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Winning is never easy, the old cliché goes, but losing 22-2 in seven innings of softball is usually a pretty difficult accomplishment as well. It wasn't last night. The RFT softball team took it on the chin (and the back, and the hip, and the…you get the point) and made losing look easy against BS Bar and Grill at Lions Club Park on Woodson Road.

The setting sun and cold beer made for a perfect atmosphere in which one loud team could really care and the other team could be just happy to be there.

There were highlights:

In case anyone asks, here is the rundown of Olympic athletes from the St. Louis area. Feel smarter and show your patriotism. We've combed Youtube and picked out some highlights and interviews with athletes in Beijing.

Videos after the jump.

Moving a pet to a new cage often seems impossible.

Anyone who has ever owned a parrot, for instance, has gone through the laborious process of assembling the new coop in front of the bird, setting it across the room so it can familiarized itself with it, then placing it alongside the rusty old confines and encouraging the bird to hop on its shiny new perch. The talking parrot, of course, refuses to budge and squawks "No effing way," just like its foul-mouthed owner would in such a situation.

So it was last night as RFT softball played its first game away from the friendly confines of Overland’s Legion Park, losing 9-5 to Grady’s Bar and falling to a 4-6 record the season.

Not all athletes are fit to be in commercials for thick-and-chunky soup, or posing for cameras while high-fiving kids with disabilities in televised public-service announcements. Just not going to happen, because athletes are people too.

St. Louis is a sports city unlike any other of comparable population for its history and tradition. But it has had its share of problem athletes and fiery characters.

Some have been downright villainous, while others' actions seem to fall into the realm of "WTF were you thinking?"

Here they are, the biggest thugs in St. Louis sports history. Put your suggestions at the bottom.

Rocco Landesman, Clayton High School Class of '65, has submitted a bid for the Chicago Cubs.

The big-time Broadway producer is one of the money men behind Mel Brooks' The Producers. Is this a Bialystockian attempt to gain even more money by investing in a guaranteed loser? Many Cardinals fans already equate the Cubs with the Third Reich (great success in the early going, followed by years of diminishing results, followed by a monstrous national shame and reluctance to acknowledge the past), so it's not a stretch.

"Springtime for Piniella," indeed.

-Unreal

In the 2005 cinematic masterpiece The Ringer, Johnny Knoxville plays a regular-guy jackass who tries to rig the Special Olympics by posing as a mentally disabled participant. Any movie made in such monumentally bad taste is right up Unreal's alley. That's why when both the RFT softball squad and its opponent, Grady's Bar, each debuted its own ringer last night, Unreal was delighted to see them do their best to re-enact the Knoxville classic.

But while it appeared at times that the game was in fact turning out to be that kind of special -- a Grady's player was sporting golf shoes on the softball diamond, and RFTers were tripping over first base as if it were a high hurdle -- in the end the RFT won 7-6 in extra innings thanks to some help from their ringer, a fill-in left fielder named Greg who was on loan from Chevy's Fresh Mex.

After a perfunctory RFT top of the first, Grady's jumped out to an early lead when a strapping left-handed slugger sporting a Lindenwood College Baseball T-shirt (who'd been conspicuously absent from earlier Grady's contests) swatted a home run in the bottom of the frame. Grady's tacked on a few more in the early innings, belting balls down the left-field line and blooping base hits up the middle. Meanwhile, their veteran hurler was stymieing the alt-weekly's offense with precisely located, high-arcing pitches.

Like a champion Special Olympics sprinter, however, the RFTers showed a strong kick as they approached the finish line.

Perhaps it was the addition of Busch beer to the dugout cooler Monday night. How else to explain RFT's rise from the valley to the mountaintop?

Fortified in mind, body and AB's tastiest "spirit," Team RFT rallied last night to defeat BS Bar & Grill to the tune of 18-12. The victory marked the first time in three years RFT has defeated the perennial champs and came just a few short weeks after the good guys puked up a 22-1 humiliation-fest to BS to inaugurate the 2008 campaign.

In upping their record to 3-3 on Monday night, the RFTers proved once again that this year they're no longer content to serve as league doormats. The most visible testament to this effect was RFT's steely ace Kevin Powers, who took the mound to face his former team. After suffering through a five-run first inning, Powers settled down and found those rotating rainmakers that have made him the Cy Young of the U. City/Overland rec league three years running. (How and why BS let Powers go remains one of the biggest head-scratchers of the off-season.)

Any statistician worth his scorebook will tell you that the average baseball player peaks around age 30.

Clearly, this is not true for slow pitch softball, as a ''veteran'' (read: downright geriatric in some cases) Grady's Bar team defeated RFT last night 15-10, dropping the alt-weekly squad's 2008 record to 2-3.

