Using the output of strsplit

I successfully combined my data frames, and am now on my next hurdle.

I had combined the data and quarter, and used tapply to count the
entries for each unique date/quarter pair.
ar= tapply(ewrgnd$gw, list(ewrgnd$dq), sum) ? #for each date/quarter
combination sums the gw (which are all 1)
dq=row.names(ar)
spl=strsplit(dq)
But I need to split them back into the separate date and quarter. So I
used strsplit(), and get

spl

[[1]]
[1] "2009-01-01" "60"

[[2]]
[1] "2009-01-01" "61"

[[3]]
[1] "2009-01-01" "62"

[[4]]
[1] "2009-01-01" "63"

[[5]]
[1] "2009-01-01" "68"
. . .

But lists throw me. I want to get separate vectors of the date and
quarter out of my list. All the things I have seen extract rows from the
list. I need to extract columns.

Thanks list,
Jim Rome