DOWNTOWN — Detroit Tigers manager Jim Leyland remembers the day well because he left a little of himself behind in that Georgia heat.

During his playing days, Leyland was a catcher, and this was the kind of day that you didn’t want be a catcher, let alone a minor-league catcher, with no backup around, handling both games of a doubleheader in Savannah, Ga.

“I lost 11 pounds,” he said in the visiting manager’s office at Busch Stadium on Wednesday. “I only weighed 175 pounds to start with. We wore those old wool uniforms. There was none of this double-knit (haberdashery). That was back when Nero played for Rome.”

Leyland offered his Savannah story as an example of heat. He knows hot.

And he expects tonight against the St. Louis Cardinals to be hot.

Seems like a good place to begin today’s live-time 10@10 from 10 Tucker Ave.:

1. Leyland said to come to St. Louis in June and not accept the likelihood that it will be smoky, humid and, yes, climb into the mid-to-upper 90s — like it’s expected to tonight — is like going to Detroit in April without a coat. It’s April. It’s Detroit. Check a Farmer’s Almanac, for crying out loud. It’s gonna be cold. This is St. Louis. It’s June. There’s a reason why players used to soak their feet in ice tubs between innings. That said, Leyland doesn’t expect his young pitcher Rick Porcello — who can throw in the mid-to-upper 90s — to be on any stricter pitch count or shorter leash because it is his first time facing this blast of heat. “I was pitching in Lakeland (Fla.) a year ago,” Porcello said. “Of course, it’s a little more exhausting when you’ve got Albert Pujols to worry about.” Leyland offered a simple recipe for getting through the heat: “Drink a lot of water. Drink a lot of fluids. Do what your momma told ya.”

“It’s going to be hot tonight,” Leyland said. “The Cardinals are going to be hot, too. When the turf was here this was the hottest place I’ve ever been. This and Savannah, Ga.”

2. Hot is actually Yadier Molina. His hitless game in Cleveland on Friday stands out as the rare night in the past week that he didn’t produce a hit, and yet he hit some of the hardest balls of the game. He had a series of at-’em liners — like one that required a diving catch at third base, and another that required a leaping snag at second — that were among the Cardinals most well-struck knocks of the game. With his 3-for-4 night and home run Wednesday, pending All-Star Molina is 14-for-38 (.368) with five RBIS and seven runs scored since June 5 against Colorado. He has one strike out in that span.

3. With this week’s report that Sammy Sosa was one of the 104 players to test positive for a banned substance back in the veiled-days of yore, we know that the former Chicago Cubs slugger committed two baseball faux pas — corked bat and corked body. That leads us to today’s poll question:

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4. Cardinals manager Tony La Russa inched closer to his 2,500th win with Wednesday’s victory — a milestone that would make him only the third manager in history, and the second who doesn’t own the team, to reach the mark. But on Tuesday he collected a win that no other manager in baseball has. The drubbing of Justin Verlander was La Russa’s 100th career victory against Detroit. He has at least 100 victories against 16 different major-league teams, by far the most of any manager. The next closest, according to the Elias Sports Bureau, is Atlanta’s Bobby Cox, who has 100-plus wins against 12 teams.

5. On Tuesday night, Albert Pujols had a first for his career. It was the first time that the opposing team had walked him intentionally in his first two plate appearances of a game. The first-inning IBB was the 10th of his career, according to research by the club’s media relations staff. Pujols is on pace for more than 50 IBBs this season, and that would break his personal and club record of 34 set last season. Since 1954, there have been 124 games when a player has received at least three intentional walks. Mark McGwire and Ryan Howard have each had three three-IBB games. Barry Bonds had 16 of them. Pujols has yet to have one. But what he did do Tuesday night was join the group of players who had two IBBs and a home run in the same game. That’s been done 234 times in National League since 1954, and Pujols has the past three.

6. The Post-Dispatch photo department plans to fan out around Busch Stadium and around St. Louis to capture a Day in the Life of the St. Louis Cardinals and Cardinals Nation. Read about it this morning, and they are asking for help — from fans. Find out more about it here.

7. Scott Bittle, the Cardinals’ fourth-round pick from Ole Miss, visited Busch Stadium on Wednesday. He took in batting practice, chatted a while with Cardinals officials, gabbed with former pitcher Cal Eldred … and, yes, met with team physicians and trainers. Bittle has not yet agreed to a deal. Bittle missed the end of the college season with a shoulder injury and last year the New York Yankees did not sign him because of lingering concerns about the shape of his right shoulder. Bittle insisted Wednesday that the two injuries are unrelated. The current injury is a joint capsule strain. He had an MRI taken of the joint Wednesday. “Completely separate things, completely,” said Bittle, a reliever with a biting fastball. “What happened last year was unfortunate, but it doesn’t have anything to do with what’s going on this year. My shoulder is going to be fine.”

