Daily Sports: The Eyes Of Texas On Tuesday

Baltimore Orioles first baseman Chris Davis has lit up the American League this season, with 33 home runs and he’s set to be the AL starter in the All-Star Game next week at Citi Field in New York. Before Davis was lifting the Oriole offense, he was a part of the Texas Rangers’ organization. Davis is facing his original MLB home in the early part of this week, and tonight’s Orioles-Rangers game (7 PM ET, MLB) is the highlight of Tuesday’s daily sports schedule.

Texas traded Davis, along with pitcher Tommy Hunter, as part of a deal to bring back reliever Koji Uehara in 2011. This underscores the risk that comes with all these deadline deals. Uehara was, and is, a good reliever, but he was slated to fill the seventh-inning role. Is it so unthinkable that a team could find another way to fill this void other than dealing prospects? We should note that Hunter has become an effective reliever with the Orioles.

I don’t mean to pick on Texas—all contenders do this, and in a lot of cases they don’t even get a good reliever back in return. What I do mean to pick on is the notion that you have to acquire veterans for every single role on a team when you’re pushing for the World Series. With the non-waiver trade deadline now three weeks out, it’s a topic we’ll have to reason to revisit in the near future.

Speaking of Texas, we all know that football, not baseball, is the driving force in the Lone Star State, and the Dallas Cowboys are the theme of tonight’s NFL Network historical features. Starting at 8 PM ET you can watch consecutive one-hour features on Jimmy Johnson and Tom Landry, the coaches who combined to win four Super Bowls in Dallas. Landry did it over a period of two decades, reaching the heights in 1971 and 1977, while Johnson did it in a compressed five-year stretch, breaking through with championships in 1992 and 1993.

Here at TheSportsNotebook, our MLB coverage will be talking about the AL Central. We’ll have a statistical snapshot of each team and how they stand in this final week before the All-Star break. This is the second in a series of divisional features that began yesterday with the AL East.