Sunday, October 10, 2004
Braves Beat Astros 6-5, Set Up Atlanta Finale
Sun Oct 10, 6:43 PM ET
By Mark Babineck
HOUSTON (Reuters) - Adam LaRoche (news) crushed a game-tying three-run homer and J.D. Drew (news) slapped a ninth-inning RBI single to give the Braves a 6-5 comeback victory over the Houston Astros (news) on Sunday.
Reuters Photo
The result leveled the best-of-five National League Division Series at 2-2 and set up a finale back in Atlanta.
"It was a little momentum swing, I think," said rookie LaRoche, who had refused to let a freak play that cost the Braves dearly get him down.
"Some guys were thinking, 'This might be our last game.' That turned the emotions around and kind of gave the guys a boost."
J.D. Drew finished off the Astros with a ninth-inning RBI single and John Smoltz (news) pitched two scoreless innings at the end.
The Braves had good reason to be somber.
Leading 2-1 in the second inning, starter Russ Ortiz (news) appeared to get out of a jam when he caught Craig Biggio (news)'s pop fly after it careened off Minute Maid Park's rafters.
The umpires ruled the ball dead because it hit the roof, which was closed despite fair weather, in foul territory.
Given new life, Biggio lined a three-run homer into the left-field seats and Jeff Bagwell (news)'s run-scoring single two batters later made it 5-2.
Roger Clemens (news) left the game after five innings and reliever Chad Qualls promptly got into trouble, serving up two hits before LaRoche's first-pitch blast.
ON FUMES
"He was at the end of his rope," Astros manager Phil Garner said when asked why he lifted Clemens. "He gave us everything he had. That last inning, he was on fumes."
Garner, who has had uncanny success with his moves since he took over at mid-season, inserted closer Brad Lidge (news) in the eighth inning, then lifted him for pinch hitter Orlando Palmeiro (news) when the Astros had runners on the corners with two out.
Palmeiro grounded out to first on a close play, leaving Garner to use journeyman reliever Russ Springer in the ninth.
Springer recorded two quick strikeouts before hitting Rafael Furcal (news) with a pitch. Furcal stole second and scored on the hit by Drew, who had been 2-for-15 in the series.
"J.D Drew has been struggling, no doubt about that," Cox said. "He rose today. That's baseball."
Clemens, who was a career 0-3 with a 6.98 ERA in playoff starts on short rest, seemed to get stronger as the game wore on.
"You can tell he knows what he's doing out there," said LaRoche, who was three years old when Clemens made his major-league debut.
"He doesn't leave anything over the heart of the plate. He was impressive, like we knew he was going to be."
Braves starter Russ Ortiz gave up five runs in three innings but was mindful his pitching line might have been very different had the roof been open and Biggio popped out.
"After I caught it I was pretty excited because I thought it was the third out," Ortiz said. "But those are the rules, I guess."
The Astros were trying to advance in the playoffs for the first time in the franchise's 43-year history. The Braves have failed to move beyond the first round in three of the last four seasons and have lost two straight Game 5's.
Sun Oct 10, 6:43 PM ET
By Mark Babineck
HOUSTON (Reuters) - Adam LaRoche (news) crushed a game-tying three-run homer and J.D. Drew (news) slapped a ninth-inning RBI single to give the Braves a 6-5 comeback victory over the Houston Astros (news) on Sunday.
Reuters Photo
The result leveled the best-of-five National League Division Series at 2-2 and set up a finale back in Atlanta.
"It was a little momentum swing, I think," said rookie LaRoche, who had refused to let a freak play that cost the Braves dearly get him down.
"Some guys were thinking, 'This might be our last game.' That turned the emotions around and kind of gave the guys a boost."
J.D. Drew finished off the Astros with a ninth-inning RBI single and John Smoltz (news) pitched two scoreless innings at the end.
The Braves had good reason to be somber.
Leading 2-1 in the second inning, starter Russ Ortiz (news) appeared to get out of a jam when he caught Craig Biggio (news)'s pop fly after it careened off Minute Maid Park's rafters.
The umpires ruled the ball dead because it hit the roof, which was closed despite fair weather, in foul territory.
Given new life, Biggio lined a three-run homer into the left-field seats and Jeff Bagwell (news)'s run-scoring single two batters later made it 5-2.
Roger Clemens (news) left the game after five innings and reliever Chad Qualls promptly got into trouble, serving up two hits before LaRoche's first-pitch blast.