Cardinals Class AA outfielder Tyler Henley, shown here batting in the Cape Cod League.

8. FARMNIK REPORT: Class AA outfielder Tyler Henley went 2-for-4 with a couple RBIs in Springfield’s 10-9 loss to Arkansas on Wednesday. Henley, who started in right field, has a hitting line of .339/.400/.511 this season and he’s driven in 32 runs to go with the 29 he’s scored. Henley was a 2007 eighth-round pick out of Rice, and the Cardinals paid over-slot to get him to leave college. The lefthanded-hitting Henley has been a center fielder and now a corner outfielder for the club, but he’s also emerged from leadoff hitter to RBI man. He had a .991 OPS in May and he’s hitting .357 so far this month. Here is a Q&A he did with Future Redbirds this past winter. … Designated hitter Steven Hill had three hits in the loss, as did center fielder and Stanford man James Rapoport. … Sam Freeman, the lefty reliever out of KU, blew the save and took the loss when he allowed a three-run home run with no outs in the ninth. … The Isotopes hammered the Cardinals’ Class AAA affiliate, Memphis. They won, 8-1. Leadoff hitter Jon Jay was the only Redbird to get multiple hits, and Jarrett Hoffpauir scored the lone run. Righthander Mitchell Boggs took the bruising. He allowed eight runs (five earned) on nine hits and his start lasted only 2 2/3 innings. He struck out three and walked one. … Palm Beach’s game against Tampa was postponed. … The Low-A Quad Cities River Bandits stranded 13 runners in a 7-3 loss Wednesday. Center fielder Travis Mitchell, a St. Louis native, had three more hits and he scored a run. … Charles Cutler played catcher and first base and continued to pepper the box score with another multi-hit game. But the River Bandits went 4-for-19 with runners in scoring position and only managed a single run in three different innings. … Hardly any kind of support for starter Adam Veres, who pitched five innings in his 10th start of the season. He slipped to 0-4 in his previous 10 appearances, despite allowing two runs and striking out five Wednesday.

9. Some quick Numbers of Notes: New Yankee Stadium has had at least one home run in every one of its 34 games so far this season, trouncing the previous record of 22 consecutive games at Hiram Bithorn Stadium with at least one HR at the start of the season. … Detroit outfielder Curtis Granderson’s two home runs from the leadoff spot Wednesday night at Busch Stadium give him two multi-homer games when batting No. 1 this season. The only player with more this season is Texas second baseman and Mizzou alum Ian Kinsler. … Colby Rasmus hit his first major-league triple last night. He had 16 triples in the minors, and that means in his pro career he has 17 triples and he’s hit into a double play only 15 times. … The Brewers sweep of Cleveland featured 55 runs, the most runs scored in an interleague series since 2005. … And speaking of 2005: Washington Nationals pitcher John Lannan became the first New York native since 2005 to get a win against the Yankees and the New York Mets in the same season. The last New Yorker to do it was Pride of Staten Island, Jason Marquis, when he swept the boroughs in 2005 for the Cardinals.

10. So, Jose Canseco plans to sue baseball for “lost wages” and “defamation of character”, and he hopes to enlist his fellow finger-waving, tongue-tied Congressional panelists to turn it into a class action lawsuit. Make that the second-least surprising steroids-related news of the week. Canseco invokes the name of Mark McGwire as an example of a player held out of the Hall of Fame by the Culture of PED and therefore kept from the comfy wages HoFers get for appearances and autograph sessions and so forth. Argues Canseco: “Baseball blackballs you from their family, meaning you can’t have a future proper reference from them, a job, no managerial jobs, no coaching jobs, nothing. They completely sever you.”

A few years ago, the question that interested me was if Canseco would have written the book that started it all, Juiced, if he had stayed in baseball long enough to hit a 500th home run. Back then, 500 was still a glory number, still a Golden Ticket to Cooperstown. Canseco didn’t hide his motivation to continue playing until he got No. 500 because it meant Hall of Fame. He longed to be part of that club.

He fell 38 homers shy. So, he became an author instead.

The question presented to Canseco’s agent was this: If he hit 500 would he have picked up a pen? His agent had a guess, but not an answer. So he dialed up Canseco and asked.

“He said he would still have written the book,” his agent told me, “but only after he was in the Hall of Fame.”

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Figured it would be a fitting way to end today’s 10@10 by talking lawsuits and courts. Day 2 of civic duty continues in downtown St. Louis, and thanks for your patience as I wrote today’s 10@10 in nibbles.

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