The St. Louis Cardinals and Atlanta Braves have developed a nice little rivalry in the National League over the last couple seasons. At least it’s become a rivalry if you’re a sports fan in Atlanta.
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 11th-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.
The last day of May provides sports fans with the first real taste of summer—there’s no NBA or NHL playoff action, so it’s all about baseball on the daily sports docket for Friday.
Sometimes the attraction of the daily sports schedule lies in its quantity—a Saturday afternoon of college football or basketball being a good example. And sometimes it’s about the quality of one big game. For example, a Game 7 where a heavy favorite has been pushed the limit by a team that might be an
The Pittsburgh Pirates haven’t won a series in September. The Milwaukee Brewers haven’t lost one since the August 17-19 weekend, and the two teams moving in opposite directions have finally crisscrossed in the standings. The Pirates dropped two of three in Wrigley Field over the weekend, while the Brewers rebounded from a Friday night loss to capture a home series with the New York Mets. Milwaukee has moved a half-game ahead of Pittsburgh in the NL wild-card race, with both teams having to catch Los Angeles and St. Louis.
With 2 ½ weeks to go in the regular season it’s fair to say the Brewers-Pirates three-game series in Pittsburgh starting Tuesday is virtually an elimination series. Milwaukee’s scoring more runs than any National League team for the month of September and Pittsburgh pitching is giving up more. Clint Hurdle turns to A.J. Burnett in the opener and then to Wandy Rodriguez in the matinee finale on Thursday to see if he can turn the tide, in what will be the biggest series in baseball between now and the weekend, and the biggest matchup between these two sports markets since the Packers-Steelers Super Bowl following the 2010 season.
We’ve talked about the Baltimore Orioles more often than most media outlets here at TheSportsNotebook during the season. Not only is that a byproduct of my having lived in Charm City from 2008-11, but the fact that somebody needed to talk about the Orioles and at least examine why they were winning instead of casually assuming the winning would stop. Now the rest of the media is on the bandwagon, and they’ll get a lot of TV coverage for a four-game weekend series with the New York Yankees that started last night in dramatic fashion.
I’m going to guess that when baseball fans in Baltimore made their Labor Day weekend plans the notion they were going to have a big series in the Bronx probably didn’t want to cross everyone’s minds. But that’s exactly what’s ahead starting tonight as the Orioles meet the Yankees in a three-game set that marks the biggest games the teams have played since Jeffrey Maier became a household name in the 1996 American League Championship Series.
The Tampa Bay Rays and Texas Rangers have met in the playoffs each of the last two years, with the Rangers winning both times en route to consecutive American League pennants. The October foes square off again to start the week, and while Texas is secure, 5.5 games up in the AL West, Tampa Bay is battling tooth and nail for a wild-card spot as well as keeping their eyes on the New York Yankees ahead of them in the AL East. The Rangers-Rays series in Arlington keynotes the opening half of the week in the race for the MLB playoffs.
The top of the National League’s East & West divisions go head-to-head to start off the week in baseball and we’re six weeks out from the finish line. Washington meets Atlanta, and in an even bigger series the Los Angeles Dodgers match up with San Francisco. TheSportsNotebook previews these, and the rest of the early week in the MLB playoff race…
The wild-card race is running full steam in both leagues as we hit the third weekend of August, and both the American & National League have two big head-to-head series going down over the next three days, as TheSportsNotebook dives into what’s ahead for the weekend in baseball..
The Detroit Tigers and Texas Rangers are each on a stretch of playing decent baseball, as last year’s ALCS teams look to again make it to October and go deep. The Tigers split four with the Yankees earlier in the week. I suppose that can be considered modestly disappointing, as they won the first two at home and hit C.C. Sabathia hard in the third game before losing 12-8. But a split with one of the league’s best teams is never a bad thing and it fits into an overall stretch of consistency for Jim Leyland’s team. Texas, after losing the first two games of their series with the Angels early last week, responded by winning the next two and salvaging a split and then taking two of three from Kansas City and Boston.
The Oakland A’s and Los Angeles Angels are barely hanging on in the AL West race, trailing Texas by 5.5 and 6 games respectively. But the A’s lead the wild-card race and the Angels are just a game out of the playoffs as they begin a crucial three-game series in NoCal tonight. The series’ loser […]