ON FUMES
"He was at the end of his rope," Astros manager Phil Garner said when asked why he lifted Clemens. "He gave us everything he had. That last inning, he was on fumes."
Garner, who has had uncanny success with his moves since he took over at mid-season, inserted closer Brad Lidge (news) in the eighth inning, then lifted him for pinch hitter Orlando Palmeiro (news) when the Astros had runners on the corners with two out.
Palmeiro grounded out to first on a close play, leaving Garner to use journeyman reliever Russ Springer in the ninth.
Springer recorded two quick strikeouts before hitting Rafael Furcal (news) with a pitch. Furcal stole second and scored on the hit by Drew, who had been 2-for-15 in the series.
"J.D Drew has been struggling, no doubt about that," Cox said. "He rose today. That's baseball."
Clemens, who was a career 0-3 with a 6.98 ERA in playoff starts on short rest, seemed to get stronger as the game wore on.
"You can tell he knows what he's doing out there," said LaRoche, who was three years old when Clemens made his major-league debut.
"He doesn't leave anything over the heart of the plate. He was impressive, like we knew he was going to be."
Braves starter Russ Ortiz gave up five runs in three innings but was mindful his pitching line might have been very different had the roof been open and Biggio popped out.
"After I caught it I was pretty excited because I thought it was the third out," Ortiz said. "But those are the rules, I guess."
The Astros were trying to advance in the playoffs for the first time in the franchise's 43-year history. The Braves have failed to move beyond the first round in three of the last four seasons and have lost two straight Game 5's.
Critical Faculties
I want your sex (history)
By Christopher Shea October 10, 2004
"GENIUS OR PERV?" That was the rather indelicate headline atop a story in a Toronto newspaper about "Kinsey," a new film starring Liam Neeson set to open next month. The movie portrays the taboo-flouting scientific zeal that drove pioneering sex researcher Alfred Kinsey to take down the sexual histories of thousands of Americans -- demonstrating for the first time just how far actual American sex departed from the missionary-position, husband-and-wife ideal. Yet it also shows him cheating on his wife with a man, circumcising himself, and -- worst of all -- failing to tell police that one of his subjects claimed to have sexually molested hundreds of children.
Kinsey is currently enjoying a cultural revival of sorts. The film is winning plaudits at film festivals, T.C. Boyle's Kinsey-inspired novel "The Inner Circle" is climbing the best-seller lists, and a documentary is slated to run on PBS in February. Today's sex researchers -- who include everyone from reconstructive surgeons to biomedical types studying the female orgasm to Kinsey-style survey-takers -- are also enjoying a momentary spotlight.
Yet sex research remains somewhat of an orphan in American academia, falling through disciplinary cracks, says Vern Bullough, an emeritus professor of history at California State University in Northridge and author of "Science in the Bedroom" (Basic), a history of the field. "Most universities have a course in human sexuality, but departments fight over whether it should be in psychology or biology or sociology or nursing or what," he notes.
Bullough traces the roots of sex research in late 19th- and early 20th-century Germany and Austria, where empiricists like Magnus Hirschfeld conducted surveys about homosexuality and Freud proposed more abstract theories about sexuality. That tradition, Bullough says, was basically "destroyed in Europe by Hitler and picked up in the United States," where it joined with America's own tradition of "hygiene commissions" set up by city governments and charitable foundations to combat venereal disease.
Kinsey began his own career as an entomologist studying gull wasps before he shifted toward his famous inquiry into human sexuality. In interviews he and his staff at Indiana University conducted, he documented the sexual histories of some 18,000 Americans, discussing everything from masturbation to same-sex experimentation to premarital sex. In 1948, the famous "Kinsey Report" on male sexuality notoriously found that 37 percent of men surveyed had had at least one homosexual encounter. In 1953, his follow-up on female sexuality reported the even more shocking fact that 64 percent of married women had had an orgasm before their wedding night through a scandalous variety of means.
The study still infuriates some social conservatives today. "Kinsey's `Male' book libeled our World War II grandfathers and fathers. His `Female' book libeled our grandmothers and mothers," the independent scholar and longtime Kinsey critic Judith Reisman wrote last year. Sex researchers expect a backlash against the movie. "People who don't want to know more about sexuality [are] concerned that the film will somewhat make sex research more respectable," says Julia Heiman, a psychologist who took over as the new director of Indiana Kinsey Institute in June.