The addition of ace pitcher and RFT circulation manager Kevin Powers wasn't enough to ensure victory last night in a tightly contested game versus Chevy's Fresh Mex.

Powers -- whose prowess in beer-related sports is comparable to Bo Jackson's onetime dominance of real athletics -- missed the first three games of the season to conclude his Monday-night dart league campaign. The postponed start had little to no adverse effect on his pitching. Powers struck out the side in the fifth inning and recorded a whopping seven Ks over nine innings.

Vashon High School today was stripped of three state championships in basketball for recruitment violations and use of ineligible players. The school was also forced to forfeit five seasons' worth of games for the years 2000-'01 and 2002 through 2006.

The ruling by the Missouri State High School Activities Association, the state agency that governs high school sports, came during a closed session of the association's board of directors this morning in Columbia.

"It's what I expected," says Sam Dunlap, athletic director of the Public High League, in which Vashon competes. "Violations happened; the rules were applied."

Dunlap declined to say whether he thought the ruling is fair. "Any time you have something like this, it's not a happy day," he says.

"Like Sam said, we had a feeling it was going to happen" adds Keith Northway, Vashon's athletic director the past two years. "I have no other comment."

With four rainouts this season, the RFT softball team has had plenty of time to sit at home watching the Cardinals on television. Evidently the hours parked on the couch have served them well.

Like the Redbirds, the RFTies have ignored the preseason naysayers to get off to their best start ever. After just three games, team RFT is 2-1 and already tied with its 2007 win total. With one more victory, the team will equal its franchise victory count dating back to ’06.

The Cardinals didn't play Wednesday, but something big happened in the world of baseball.

John Smoltz announced yesterday that he'll have to have surgery on his right shoulder, thus ending his season. He stated that he intends to come back and pitch again next year, but I have to question how legitimate his chances to do so really are. He's 41 years old. He's got a whole lot of miles on that right arm. The man is one of the true warriors in the game of baseball, but I think time may have finally caught up with him.

If so, we're seeing the end of one of the great careers of recent times. Smoltz currently sits with a career record of 210-147, and added 154 saves during his tenure as the Atlanta closer. He will retire as the only man in the history of game to have amassed 200 victories and 150 saves. Smoltz is a first-ballot Hall of Famer if ever there was one.

While the Cardinals were waiting out the rain in Washington last night, a very interesting plot development was taking place a ways down the coast, in Florida.

Matt Clement finally stepped onto a mound and started on the road back to the big leagues.

Clement, the 33-year-old right-hander who signed with the Cardinals this off-season, pitched last night for the Cards' High Class A affiliate, Palm Beach, against the Cubs' farm team. He threw six innings. He gave up no runs. He only gave up one hit. He didn't walk anyone. Really, it couldn't have gone any better.

According to reports from Roger Dean Stadium, Clement had his fast ball velocity all the way up to 88 mph, with excellent movement. He threw his full assortment of pitches and had at least solid command with pretty much all of them. Clement threw 73 pitches total, an extremely efficient for a six-inning outing.

So, what does this really mean?

First off, let me say to Mr. Clement: Congratulations. That may seem ridiculously premature, but the fact of the matter is, I and a whole lot of other people completely wrote Clement off.

Strange how quickly that optimism just faded away, isn't it?

The Cards were on the verge of taking three of four games from the Pirates, going 5-2 on the home stand, and heading out onto the road riding a wave of momentum. Suddenly, in the space of about ten minutes and an equal number of pitches, they were looking at a deficit, a series split and a bad taste left over from the end of the home stand.

A situation like last night has happened once before. Back on the seventh of May, to be exact. The Cardinals were in Colorado, playing in the third game of a four-game series. They had gotten off to a magnificent start in the series, winning the first two games, and were leading at the end of the seventh inning of the third game. Wainwright had been the starter for that game, too, and had hurled seven shutout innings.

Having thrown 106 pitches, Adam's night was over, and La Russa went to the 'pen. By the time the eighth inning was over, the Cardinals were down, the bullpen having collapsed and allowed the Rockies to jump ahead. Colorado went on to win that game, Kyle Lohse self-destructed the next day, and the Cards had to settle for a series split. Unfortunately, the Cardinals then proceeded to struggle in Milwaukee, with the bullpen continuing to be a sore spot.

So, here we are again. Almost the exact same situation, although this time Wainwright got hammered late, rather than the bullpen. The Cardinals now depart for a long road trip, leaving home on a sour note.

So far this season, we've seen some definite surprises, most of them positive. Ryan Ludwick, even counting his last few games, has been one of the best hitters in all of baseball. If you saw that coming, you're probably a liar, or should be playing the lottery more often.

There has been one notable exception, though. There has been one surprise on the offensive side that hasn't been at all positive, and that's the lack of power production from the Cards' new third baseman, Troy Glaus.