Daily Sports: Are The Yankees Making Their Last Stand?

The New York Yankees are facing the crunch point of their season. They just lost two of three this weekend in Fenway Park, including an 11^th-inning walkoff defeat on Sunday night. Now they fly into Texas for another competitive series against the Rangers. ESPN televises the series opener tonight at 7 PM ET.

While the Yanks are often overhyped to the extreme, we really are at a point in the schedule where they’re the most intriguing team in baseball. Can they hold on in a sequence of games against good teams and keep themselves in the playoff race in time for Jeter and A-Rod to save the day? They’ve got to steal some series wins and another chance starts tonight.

The other option in daily sports, in what’s a very quiet TV night, even by July standards, is to watch the championship game of the NBA Summer League. The teams of the Golden State Warriors and Phoenix Suns meet for the title at 9 PM ET on NBA-TV. Is it fair to say this is the biggest game these franchises have played since the Suns took Game 7 of the 1976 Western Conference Finals? Is it fair to say that perhaps 1 percent of diehard basketball fans could even tell you one player on either team?

NFL Network normally has had some pretty good programming, although today their best choice is in the mid-afternoon. A replay of last year’s Super Bowl is running at 4 PM ET. Watch the power go out, watch San Francisco make key mistakes, and watch the atrocious no-call on fourth down in the end zone all over again, as the Baltimore Ravens make Ray’s Last Ride one to remember.

Here at TheSportsNotebook we’re going to take a look at the AL East race, and then at 4 PM ET I’ll be appearing on Prime Sports Network with Greg DePalma for our usual Monday podcast. Greg will start with 15-20 minutes from golf expert Jeff Shain, as they recount how Phil Mickelson won the British Open, and then I’ll be on to talk baseball for an hour or so.