Even more sympathetic observers acknowledge that Kinsey's work suffered from a lack of scientific sampling methods. Still, his reports provided the richest information on American sexuality for four decades -- at least until a team of University of Chicago sociologists published a more statistically sophisticated study in 1994. That study lowered the incidence of homosexuality to about three percent and generally highlighted the mundane, seven-times-a-month-for-married-couples quality of American sex. But some scholars think Kinsey's work has some advantages -- that his long, ingratiating interviews may have elicited more frankness than the just-the-facts-ma'am approach of the volunteers who went door-to-door for the Chicago sociologists.
In "Science in the Bedroom," Bullough says sex researchers break down into camps: the "Sex is good, and let me convince you" crew, as he puts it, and more buttoned-down types who declare, "Sex is an important topic to investigate, and I'm doing it scientifically." That division is evident in the program for next month's annual meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality, which is set to draw 400 scholars and sex therapists to Orlando, Fla. Turn your head from the list of sober talks on STDs and erectile dysfunction to gaze on ads for Natural Contours vibrators (pitchwoman Candida Royalle, a feminist-porn director, will put in an appearance in Orlando) as well as videotapes with such titles as "A Lover's Guide to Self-Pleasuring" and "Enjoying Guilty Pleasures."
But don't be fooled by the "Floridian Poolside Fantasy" party scheduled for Saturday night. "It is like any scientific meeting," observes Beverly Whipple, an emerita professor of nursing at Rutgers, past president of the Society, and coiner of the term "G-spot," who will be receiving an award at the session. "It is not a carnival."
So what will the actual science be like? To judge from some recent issues of the Journal of Sex Research, some sex specialists have a weakness for the obvious: Among the startling findings reported there are that college students who view porn in a psychology laboratory are likely to have sex when they go home, and that "attractive" women in various cultures use "attractiveness-enhancing tactics" (such as wearing makeup or flirtatiously touching men) more often than their less comely sisters.
Yet researchers are also looking at the causes of risky and compulsive sex, charting changes in attitudes toward homosexuality, and -- a hot topic -- looking for the causes of and cures for female sexual dysfunction. John Bancroft, the former director of the Kinsey center, reports an odd, potentially useful discovery about self-described sex addicts: They report high sexual arousal when depressed, unlike almost everyone else.
And Marca Sipski, an M.D. at the University of Miami, has demonstrated over the last few years that women with severe spinal-cord injuries can still experience orgasms. Not only does that discovery offer new clues about the biophysiology of the orgasm, says Rutgers's Whipple, who has also published on this topic. It offers reassurance to paralyzed women who have been telling skeptical doctors this for years. "My whole research program," says Whipple, "has been to validate the sexual response of women who have been told their responses differ from what is 'normal.'
"Redefining what's normal, you might say, is a guiding principle of sex researchers -- and one reason they take so much heat. Whatever comes next -- female Viagra? -- the Kinsey project is still alive.
Christopher Shea's Critical Faculties column appears in Ideas biweekly. E-mail: critical.faculties@verizon.net.
I want your sex (history)
By Christopher Shea October 10, 2004
"GENIUS OR PERV?" That was the rather indelicate headline atop a story in a Toronto newspaper about "Kinsey," a new film starring Liam Neeson set to open next month. The movie portrays the taboo-flouting scientific zeal that drove pioneering sex researcher Alfred Kinsey to take down the sexual histories of thousands of Americans -- demonstrating for the first time just how far actual American sex departed from the missionary-position, husband-and-wife ideal. Yet it also shows him cheating on his wife with a man, circumcising himself, and -- worst of all -- failing to tell police that one of his subjects claimed to have sexually molested hundreds of children.
Kinsey is currently enjoying a cultural revival of sorts. The film is winning plaudits at film festivals, T.C. Boyle's Kinsey-inspired novel "The Inner Circle" is climbing the best-seller lists, and a documentary is slated to run on PBS in February. Today's sex researchers -- who include everyone from reconstructive surgeons to biomedical types studying the female orgasm to Kinsey-style survey-takers -- are also enjoying a momentary spotlight.
Yet sex research remains somewhat of an orphan in American academia, falling through disciplinary cracks, says Vern Bullough, an emeritus professor of history at California State University in Northridge and author of "Science in the Bedroom" (Basic), a history of the field. "Most universities have a course in human sexuality, but departments fight over whether it should be in psychology or biology or sociology or nursing or what," he notes.
