Daily Sports: Baltimore Badly Needs A Win Tonight

At the start of this week, TheSportsNotebook featured the Baltimore Orioles and noted that they were starting an enormous 15-game stretch against good teams that could make or break their playoff chances. Two close losses at home to the Tampa Bay Rays are how that stretch has started out, so the stakes are high tonight in Camden Yards. And the cameras of ESPN2 are on hand, as Buck Showalter hands the ball to rotation ace Wei-Yin Chen to try and stop the bleeding in a 7 PM ET game.

Rays-Orioles keynotes Wednesday’s daily sports activity on TV. For those able to check out an afternoon game, the finale of the Red Sox-Giants series in San Francisco goes on MLB Network at 3:30 PM ET. This is the rubber game of the three-game set, with Boston having slipped percentage points behind Tampa in the AL East.

It’s tomorrow that Week 3 of the NFL preseason begins, but the NFL Network will still spend the day and the prime parts of the evening re-broadcasting games from Week 2. The focal point tonight is at 8 PM ET, where you can do some scouting on the Denver Broncos and Seattle Seahawks.

NBA-TV continues its celebration of the recent past, with a run of classic games from the late 1980s and early 1990s. The prime-time feature is at 8 PM ET, and it’s the finale of the 1991 NBA Finals when the Chicago Bulls beat the Los Angeles Lakers in the old Forum to clinch. When we woke up that June morning in ’91, there were still nimrods who said that Michael Jordan could not win a championship. When we went to bed, Jordan was well on his way to duct-taping the mouths of the critics forever.

TheSportsNotebook has football on its mind over the next couple of days. There’s going to be previews of Notre Dame, the old Big East (now called the American Athletic) and the AFC South. I haven’t decided on the sequence that everything will be posted today and tomorrow, but just check out the categories for college football coverage and NFL analysis for this, along with the extensive material that’s been posted throughout August.