Weekend Watch, August 31-September 3

August 31, 2012-Ah Labor Day, the unofficial beginning of the fall season. It’s unofficially fall in the world of sports as well as of this weekend. Here are some of the TV highlights.

1.IndyCar, Streets of Baltimore, Sun., 2 p.m. EDT, NBC Sports-The league formerly known as the IRL comes to Baltimore for the first time, courtesy of a two-mile road course literally running through the streets of the Inner Harbor.

2.MLB, Fox/TBS/ESPN/MLB/various, Fri-Sun-This weekend’s pennant race highlights include the Chicago White Sox at Detroit, Baltimore at the New York Yankees, St. Louis at Washington, Boston at Oakland, Pittsburgh at Milwaukee, LAA at Seattle and Arizona at Los Angeles.

3.MLS, San Jose vs. Chivas USA, Saturday, 9 p.m. EDT, 6 p.m. PDT, NBC Sports-Portland and Colorado are also on the network formerly (un)known as VS. on Friday night but seeing as how they’re currently the Nos. 9 and 8 seeds in the Western Conference right now, we can safely skip that one. Chivas USA isn’t exactly doing so well either, currently stuck at seventh in the West but the conference’s current top-ranked team, No. 1 San Jose, should make things interesting.

4.English Premier League-Highlights include West Ham United vs. Fulham, Tottenham Hotspur vs. Norwich City and Manchester City vs. Queen’s Park Rangers on Sat. and Newcastle United vs. Aston Villa and Liverpool vs. Arsenal on Sunday.

Enjoy.

Weekend Watch, August 24-26

August 22, 2012

I’m sorry this post is a bit early but thanks to the start of the college school year, I’ll be rather busy this Thursday. So without further ado, here are some potential sports-watching highlights for the final full weekend of August.

Weekend Watch: August 17-August 19, 2012

August 16, 2012
We’ve got a great weekend coming up, sportswise. Pennant race action in baseball, preseason NFL football, MLS action and best of all, the Barclays Premier League starts this weekend. As usual, here are some of the highlights.

Felix and Robin

August 15, 2012

Felix Hernandez pitched a perfect game today, a 1-0 victory by the Seattle Mariners over the Tampa Bay Rays, the 23rd in baseball history and the 21st since the 1903 World Series signaled the emergence of what quickly became known as Major League Baseball. It’s the third perfect game and the sixth no-hitter this season. It’s the second no-hitter of 2012 for the Mariners after Kevin Millwood and five of the team’s relievers combined for a no-hitter against the Los Angeles Dodgers in June. Only a few hours earlier, Arsenal Football Club agreed to sell its star striker, Robin Van Persie, to Manchester United for an undisclosed sum, though probably somewhere near the £20 million Arsenal was said to be asking for.

These two events are, of course, completely irrelevant to each other. Different sports, different continents, different systems of player movement (European-style loans and transfers don’t exist in North American sports, likewise for trades and waiver claims in European football). The Van Persie story was of interest to me because I follow Arsenal. As for Hernandez, while I’ve certainly thought he was one of the best pitchers in MLB for a while now, I don’t particularly follow the Mariners so I just tuned in to watch the last two innings of the perfecto on MLB.com.

Olympic 29: Modern Pentathlon

August 11, 2012

Well, here we are, Sport # 29 of the 29 Olympic sports, modern pentathlon. I watched the fencing part of the competition on the final Saturday of the Olympics and all I can say is that this sport is insane.

The whole sport of modern pentathlon is a loose adaptation of the ancient Greek discipline of the pentathlon, a sport not dissimilar to today’s decathlon and heptathlon. I say “loose” because when Baron Pierre de Coupertin came up with the sport, he based it on a specific premise of a 19th-century soldier trapped behind enemy lines and forced to duel, swim, ride, run and shoot to survive.

This is accomplished at the London Games through a fencing portion, where the athletes are required to compete against every other athlete in the field with epee swords and the first touch wins the fight, a slightly more conventional swimming portion, a riding/equestrian portion, where the athletes have all of 20 minutes to familiarize themselves with their assigned horses and a running/shooting portion, where the athletes run a given distance, stop and shoot a select amount of targets from their laser guns, run again, and then shoot again.