Bullough traces the roots of sex research in late 19th- and early 20th-century Germany and Austria, where empiricists like Magnus Hirschfeld conducted surveys about homosexuality and Freud proposed more abstract theories about sexuality. That tradition, Bullough says, was basically "destroyed in Europe by Hitler and picked up in the United States," where it joined with America's own tradition of "hygiene commissions" set up by city governments and charitable foundations to combat venereal disease.
Kinsey began his own career as an entomologist studying gull wasps before he shifted toward his famous inquiry into human sexuality. In interviews he and his staff at Indiana University conducted, he documented the sexual histories of some 18,000 Americans, discussing everything from masturbation to same-sex experimentation to premarital sex. In 1948, the famous "Kinsey Report" on male sexuality notoriously found that 37 percent of men surveyed had had at least one homosexual encounter. In 1953, his follow-up on female sexuality reported the even more shocking fact that 64 percent of married women had had an orgasm before their wedding night through a scandalous variety of means.
The study still infuriates some social conservatives today. "Kinsey's `Male' book libeled our World War II grandfathers and fathers. His `Female' book libeled our grandmothers and mothers," the independent scholar and longtime Kinsey critic Judith Reisman wrote last year. Sex researchers expect a backlash against the movie. "People who don't want to know more about sexuality [are] concerned that the film will somewhat make sex research more respectable," says Julia Heiman, a psychologist who took over as the new director of Indiana Kinsey Institute in June.
Even more sympathetic observers acknowledge that Kinsey's work suffered from a lack of scientific sampling methods. Still, his reports provided the richest information on American sexuality for four decades -- at least until a team of University of Chicago sociologists published a more statistically sophisticated study in 1994. That study lowered the incidence of homosexuality to about three percent and generally highlighted the mundane, seven-times-a-month-for-married-couples quality of American sex. But some scholars think Kinsey's work has some advantages -- that his long, ingratiating interviews may have elicited more frankness than the just-the-facts-ma'am approach of the volunteers who went door-to-door for the Chicago sociologists.
In "Science in the Bedroom," Bullough says sex researchers break down into camps: the "Sex is good, and let me convince you" crew, as he puts it, and more buttoned-down types who declare, "Sex is an important topic to investigate, and I'm doing it scientifically." That division is evident in the program for next month's annual meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality, which is set to draw 400 scholars and sex therapists to Orlando, Fla. Turn your head from the list of sober talks on STDs and erectile dysfunction to gaze on ads for Natural Contours vibrators (pitchwoman Candida Royalle, a feminist-porn director, will put in an appearance in Orlando) as well as videotapes with such titles as "A Lover's Guide to Self-Pleasuring" and "Enjoying Guilty Pleasures."
But don't be fooled by the "Floridian Poolside Fantasy" party scheduled for Saturday night. "It is like any scientific meeting," observes Beverly Whipple, an emerita professor of nursing at Rutgers, past president of the Society, and coiner of the term "G-spot," who will be receiving an award at the session. "It is not a carnival."
So what will the actual science be like? To judge from some recent issues of the Journal of Sex Research, some sex specialists have a weakness for the obvious: Among the startling findings reported there are that college students who view porn in a psychology laboratory are likely to have sex when they go home, and that "attractive" women in various cultures use "attractiveness-enhancing tactics" (such as wearing makeup or flirtatiously touching men) more often than their less comely sisters.
Yet researchers are also looking at the causes of risky and compulsive sex, charting changes in attitudes toward homosexuality, and -- a hot topic -- looking for the causes of and cures for female sexual dysfunction. John Bancroft, the former director of the Kinsey center, reports an odd, potentially useful discovery about self-described sex addicts: They report high sexual arousal when depressed, unlike almost everyone else.
And Marca Sipski, an M.D. at the University of Miami, has demonstrated over the last few years that women with severe spinal-cord injuries can still experience orgasms. Not only does that discovery offer new clues about the biophysiology of the orgasm, says Rutgers's Whipple, who has also published on this topic. It offers reassurance to paralyzed women who have been telling skeptical doctors this for years. "My whole research program," says Whipple, "has been to validate the sexual response of women who have been told their responses differ from what is 'normal.'
"Redefining what's normal, you might say, is a guiding principle of sex researchers -- and one reason they take so much heat. Whatever comes next -- female Viagra? -- the Kinsey project is still alive.
Christopher Shea's Critical Faculties column appears in Ideas biweekly. E-mail: critical.faculties@verizon.net.
