St. Louis Sports Blog

You know him, you love him, but now it's time to start thinking of a nickname for him. Yes, we're referring to up-and-comin', goggles-sportin' Cardinals reliever Jason Motte.

In our continuing effort to bestow creative and fitting nicknames upon our beloved St. Louis Cardinals, we come to...

...Dennys Reyes.

shgmom56 (via Flickr)

After the jump, help choose a nickname for Dennys Reyes!

Was there ever any doubt?

"Funky Cold Molina" it is. 58% of you favored the winner, with "Gasolina" pulling down a respectable 22% and "Brolina" clocking in at 11%.




We'll post a Dennys Reyes poll first thing Monday!

Unreal lost track of time and forgot to solicit nominations for our next nicknamee. No matter; here we go.

We'll close polling soon on a nickname for Yadier Molina...

...but we can't wait to stir the pot for our next nicknamee, Dennys Reyes. And yes, "Denny's" is the early frontrunner. But that doesn't mean you can't nominate something else.

Meantime, be sure to vote in the Molina poll.

Well, this one was over before it began, really. It was no contest

Joe Mather is hereby christened "Joey Bombs"! That moniker led the way with 64% of the vote;  Unreal's secretly hoped-for choice, "Spud," finished an almost-respectable second, garnering 21%.

We liked Spud because it sounds old-school and is a nod to Joseph T. Mather's Joey Bombs' home state, Idaho. (Admit it: "Spud Mather" trips off the tongue like nobody's business.)

But from here on in, it's Joey Bombs. At least it will be when if he makes it back to the big club. After a painfully subpar spring training, JB was exiled to Memphis, where he's, well, let's just go with the less said, the better.

No, "Yadi" is not a nickname. It's what grammarians would call a "for-short." At least that's what grammarians would call it if grammarians were fourth graders. Unreal has no idea what more-seasoned grammarians would call it.

Regardless, the Wheel of Nickname Fortune has spun 'round to Yadier Molina, and it ain't gonna spin again till the Redbirds backstop's got a suitable nickname.

After the jump, name that Molina...

While you're cogitatin' on a nickname for Joe Mather ...


... you might want to toss a name into the hat for our next Cardinal up for naming, Yadier Molina. Someone already nominated Funky Cold Molina, which, let's face it, is pretty good even if it's a tad dated.

Don't forget to vote in the Mather poll, and if you want to leave a suggestion to be included in the Molina go-round, leave it in the Comments thread below. We'll open the voting for Molina on Wednesday and christen Mather the following day.

It's official -- and by a landslide. Rick Ankiel is hereby christened "Swingin' Dick"!

A whopping 63% of respondents favored the "Swingin' Dick" handle for the Cardinals' slugging outfielder. Coming in a distant second: "Ammerin Ank," with 20% percent of the vote.

And remember: It's not too late to cast your ballot for this week's nickname poster boy, Joe Mather. Think of it this way: If we come up with a really fine nickname for him, maybe it'll hasten his return to the majors. (Recapturing his stroke wouldn't hurt.)

Baseball nicknames. They don't make 'em like they useta. So Unreal has set out to assign a nickname to every Cardinal on this season's roster.

We got started last week with Rick Ankiel. Now it's Joe Mather's turn.

After the jump, Joe Mather...

Baseball nicknames. They don't make 'em like they useta. This isn't just Unreal blowing the proverbial smoke. This is documentable fact.

www.dksbaseballcards.com

In the old days, baseball gave us Bob "Death to Flying Things" Ferguson. George "Prunes" Moolic. Frank Chance, a.k.a., "The Peerless Leader." As if Honus Wagner wasn't sufficiently kickass in itself, the Pirates immortal was known in his time as "The Flying Dutchman." Ty Cobb was "The Georgia Peach." Walter Johnson was "The Big Train." Ted Williams was "The Splendid Splinter." Leo Durocher was "The Lip." Enos Slaughter was "Country." And of course, Stan was "The Man."

Even the lesser nicknames of the past rocked. Buck. Babe (a.k.a. "The Bambino," a.k.a. "The Sultan of Swat"). Lefty. Jumbo. Deacon. Preacher. Chick. Happy. Smokey Joe. Shoeless Joe. Whitey. Whitey. Whitey. Moose. Slats.Vinegar Bend, for crying out loud.

Nicknames started to peter out in the 1960s, though the major leagues still made room for Catfish, for Mudcat, and for Slats and our beloved Moonman.

Take a look at the Cardinals roster, though, and see if you can find more than one or two measly nicknames. Yep, we've got "El Hombre" and, if we push the envelope, "Skip"...and that's all she wrote. It's enough to make you miss Ray "Burger" King, though his nickname never really took hold.

Unreal aims to change all that. Beginning today, we'll publish a poll and invite readers to vote on nicknames for the 2009 Cardinals.

After the jump, we begin our quest with Rick Ankiel...

