TV Daily Sports: Tuesday Looks A Lot Like Monday

The summer reruns have started on sports. Tuesday is a day that looks an awful lot like Monday in terms of daily sports choices on TV. Afternoon coverage of Wimbledon goes up to 4 PM ET on ESPN2. Then at night the baseball focus is the San Francisco Giants and Cincinnati Reds (7 PM ET, MLB Network).

At least the Giants-Reds game promises to be better than last night. San Fran had to throw a kid fresh up from the minors in Michael Kickham, and his command was all over the place, with the Reds coasting to an 8-1 win.

There was one positive for this—well for me, they were two, since I wanted the Reds to win. But for the TV audience, had Kickham delivered a respectable outing, ESPN’s Rick Sutcliffe, notoriously overenthusiastic about everything, might have had the poor kid destined for the Hall of Fame. Instead, Sutcliffe was forced into some actual analysis of what was going wrong for Kickham and the analyst did a decent job. Rick, take note.

ESPN also showed highlight of San Francisco’s improbable Division Series win over Cincinnati last year, when the Giants won three straight on the banks of the Ohio River to complete a rally from 0-2 down in the series. I was thinking that city of Cincinnati must really have it in for their counterparts in Frisco. The Bengals have made the Super Bowl twice…and both times lost to the 49ers, once on a goal-line stand in 1981 and the other on a last-minute Joe Montana drive in 1988. Now you tack last year’s postseason on and the good people of southwest Ohio have to be hungry for some revenge.

Here at TheSportsNotebook, our MLB coverage will hone in on a to-be-decided NL East topic that will go up later this afternoon. Yesterday’s feature took a closer look at the Minnesota Twins, who are still lurking around in the AL Central race.