It’s been like a sauna in the LA Basin for the last few days – a fact no doubt appreciated by all the athletes at the Home Depot Center for the X-Games …

-  Remember last week when we wondered how Juan Pablo Montoya would react to a crushing NASCAR loss at Indy after a pit lane violation?  We got the answer today – loud and clear.  Montoya took second place today in a rain-delayed race at Pocono, beating everyone in the field except the one guy with more to prove than Montoya.  Denny Hamlin won twice at Pocono in 2006, and has always done well at the track.  This time, he strapped into his car with additional incentive – the death three days earlier of his 91-yr-old grandmother – by his own admission, his #1 fan.  He declared on Friday he’d win, and today he backed it up with a dominating performance.  Some days, the winner has the biggest engine, others the biggest ego.  Today, it was the biggest heart that took the checkered flag.

-  Let me be honest:  it’s not easy being a Florida Marlins fan.  Sure, there are the two World Series trophies, but they’re paired with two fire sale dismantlings of the championship teams.  For the last few seasons, the Fish have been competitive, but not winners, and we fans are forced to watch someone else in the playoffs.  Things seem to be on the upswing, however.  Hanley Ramirez has developed into one of the best shortstops in the game (and the first Marlin ever elected by the fans to back-to-back All Star games) and leads the league in batting.  Josh Johnson leads a young pitching staff filled with talent and has no less than ESPN’s Peter Gammons touting him as a Cy Young Award candidate.  Ground has finally been broken on the new Marlins stadium, a retractable roofed facility on the former site of the Orange Bowl, and the Marlins actually made a trade at the deadline to improve the club.  We’re even getting a few highlight moments to enjoy, like last night.  After seeing the bullpen give up a go-ahead home run to the Cubs in the top of the ninth inning, the Marlins rallied as Dan Uggla and Cody Ross homered on back-to-back pitches to first tie and then win the game in walkoff fashion.  We may not be ready  to make a run at the division title yet, but it’s worth remembering that in 1997 and again in 2003, the Marlins entered the playoffs as the Wild Card champion.  Anyone else smell history in the making?

-  Baseball has a huge controversy over how to handle records made by those who took – or were accused of taking – performance enhancing drugs.  Whether to include, exclude or asterisk the cheaters remains to be decided.  But what do you do if your record book is being rewritten just as significantly but without breaking the rules?  That’s the challenge swimming faces as technology continues to provide additional enhancements to swimmers’ performances.  At the recently completed world championships in Italy, 43 world records were set, most by swimmers in full bodysuits made of polyurethane.  The suits are so advanced, that FINA, the international sanctioning body, finally had to ban them effective January 1, 2010.  But the damage is done.  Much like NASCAR records set before horsepower-robbing restrictor plates were mandated, the numbers are in the books and it could be decades before swimmers approach them again.  It’s an issue they’ll have to deal with, and there’s no easy answers.  It’s probably worth noting that in Michael Phelps’  rematch with Milorad Cavic, the man who missed breaking up his gold medal streak at the Bejing Olympics by a fraction of a second, Cavic wore a full poly suit while Phelps wore just the lower half of an older, less advanced model and an unshaven chest – and still kicked Cavic’s ass …