Here's Alex Rodriguez, the New York Yankees' $300 million man, in December 2007, telling Katie Couric on 60 Minutes that he never used steroids:





And here he is today, February 9, 2009, speaking to Peter Gammons on ESPN:




Can you say, "Lying sack of shit"? (Not to mention what the latent effects of those drugs evidently did to his complexion.)

You know what? I was just going to let this whole thing pass without comment, because I've seen it everywhere else. But I can't. I just can't. It's just too damn much for me. 

The above is part of an imagined diary of what tonight may be like for Chris "Dry-Humpin'" Duncan and Tyler Johnson of the Cardinals. Godspeed.

Read more of what may happen tonight over at InsideSTL.

In the world of extreme fighting, there is little that hasn't been done. Fighting in backyards, fighting in cages, fighting with props like chairs and broken glass.

Now comes extreme arm wrestling. And if it's happening anywhere in the world, there is YouTube video of it.

What makes Xtreme arm wrestling different is that the competitor' arm-wrestling hand is taped to his opponent's.

The free hand? That's for socking the other guy in the face as many times as possible. Just watch.

Members of Riverfront Times' newly christened bowling league, the Free Bowlers, convened at Olivette Lanes on Olive Boulevard yesterday evening for our first night of league play.

Some players arrived in spiffy new shoes and bowling shirts; a few even brought their own balls! Others slipped on worn rental shoes and did their best with house orbs.

Olivette Lanes' gracious staff wisely located the RFT rollers mid-alley, the better to keep an eye on us in case any sort of intervention was necessary. None was; despite consuming copious quantities of Anheuser-Busch products, the Free Bowlers were, for the most part, docile.

The league consists of six five-member teams, four of them anchored by RFTers, the other two by holdovers from the recently concluded softball season (about which the less said the better, if you ask Unreal).

Teams 5 and 6 have yet to roll, because they're still fighting it out for softball supremacy. But with all the RFT first-week action concluded, the standings have Team 4 in first place with a 5-2 record and a total of 1,792 pins knocked down, a 597-per-game average. In second place is Team 2, with a 4-3 mark and 1,867 pins; followed closely by Team 1, which was edged out by Team 2 despite posting a higher total pin fall of 1,876.

Stat line of the night goes to Team 2's K-Strange and his wicked right-hand hook. Strange toppled 506 pins in three games, with a high game of 185. Honorable mention to Team 1's Angela Noel, who posted a 177 in the second game.

-Unreal (RFT bowling correspondent)

You may have heard the 2008 U.S. Olympic basketball team referred to as the "Redeem Team" for its mission to continue the legacy of its predecessor, the Dream Team, and "restore order to the universe" by bringing home a gold medal.

Well, last night RFT Softball fielded its own lowercase redeem team, defeating beer-league powerhouse BS Bar by a score of 5-3 a week after getting steamrolled by the BSers 22-2. The victory, however, doesn't bode well for the order of the universe, as it marks only the second time in three years of University City/Overland rec-league play that RFT managed to beat BS's soused sluggers.

The dream game was like a bizarro version of the nightmarish beatdown that preceded it seven days earlier. When BS led off with a lazy pop fly to left, the first out of the game came precisely twelve batters sooner than it did the week before.

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:

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.

Like a heaping helping of its signature appetizer Nachos Grande, Chevys Fresh Mex kept piling it on Monday night in a 17 to 8 drubbing of RFT at Legion Ballpark in Overland. Adding to the heartache -- and heartburn -- for the alt-weekly players was the knowledge that for much of the contest the game was theirs to lose.

With temperatures hovering in the upper 90s, RFT warmed up to a quick lead in the bottom of the first thanks to a two-RBI double from third sacker Chad Garrison. Chevys bounced back in the second inning to take a 4-2 lead before clutch batting on the parts of RFT outfielders Matt Underwood and Ray "Ray" Richardson reclaimed the lead 5-4. Chevys went on to tie the game 5-5 in the fifth.

Then came the feeding frenzy.

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.

Team RFT had a sniff of its old self last night. It smelled a lot like marijuana. Sticky, gooey, chronic marijuana.

Then again, perhaps that odor was just the fumes wafting over from the Macanudo-size blunt being passed around in the nearby parking lot. Whatever the case, the secondhand smoke seemed only to stoke RFT's lethargy Monday night and produce more than a few flashbacks to seasons when the team routinely suffered defeats by double-digit margins.

From the onset yesterday, it was clear that this was not the same club that just two weeks ago rallied for its greatest victory of the season. Hitless in the top of the first, RFT took the field only to watch Chevys Fresh Mex bat its way through the order on the way a quick eight runs. Chevys added to its tally in nearly every ensuing inning and led 22-3 going into the final frame.

While Chevys' bats were finding a Jarlsberg wheel's worth of holes between RFT fielders, it was all RFT could do to not hit the ball directly into the gloves of its opponents. Chevys' man-mountain of a pitcher recorded so many 1-3 putouts that several RFT players questioned whether his girth wasn't exterting some type of gravitational pull on the ball.

