by Dave Boehler
The Beacon Sports Editor

You just can’t make this stuff up: a Major League Baseball team almost scores 30 runs, three odd stories from California and one from Ohio – that isn’t sports related but is too good to pass up.

Scoreboard gets a workout

Washington Nationals fans have reasons to doubt 2022 will be their year. They got 29 more of them Wednesday.

Pitchers Anibal Sanchez and Cade Cavalli allowed 10 runs each while they were shellacked 29-8 by St. Louis in a spring training game – a laugher even by exhibition standards as the Cardinals scored 15 times in the eighth inning.

Sanchez allowed 10 runs on 12 hits and one walk over four innings. In the second inning, the 38-year-old threw so many pitches that he was taken out by his manager only to re-enter the game the following inning.

St. Louis has never scored more than 12 runs in an inning during a regular-season game. The outburst was so brain-breaking that when Washington’s Gilbert Lara hit a three-run homer in the bottom of the eighth, the scoreboard operator briefly awarded the runs to the Cardinals – perhaps out of muscle memory.

Over 131 years in the National League, the Cardinals’ regular-season record is 28 runs in a game, against Philadelphia in 1929.

It’s for the kids

A man recently completed a half-marathon in Oakland in 2 hours 19 minutes – while pushing his quintuplets in a stroller. Chad Kempel did it with his five 4-year-old children. “They were saying, ‘run faster dad!’ and I’m just dying sweating and I’m like, ‘I don’t even know if I can go any farther,” he told KIVI-TV. “I had forgotten how heavy it could be, especially when we’re going up a hill. Even if it’s barely a hill at all, I’m basically full-on holding the whole thing up.”

He’s got enough money

Las Vegas wide receiver Bryan Edwards wants to change his jersey number from 89 to 3. But the NFL makes its players buy the inventory of their own jerseys before a number change is granted. And they pay retail prices, not the cost of production, which would be much lower. So the Raider asked fans on Twitter to help come up with the $43,000 needed for the switch: “About to start a go fund me y’all gone donate?”

Don’t be a sore loser

NBA teams use a picture and graphic on social media to post the score of their game after it ends. One fan discovered the Los Angeles Lakers, after a loss, never use LeBron James, Russell Westbrook and Anthony Davis as a result of his digging through the team’s social media history this season. Malik Monk, however, has been used at least 10 times after a loss.

She did what?

A woman in Ohio called 911 to complain about her KFC order. She told the dispatcher she paid for eight pieces of chicken but only received four at the drive-thru, and insisted an officer meet her at the restaurant.