Schumi storms to Japan win
JAPANESE GP RESULT
1 M Schumacher (Ferrari)2 R Schumacher (Williams)3 J Button (BAR)4 T Sato (BAR)5 F Alonso (Renault)6 K Raikkonen (McLaren)7 JP Montoya (Williams)8 G Fisichella (Sauber)
Race as it happened
Photos from Suzuka Michael Schumacher has won a record 13th race in a season with a crushing performance at the Japanese Grand Prix.
The world champion took pole position on a drying track in the first ever Sunday morning qualifying and stormed away to an unchallenged victory.
Ralf Schumacher won a strategic battle with Jenson Button's BAR-Honda to take second in his Williams-BMW.
David Coulthard was in the thick of that fight before a collision with Rubens Barrichello took him out.
Coulthard casts no blame The Scot, who missed out on his best result of the season, and Button chose to make only two stops, while the two Schumacher brothers made three.
"For us it was pretty clear we would have a good race pace. I was pretty confident I could do it," said Michael Schumacher.
"We had to be flat-out until the pit-stops but we have dominated all year and I didn't expect anything different here. We were superb."
I went for the two stops because it worked pretty well for me in the last race
Jenson Button
BAR close on second place But while Michael and Ralf Schumacher had more than enough pace to make a three-stop strategy work, it was not so successful for Button's team-mate Takuma Sato.
The Japanese qualified third behind the Schumachers, but lost a place to Button at the start.
The team ordered them to swap places to enable Sato to make the most of his strategy.
However, Sato was unable to make up enough time and he was not quite able to join in the battle for third place.
Button said: "I went for the two stops because it worked pretty well for me in the last race and I'm used to driving the car when it is pretty heavy (with fuel)."
He was set for fifth place before Coulthard's retirement with 14 laps to go promoted him to fourth.
Grandstand discussion area:Give your thoughts on the Japanese Grand Prix Fernando Alonso drove a strong but unobtrusive race to fifth place in the Renault after qualifying 11th in a wet but drying session that led to a mixed grid and an intriguing race.
The Spaniard was initially held up by team-mate Jacques Villeneuve, who headed a queue that also included McLaren's Kimi Raikkonen, Williams' Juan Pablo Montoya and Barrichello.
Villeneuve held up a huge train of cars early onVilleneuve continued to lack pace in his second race for Renault, and caused a bottleneck in the early laps.
Once clear of him, Montoya and Barrichello closed up on Jarno Trulli's Toyota, with Sauber's Giancarlo Fisichella joining the battle.
A move by Montoya on Trulli at the chicane on lap 23 led to him losing two places and Barrichello finally squeezing past to the head of the group.
But Montoya recovered to seventh place, behind Raikkonen, whose pace on a two-stop strategy leapfrogged him ahead of his future McLaren team-mate.
Fisichella completed the points scorers in eighth place.
Toyota Trulli impressed Trulli dropped out of the picture as the race went on and finished 11th - three places ahead of team-mate Olivier Panis.
JAPANESE GP RESULT
1 M Schumacher (Ferrari)2 R Schumacher (Williams)3 J Button (BAR)4 T Sato (BAR)5 F Alonso (Renault)6 K Raikkonen (McLaren)7 JP Montoya (Williams)8 G Fisichella (Sauber)
Race as it happened
Photos from Suzuka Michael Schumacher has won a record 13th race in a season with a crushing performance at the Japanese Grand Prix.
The world champion took pole position on a drying track in the first ever Sunday morning qualifying and stormed away to an unchallenged victory.
Ralf Schumacher won a strategic battle with Jenson Button's BAR-Honda to take second in his Williams-BMW.
David Coulthard was in the thick of that fight before a collision with Rubens Barrichello took him out.
Coulthard casts no blame The Scot, who missed out on his best result of the season, and Button chose to make only two stops, while the two Schumacher brothers made three.
"For us it was pretty clear we would have a good race pace. I was pretty confident I could do it," said Michael Schumacher.
"We had to be flat-out until the pit-stops but we have dominated all year and I didn't expect anything different here. We were superb."
I went for the two stops because it worked pretty well for me in the last race
Jenson Button
BAR close on second place But while Michael and Ralf Schumacher had more than enough pace to make a three-stop strategy work, it was not so successful for Button's team-mate Takuma Sato.
The Japanese qualified third behind the Schumachers, but lost a place to Button at the start.
The team ordered them to swap places to enable Sato to make the most of his strategy.
However, Sato was unable to make up enough time and he was not quite able to join in the battle for third place.