As he does so often, Tom "Sox" Kavanaugh scored the first runs for the good guys, with a three-run blast over the fence in center field. Chris Schaeffer proved once again that the proper mixture of human-growth hormone and Busch beer can work wonders; the outfielder had another big day, going three-for-three at the plate and ably scooping up two flyouts to right-center.

Plays of the day, though, have to go to Ray "Ray" Richardson and Cathleen "Coach Cat" Joffray, who hit back-to-back, inside-the-infield home runs in the seventh.

Those "hits" brought the final score to 22-5 and left RFT with a 3-4 record on the season.

The team can only hope that next week's party in the parking lot will feature a more stimulating intoxicant -- say crack or meth. This team could use the pick-me-up.

-Unreal

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.

After a rainout last week, the RFT's softball season resumed last night with spectacular results. Yes, you read that correctly, after getting shut out and shat on in the opening game of the season, the home team emerged victorious from a 15-14 roller coaster ride of a game last night at Legion Park in Overland.

After holding opponents Chevy's Fresh Mex scoreless in the top of the first, newcomer Andrew Ciembronowicz led off the bottom of the first with a base hit, followed by another hit, and a ground-out. MVP SS/LF/Superhuman Tom Kavanaugh then stepped to the plate and ripped a double, scoring what many no doubt thought would be the first and only runs of the season. Amazingly though, like Barry Manilow's career, the hits just kept on coming. Buoyed by some hustle base running, excellent pitch selection, poor fielding by Chevy's, and some actual honest to goodness hits, the RFT eventually batted a round in the first inning, scoring eight runs in all. Though the opposing pitcher was talking on his cell phone during two at-bats, giving directions to a lost teammate, no call to the bullpen was made.

Just sayin'.

-Unreal

A recent post on Deadspin.com addresses rumors that Jim Edmonds might sign with the Chicago Cubs.

Not surprisingly, Deadspin founder Will Leitch blanches at the mere thought -- though fortunately, as he points out, Cubs fans do too.

Anyhoo, commenting on Leitch's kicker -- "By the way, this move is probably not good business for Edmonds' new restaurant/nightclub in St. Louis" -- one Deadspin reader writes:

...Edmonds' new restaurant/nightclub in St. Louis.

I've been there. It's a dive.

/rimshot

If that's a result of Deadspin "Comment Ombudsman" Rob Iracane's call for commenters to "Don't be cruel without also being funny," then Unreal's all for it.

-Unreal

While the hometown heroes the St. Louis Cardinals opened their 162-game season weeks ago, last night a slightly lesser-known local squad took the field for the first time all year. And to Unreal, "local" means that the players sit in adjacent cubicles. That's right, yesterday was opening day for the RFT's slow-pitch softball team.

But while the Redbirds were able to dispatch the defending National League champs last night thanks to some heads-up hustle from their MVP slugger, the RFTers were not so fortunate, falling to U. City rec league titans BS Bar by a score that was tallied at "At least 16-0." The box score reveals the impressive magnitude of the defeat, as BS Bar led in such categories as home runs, hits, fielding percentage, total bases, and, perhaps most frustrating for the alt-weekly lineup fresh off a Cinco de Drinko bender, alcohol consumed. After watching the game, a representative from Chico's Bail Bonds immediately offered to sponsor the RFT squad.

The award for player of the game goes to staff writer/pitcher Chad Garrison, who, flush with confidence after conquering the St. Louis real estate market, struck out three while walking just one in four innings of work. While his ERA is inflated after allowing sixteen runs, including an emblematic home run on the first pitch of the season, the blogosphere is already touting his low WHIP and xFIP numbers as more telling of his abilities. If you're in a deep fantasy league, he could be a good waiver pickup.

Check back every Tuesday this summer to see if the RFT will be able to improve on its opening-day showing. Next week's goal: advancing a runner past first base.

-Unreal

If Jeff Gordon can do it, why can't Unreal?

3:54 p.m.: Having arrived fashionably late -- Unreal is nothing if not fashionable -- we found our spot in the nosebleed section of the press box just in time to see Rick Ankiel put the Cards on the board with a bases-loaded double down the right-field line. A single by Official 2008 whipping boy Cesar Izturis plated two more, and the Birds erased a 1-0 deficit to take command 4-1.

More as events warrant.

3:58 p.m.: Make that 5-1 Cardinals. Bottom of the second. Albert Pujols just now jacked a 1-1 pitch 385 feet into the vistors' bullpen.

4:01 p.m.: Bottom of the second. It's raining a little.

4:07 p.m.: Just noticed who's sitting next to us. Jeff Gordon! Dueling live bloggers!

4:16 p.m.: Bottom of the third. Izturis draws a walk. It's raining. Like hell! Here comes the tarp.