled across the site today when searching for information about beer baron August Busch III. Not only does Virtual Globetrotting display photos of the Busch mansion as seen through Google Maps and Windows Live Local (which captures incredibly detailed "Bird's Eye" images from a low-flying airplane), it also provides links to dozens of other local celebrity manors.

We see that Nelly's casa is indeed worthy of a spot on Cribs and understand why President George W. Bush would choose to stay at the luxurious compound of his friend and campaign contributor Stephen Brauer during his visits to St. Louis.

Virtual Globetrotting bills itself as a Web site that is "all about visiting exotic locations from the comfort of your home." The site allows anyone to post images provided they meet the moderator's approval. That said, how accurate are the images? We checked the addresses of Cardinals players Jim Edmonds and Albert Pujols as provided by Virtual Globetrotting and the St. Louis County Department of Revenue and found they matched up.

Our only questions now: What the hell does Jimmy Baseball do in that gaudy swimming pool of his ? And why on earth is Pujols still living in that chintzy McMansion?

-Unreal

-Unreal

It’s time to throw in the towel and give up hope. The Cardinals have nearly the same chance of making the playoffs as cellar dwellers like San Francisco, Washington, Texas and Kansas City.

The forecast comes from coolstandings.com, a Web site that chronicles what teams have a chance of making the playoffs, winning the division, or capturing the wild card. It’s all based on their remaining strength of schedule and how many wins they can expect given the number of runs they have allowed and scored.

According to the site, entering the weekend the Cards had a .4 percent chance of making the playoffs. Friday and Saturday’s losses to the Pirates dropped them to .3 and .1, respectively. The lowest odds the site will give is zero. Several teams, including hopeless division mates Houston, Pittsburgh and Cincinnati, are rated at “Less than .1.”

Some other interesting observations from the site, which also does playoff percentages for NFL and NBA seasons, include the fact that the last time the Cards, who started the season with a 30 percent chance of making the playoffs, were given more than a one in ten chance of seeing October was on April 27. That evening’s loss to the Cubs, however, proved to be a kick in the groin that put the team down for the count, causing a 7 percent drop, from 16 to 9 percent in their postseason outlook, the second largest drop of the year.

Not surprisingly Boston is rated the best shot to make the playoffs with a 99.5 percent playoff chance. The NL Central, which coolstandings projects the Cubs to win, is the only division with more than two teams at .1 or less.

Optimists can, however, take solace in the fact that the Cards are not yet tagged with a zero percent chance, a distinction earned only by the hapless Devil Rays. The site claims to simulate the remainder of the season “millions times per day,” meaning that at least once in that simulation the Cards staged an epic comeback and made the playoffs. In the words of Lloyd Christmas, “So you’re saying there’s a chance?”

-Keegan Hamilton

A curious bit of sports reporting appeared in this morning's Post-Dispatch regarding the St. Louis Cardinals' "frustrated" (and in the end failed) pursuit to return Matt Morris to the fold. Joe Strauss writes that general manager Walt Jocketty was "stunned" when the San Francisco Giants sent the aging right hander to the Pittsburgh Pirates. "Call it what you want. It looks like a straight salary dump to me," Strauss quotes one dispirited club official as saying.

Well, that's a stretch not even Willie McCovey could make, you dispirited club official, you. Sure, San Francisco managed to slice $13.7 million from its books by sending Morris packing, but the Giants -- languishing in last place in the N.L. West with a team whose median age is older than dirt -- picked up a 26-year-old speed demon of a center fielder named Rajai Davis. This is a guy with 251 minor-league steals and a career .375 OBP. In fact, Davis had a 21-game hitting streak going at Triple-A Indianapolis before the Bucs brought him up last month, after which he has proceeded to hit .271 in 24 games. Look for him to be in the starting lineup tonight when the Giants face the Dodgers.

The Cardinals' dismay, meanwhile, appears unfounded. As Larry Borowsky notes on his blog, vivaelbirdos.com, the team might well have landed Morris had they done more than absorb the majority of Morris' leftover contract and offer only two not-ready-for-primetime midlevel minor leaguers.

More to the point, says Borowsky, in exchange for a "salary dump," the Giants got a promising young starting center fielder -- a player the Cards should have pursued!

As a lifelong Giants fan, I'm absolutely giddy that the team has at last given up the old goat and gone for some young blood. Morris, who won 101 games for the Redbirds from 1997-2005, has been an absolute bust in his two and a half seasons with the Giants (though one could make the case that his 7-7 record and 4.35 ERA this season is the stuff of an ace on the current Cardinals staff).

-Ellis Conklin