Daily Sports: A Weekend In Wrigley

The Chicago Cubs might not be having the best of seasons, but Wrigley Field always draws both a crowd and the TV cameras, and it’s one of the National League’s great rivalries—Cardinals-Cubbies—that will highlight daily sports throughout this weekend.

Fox will send its #1 broadcast team of Joe Buck and Tim McCarver to Wrigley for Saturday night’s game at 7:15 PM ET. This one of five games the network will send across the country, and if you’re lucky, you’ll get Texas-Detroit instead—a better game, and no McCarver.

The Saturday night Fox game is bracketed by a pair of games on MLB Network. The day starts early in the Bronx with Twins-Yanks at 1 PM ET. And it concludes late on the West Coast at 10 PMET, with most of the country seeing the Red Sox-A’s and those of us who live in the Milwaukee area stuck with Brewers-Diamondbacks.

Then on Sunday its ESPN’s turn to go to Wrigley, as the 8 PM ET telecast of Cardinals-Cubs will be the final game before the All-Star break. Earlier in the day, TBS will carry Texas-Detroit at 1 PM ET. Justin Verlander takes the mound for the Tigers.

You can also watch NASCAR in the 1 PM window on Sunday with TNT’s broadcast of the Camping World RV Sales 301, a name that might rival the Poulan Weedeater Independence Bowl from the early 1990s when it comes to just sounding silly.

The NFL Network has been putting together interesting one-hour features on their league’s history, both recent and a little more distant and one of those features has been one-hour segments focusing on specific personalities who made their mark on the league. “A Football Life” is the name of the feature and starting at 8 PM ET on Saturday night, there’s a run of three good ones.

Ray Lewis is now a part of history, as the Baltimore Ravens linebacker went out on a Super Bowl high last season, and his feature will start off the trifecta. Then it’s Kurt Warner, and concludes with a 10 PM ET look at the fearsome defensive line duo of Reggie White and Jerome Brown, who terrorized opposing offenses with the Philadelphia Eagles in the early 1990s. Both men tragically died young, Brown right in the middle of his playing career.

TheSportsNotebook’s MLB coverage this week has been focused on statistical snapshots of each division, and that will conclude with a look at the NL West. We’ll also have a look at the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series, in preparation for Sunday’s race in New Hampshire.