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Wimbledon TV schedule

Daily Sports: Wimbledon, The AL East & The All-Stars Mark The Weekend

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The weekend in daily sports follows a similar pattern in each day—start in England, move to New York in early afternoon, end in Anaheim at night, and mix in a good baseball movie. And jumping into the midst of this basic pattern will be the stars coming out in major league baseball.

Tennis starts early on Saturday morning when the women’s final between Marione Bartoli and Sabine Lisicki commences at 9 AM ET on ESPN. By early afternoon you can switch into key AL East action, with the Baltimore Orioles and New York Yankees from the Bronx (1 PM ET, MLB).

Then at 6:30 PM ET, Fox starts its customary Saturday night baseball coverage a half-hour early, and it’s for the purpose of announcing the All-Star Game starters. The reserves and pitchers still have to be chosen, and each league will have one player chosen by popular online vote, but the big votes open to the public are now closed.


On the field, Fox will split its game coverage. The western part of the country will mostly get the Dodgers-Giants, and that’s who gets the #1 broadcast team of Joe Buck and Tim McCarver. The eastern side of the country mostly gets the Braves-Phillies—a game just as good and you don’t even have to listen to McCarver.

MLB Network will then step back in for a late Saturday night telecast from the West Coast, where the Red Sox visit the Angels at 10 PM ET. Viewers may also get Colorado-Arizona in a key game in the NL West.

The movie choice on Saturday night is the Kevin Costner/Tim Robbins classic “Bull Durham”, where Costner plays the grizzled veteran catcher who’s made the most of his limited physical gifts, with Robbins the flaky young pitcher with fantastic stuff, but no idea how to harness it. Bull Durham starts at 8 PM ET on MLB Network.

On Sunday, we’re back across the pond for the men’s final at Wimbledon, with Andy Murray and Novak Djokovic starting up at 9 AM ET on ESPN. Just like Sunday, the schedule then shifts to Yankee Stadium in the early afternoon with TBS’ coverage of the Baltimore-New York finale at 1:35 PM ET.

Just like Sunday, there’s a Red Sox-Angels came in prime-time, as ESPN has its usual 8 PM ET Sunday night game from Anaheim. TheSportsNotebook’s MLB coverage earlier this week touched on the prospects of the Angels for making a big second-half push. And just like Sunday there’s a movie worth watching on MLB Network—Pride of the Yankees, the story of Lou Gehrig, begins at 9 PM ET.

TheSportsNotebook will have updated MLB coverage coming up later today, with articles focusing on the AL East and NL West. One of the daily sports options I didn’t list here was Saturday night’s NASCAR Sprint Cup Series race from Daytona. That’s Saturday night at 7:30 PM ET on TNT, and TheSportsNotebook previewed it yesterday. And the most recent installment of baseball coverage looked at the Cincinnati Reds, in the wake of Homer Bailey’s no-hitter on Monday.

Daily Sports: Orioles-Yanks & 1980s NFL Highlight Friday

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The New York Yankees are six games out of first place in the AL East, and on the outside looking in the wild-card picture. There’s no need to panic, but there is a need to play with some sense of urgency right now, and that sets up a good series this weekend in the Bronx with the Baltimore Orioles. The Birds swept the Yanks last weekend and the return visit starts tonight on MLB Network at 7 PM ET.

If you’re looking for other action on TV’s daily sports docket, I hope you have the day off on this holiday weekend. The other good programming is during the afternoon. Wimbledon will run up until 2 PM ET on ESPN.

You can also watch the best of 1980s NFL on the NFL Network. The Washington Redskins won three Super Bowls, in 1982, 1987 and 1991. Each one came under a different quarterback as Joe Gibbs built his legacy as the one, in my view, who is the best football coach of the Super Bowl era (including Lombardi). From 2 PM ET to 4 PM ET, there are a series of one-hour segments looking at each championship year.


If Gibbs was the best coach, no one was more consequential in the modern development of the NFL than former San Francisco 49ers head coach Bill Walsh, who developed the West Coast passing offense and spawned a tree of coaches unlike anything we’ve seen in any other sport. Walsh’s Super Bowl runs in 1981 and 1984 will be featured in a two-hour window from 5 PM ET to 7 PM ET. Note, for the record, that Walsh only won the Super Bowl in 1988, and the 49ers repeated in 1989 under the leadership of former Walsh assistant George Seifert.

Here at TheSportsNotebook, it’s about NASCAR. The Sprint Cup Series returns to Daytona tomorrow night, and we’ll preview the race here later today. MLB coverage has run from Monday to Thursday and will resume over the weekend.

Daily Sports: All-Day Baseball For The Fourth Of July

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The Fourth of July means baseball, and the MLB Network is set to oblige with a tripleheader of action that mark daily sports on this holiday Thursday.

You can start up early, at 11 AM ET with the Milwaukee Brewers and Washington Nationals. And here I thought the January 1 Outback Bowl was the only sporting event to start that early—10 AM here in Wisconsin where the locals will be interested. The early starts also include Wimbledon, which starts on ESPN at 8 AM ET and runs until 1 PM.

Mid-afternoon is marked by Baltimore, and I don’t just mean in baseball. You can find the Orioles-White Sox on MLB Network at 2 PM ET, a rematch of a well-played 1983 American League Championship Series. And if you want to celebrate Baltimore’s football heritage, the NFL Network airs a one-hour tribute to the 1970 Baltimore Colts. Of course the city’s love doesn’t extend to the Indianapolis Colts, although the NFL Network’s coverage does, with Peyton Manning’s 2006 title run being the topic at 3 PM ET.