Button said: "I went for the two stops because it worked pretty well for me in the last race and I'm used to driving the car when it is pretty heavy (with fuel)."
He was set for fifth place before Coulthard's retirement with 14 laps to go promoted him to fourth.
Grandstand discussion area:Give your thoughts on the Japanese Grand Prix Fernando Alonso drove a strong but unobtrusive race to fifth place in the Renault after qualifying 11th in a wet but drying session that led to a mixed grid and an intriguing race.
The Spaniard was initially held up by team-mate Jacques Villeneuve, who headed a queue that also included McLaren's Kimi Raikkonen, Williams' Juan Pablo Montoya and Barrichello.
Villeneuve held up a huge train of cars early onVilleneuve continued to lack pace in his second race for Renault, and caused a bottleneck in the early laps.
Once clear of him, Montoya and Barrichello closed up on Jarno Trulli's Toyota, with Sauber's Giancarlo Fisichella joining the battle.
A move by Montoya on Trulli at the chicane on lap 23 led to him losing two places and Barrichello finally squeezing past to the head of the group.
But Montoya recovered to seventh place, behind Raikkonen, whose pace on a two-stop strategy leapfrogged him ahead of his future McLaren team-mate.
Fisichella completed the points scorers in eighth place.
Toyota Trulli impressed Trulli dropped out of the picture as the race went on and finished 11th - three places ahead of team-mate Olivier Panis.
Schumacher Leads Japanese GP Qualifying
Sat Oct 9,10:52 PM ET
By SALVATORE ZANCA, Associated Press Writer
SUZUKA, Japan - Formula One champion Michael Schumacher claimed his eight pole position of the year and the 63rd of his career Sunday, turning the fastest qualifying lap just hours before the start of the Japanese Grand Prix.
Schumacher moved within two top qualifying efforts of matching Ayrton Senna's career pole position record of 65. Schumacher last started from the pole at the Hungarian Grand Prix in August, the last race he won.
Qualifying for the Japanese GP was postponed Saturday because of a typhoon warning. Organizers closed the track, canceling the regular prequalifying and qualifying sessions. They rescheduled qualifying for just hours before Sunday's race.
"Qualifying on the same day (as the race) is rather awkward," Schumacher said. "To go right into pre-qualifying without practice made things interesting."
Schumacher had a fast lap of 1 minute, 33.542 seconds in his Ferrari on the 3.609-mile circuit, just ahead of his brother, Ralf, who finished in 1:34.032 in his Williams-BMW. Ralf Schumacher is competing in just his second race since a serious crash at the U.S. Grand Prix in June.
Mark Webber qualified third in a Jaguar-Cosworth in 1:34.571.
Ferrari's Rubens Barrichello, who won the last two races — the Italian and Chinese Grand Prix — qualified 15th at 1:38.637.
Barrichello's victories give Ferrari 14 wins in 16 races this season. Kimi Raikkonen and Jarno Trulli are the only other winners in the series.
Sat Oct 9,10:52 PM ET
By SALVATORE ZANCA, Associated Press Writer
SUZUKA, Japan - Formula One champion Michael Schumacher claimed his eight pole position of the year and the 63rd of his career Sunday, turning the fastest qualifying lap just hours before the start of the Japanese Grand Prix.
Schumacher moved within two top qualifying efforts of matching Ayrton Senna's career pole position record of 65. Schumacher last started from the pole at the Hungarian Grand Prix in August, the last race he won.
Qualifying for the Japanese GP was postponed Saturday because of a typhoon warning. Organizers closed the track, canceling the regular prequalifying and qualifying sessions. They rescheduled qualifying for just hours before Sunday's race.
"Qualifying on the same day (as the race) is rather awkward," Schumacher said. "To go right into pre-qualifying without practice made things interesting."
Schumacher had a fast lap of 1 minute, 33.542 seconds in his Ferrari on the 3.609-mile circuit, just ahead of his brother, Ralf, who finished in 1:34.032 in his Williams-BMW. Ralf Schumacher is competing in just his second race since a serious crash at the U.S. Grand Prix in June.
Mark Webber qualified third in a Jaguar-Cosworth in 1:34.571.
Ferrari's Rubens Barrichello, who won the last two races — the Italian and Chinese Grand Prix — qualified 15th at 1:38.637.
Barrichello's victories give Ferrari 14 wins in 16 races this season. Kimi Raikkonen and Jarno Trulli are the only other winners in the series.
