Daily Sports: MLB Tripleheader On Tuesday

The Pittsburgh Pirates cut the St. Louis Cardinals’ lead in the NL Central to a half-game last night when the Pirates won the opener of their five-game series. Now the two teams play a doubleheader on Tuesday, with MLB Network coverage of the opener kicking off a tripleheader day of baseball that makes Tuesday a good day for daily sports on TV.

Pittsburgh-St. Louis will get underway at 4 PM ET from PNC Park, as not only this is a rare five-game series with a  doubleheader mixed in, but it’s a true twi-night doubleheader, where the games are back-to-back. Nowadays, the only twinbills are usually of the day-night variety, with one game at 1 PM, then clear the stadium, then have another at 7 PM.

Speaking of 7 PM, that’s when MLB Network shows either Seattle-Boston or Colorado-Atlanta. Presumably, Mariners-Red Sox will be the game most of the country sees, and as a Boston fan living in a National League market (Milwaukee0, I’m hoping that’s the case. But the Rockies are hanging around in the NL West—granted, it’s more because of the weakness of their division, but lurking is lurking, whatever the record.

Then we go to the West Coast for the 10 PM ET nightcap, with the Yankees-Dodgers being the prime game, and parts of the country seeing Reds-Padres.

Football fans can get their NFL training camp fix. The NFL Network has an 8 PM ET recap of the entire day in camps, and if you’re in time to set the DVR, or work from home, you can watch all-day coverage of training camps starting at 10 AM ET.

I haven’t indulged in the pleasure, but my Monday podcast host Greg DePalma has, and during our show yesterday, he said the network basically spends the day obsessed over the same camp stories you can read about everywhere else in the media—RG3 and the Redskins, what’s going in New England, etc. More reason to stick to baseball for TV, as far as I’m concerned, although I’m looking forward to beginning the college football and NFL previews here at TheSportsNotebook next week.