It’s not the kind of sport that lends itself to start-to-finish watching; the event used to last for multiple days and now that it’s only a one-day event, it still takes the better part of a day to complete. And given that the sport barely survived an attempt to remove it from the Olympic program a couple years ago, there’s a good chance we won’t see it at Rio De Janeiro in 2016 or in 2020. But at least it’s certainly not boring. I’m still not sure where they came up with the laser guns idea, though.

Weekend Watch, August 10-August 12, 2012

August 10, 2012

The final weekend of the Olympics is here and with it comes a turning point in the sports TV schedule. Certainly the final few days of the 2012 Summer Games in London will provide a good amount of excitement this weekend. NBC and its affiliated networks will broadcast finals in men’s basketball, women’s basketball, men’s soccer, men’s and women’s wrestling, men’s boxing, men’s and women’s track and field and various other events. There’s also the Closing Ceremonies at weekend’s end, which hopefully will be shown in its entirety.

Olympic 29: Taekwondo

August 8, 2012

For the next to last entry of the Olympic 29 project, I watched a taekwando match on Wednesday, specifically a women’s 49 kg-class bout in which Jannet Alegria Pena of Mexico defeated Carolena Carstens Salceda of Panama 7-2 in three rounds. Like a lot of martial arts sports, it was short but intense. The whole fight couldn’t have lasted too much longer than six minutes and a good portion of it involved the fighters circling each other looking for an advantage.

But once those fighters find the advantages they’re looking for, they quickly proceed to land a series of fast kicks and punches. Most of the blows in this fight were landed by Pena. But both fighters were far from silent, literally. I don’t know enough about taekwando to say for sure that its noise level is a tactic used to psych opponents out. It does strike me as a possible explanation at least.

Both fighters screamed almost every time they landed a blow. Not exactly the type of thing that’s likely to make fans out of the people who complain about too much grunting in tennis matches. But then again, I doubt that’s ever been a concern for anyone involved in taekwando and at least for me personally, it highlighted the intensity of the sport.

Taekwando might not be one of the longer lasting Olympic sports. But it’s not exactly boring either.

Olympic 29: Triathlon

August 7, 2012

For the most part, I’ve tried to catch as many of the sports in the Olympics live on TV as possible. But sometimes I’ve had to watch sports streamed online or even tape-delayed on TV.

And with the triathlon, I’m afraid I had to break the live rule completely as both the women’s event on Sunday and the men’s event on Tuesday began around 5 or 6 a.m. EDT, too early for me to get up and watch live on TV or online. But because triathlon’s not one of the more popular Olympic sports ratings-wise, catching it tape-delayed wasn’t really an option. With that in mind, here are a couple of my observations on the Olympic triathlon after watching a non-live stream of the men’s race.

Olympic 29: Wrestling

August 7, 2012
It’s hard to imagine how professional wrestling and Olympic wrestling could be any less alike. There’s no clear cut heroes or heels here (Rulon Gardner vs. Alexander Karelin doesn’t count). If you want to root for or against a wrestler, you have to do it based on things like “nation of origin” and “personal preference.” There’s no fixing of matches (actually Olympic wrestling’s officiating tends to cause far fewer headlines than say, the judging in Olympic boxing). No chairs or any other foreign objects are thrown. Greco-Roman wrestling, which I watched on Monday, doesn’t even allow opponents to grab each other below the beltline or “actively” use their legs for any moves.

Olympic 29: Synchronized Swimming

August 5, 2012

Synchronized swimming’s always been one of those Olympic sports that just can’t catch a break with American audiences. It’s often singled out as one of the most ridiculous Olympic sports because it is fairly different from most of the types of sports we’re familiar with. It involves judging more than it does refereeing, many of the routines are done underwater so that audiences can’t even see the actual swimmers’ faces sometimes and the complex choreography probably doesn’t help in terms of accessibility.