The Elevator

By Brian Hilderbrand

Saturday, May 24, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Who’s going to the penthouse in local sports and beyond and who’s getting the shaft:

GOING UP

Ryan Ludwick

A former UNLV standout, Ludwick apparently has finally found a home with the St. Louis Cardinals after playing for five organizations in the past eight years. Ludwick recently posted a stretch where he hit six home runs in 10 days, including a pair of two-homer games, and took the team lead in both homers and RBIs.

Sin City Skulls

After winning only one game last year, the Skulls wheelchair rugby team went 5-0 and captured the Quad Rugby Division III National Championship last weekend in Park City, Utah. The team, made up entirely of quadriplegic players, was profiled in a Sun story in October.

Minor League Baseball

Things are great down on the farm, where the turnstiles spun at a record rate in the opening month of the season. Attendance last month was 6,665,662 — the most ever recorded in April in the 107-year history of Minor League Baseball. The league is on pace to break its season attendance record for the fifth consecutive year. In case you are rooting for the home team: The 51s drew 88,371 in 16 home dates in April, for an average of 5,523 per game. The league average in April was 3,745.

GOING DOWN

UNLV men’s golf

The Rebels, ranked eighth in the country by Golfweek magazine at the start of the season, qualified for their 20th consecutive NCAA Regional but failed to advance to the NCAA finals for the second consecutive year. UNLV was ranked 15th going into the postseason and finished 24th out of 27 teams at the NCAA West Regional last weekend in Bremerton, Wash.

Mother Nature

UNLV head basketball coach Lon Kruger was greeted with strong winds — the bane of all golfers — during the first day of the Coaches vs. Cancer charity golf tournament he hosted last week at TPC Summerlin. On Wednesday, gusting winds again whipped a field of 72 golfers at Spanish Trail Golf and Country Club who paid $1,000 each to send the UNLV basketball team to Australia this summer for a tournament.

Troy Cage

You would think Cage, a freshman forward, would have waited until after the Rebels’ all-expenses-paid summer trip to Australia to announce he was quitting the team because of a lack of playing time.