MLB Network’s prime-time game is Seattle-Texas at 8 PM ET, and if it’s football you want, I hope you like the Steelers—or at least like learning about them. Starting at 4 PM ET, there’s a series of one-hour shows on NFL Network on all six Super Bowl champions from the Steel City, interrupted only between 7-8 PM when league news runs. From the Steel Curtain of the 1970s, to Jerome Bettis and 2005, to Big Ben’s epic drive in Tampa for the 2008 Pittsburgh Steelers, you can watch the highlights of the franchise with more Super Bowl titles than any other.

Here at TheSportsNotebook, we’ll have MLB coverage focusing on the NL Central coming up in a little bit. Speaking of the NL Central and the city of Pittsburgh, we ran a feature on the Pirates this past Sunday.

TV Daily Sports: Tuesday Looks A Lot Like Monday

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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.

TV Daily Sports: Giants-Reds Start Key Series On Monday

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The rise of the Pittsburgh Pirates has created problems for a lot of teams in the National League, but in writing yesterday’s feature on the Buccos here in TheSportsNotebook, I was thinking that perhaps the two biggest victims were San Francisco and Cincinnati.

I would have predicted both of these teams to make the playoffs (though admittedly starting to having second, third and fourth thoughts over Frisco’s pitching), but assuming the St. Louis Cardinals aren’t going anywhere, that means Pittsburgh is going to take a spot away from at least one of the Giants or Reds. Which makes the three-game series that starts tonight in Great American Ballpark all that much bigger. ESPN will be on hand for the San Francisco-Cincinnati series opener at 7 PM ET.


Other action in daily sports is oriented toward afternoon coverage. ESPN & ESPN2 will combine in Wimbledon, as the legendary tennis tournament enters its final week. And MLB Network has matinee baseball with the Tigers and Blue Jays at 1 PM ET. It’s an odd spot for a weekday afternoon game—it’s not a getaway spot off an extended weekend, as Detroit is coming from Tampa while Toronto flies in from Boston. But hey, as a baseball fan, I’ll take it.

The Pittsburgh Steelers are the NFL Network’s focus tonight—specifically their last championship season in 2008. At 8 PM ET watch a replay of the Steelers-Cardinals Super Bowl , the wild fourth quarter and Ben Roethlisberger’s last-gasp drive and touchdown pass to Santonio Holmes. Then at 9:30 PM ET, there’s a half-hour look at Pittsburgh’s ’08 season in full.

It’s an interesting coincidence, because TheSportsNotebook plans to add a historical feature today built around the 2008 Pittsburgh Steelers. That Super Bowl run was part of a very good year for Pennsylvania sports, with the Penguins making the Stanley Cup Final, and Penn State football going to the Rose Bowl.

Of course we can throw in the Phillies winning the World Series, but having lived in PA for nine years, I can attest that the Keystone State’s two major cities are worlds apart culturally and a solid six hours drive time. It’s unlikely someone was a fan of both the Steelers and Phillies, so that means our historical feature will tilt to the central-west parts of the fan base.

And for contemporary sports, MLB coverage will have a look at the AL Central, and at 3 PM ET I’ll be appearing on Prime Sports Network with Greg DePalma for our usual weekly look at the world of sports, with an emphasis on baseball.

The Weekend Ahead In TV Daily Sports

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A rematch of last year’s AL East race, and subsequent showdown in the Division Series is the focal point of TV daily sports action this weekend. The New York Yankees are in Baltimore to play the Orioles, and with this rivalry at its highest point since the days of 1996-97, the national television crews are heading to Camden Yards.

Baltimore-New York will be one of two prime games that Fox will be showing on Saturday night at 7:15 PM ET. Cincinnati-Texas is the other one in a schedule that has five games overall. Then it’s ESPN and Sunday Night baseball for the Orioles-Yanks finale at 8 PM ET.

Surrounding the AL East fight, is an early-late doubleheader on MLB Network. The Nationals-Mets play at 1 PM ET today, and then for late-night action from the West Coast, check out Phils-Dodgers at 10 PM ET. Both teams may be disappointments, but the pitching matchup here is good, with Cliff Lee facing Hyun-Jun Ru. On Sunday afternoon, TBS will air coverage of the Diamondbacks-Braves at 1:35 PM ET.


NASCAR’s Quaker State 400 goes Saturday night at 7:30 PM ET on TNT. And Tennis aficionados wrap up the first week of Wimbledon, with ESPN airing all day coverage from 8 AM to 4 PM ET on Saturday. For those who might just want the entire week of tennis summed up for them, ABC has a “Best of Week 1” feature going from 3 PM to 6 PM ET on Sunday. The finals will be next weekend.

TheSportsNotebook will conclude a week of MLB coverage with features on the NL Central and NL West, both of which will post sometime on Sunday. The other four divisions had features run earlier this week, most recently Thursday’s focus on the Boston Red Sox in the AL East.

The NHL and NBA seasons are in the books—quite literally now, here at TheSportsNotebook. A complete compilation of the all the articles written here on both sports has been put together and is available on Amazon for download. Windy City Ride ($4.99) chronicles the NHL, and Summer Heat ($5.99) brings together all the NBA writing posted here. Both compilations are great ways to preserve the memories of the season and to remember how it all looked as it was actually unfolding.