Editor's note: only the marquee game carries a betting line here, and it was pulled from a real sportsbook page this morning. Every other game is a straight preview with no pick attached. Full slate, start times, and where to watch each game live at watch.uristocrat.com.
Every team in baseball plays today. That is 15 MLB games, five of them starting before 7 PM ET, plus two WNBA games in the afternoon network windows. The best game on the board is a coin flip at Wrigley between two teams with the exact same record.
Marquee: Yankees at Cubs, two 62-48 teams at Wrigley (7:15 PM ET, FOX)
Both of these teams are 62-48. Both are second in their division. The Yankees are chasing the Rays in the AL East, the Cubs are chasing the Brewers in the NL Central, and neither one has a cushion to fall back on in August. New York took the opener and leads the series 1-0. The pitching matchup is where the game tilts: Max Fried is 4-3 with a 3.23 ERA for the Yankees, and David Peterson is 6-7 with a 5.80 ERA for the Cubs. That gap is wide enough that the market should have moved further than it did. It did not, which tells you what Vegas thinks of Chicago's lineup at home and New York's bullpen late.
Vegas line (DraftKings prices via ESPN): Yankees -109, Cubs -110, total 6.5. Run line: Yankees -1.5 (+161). Books priced this one as close to a pick'em as baseball gets. Sourced from the DraftKings MLB board as displayed on ESPN this morning.
Also today
- Aces at Sky (1:00 PM ET, CBS). Las Vegas is 20-8. Chicago is 10-18. This is the first game of the day in any league, and it is on CBS rather than buried on a stream, so it gets a real audience. Good tone-setter if you are parking on the couch for the afternoon.
- Liberty at Mercury (3:00 PM ET, ABC). New York is 16-13 and Phoenix is 11-18. Neither team is where it expected to be in August. The ABC afternoon window is the best distribution the WNBA gets all weekend, which makes this a bigger game for the league than it is for either standings picture.
- White Sox at Rays (4:10 PM ET). Tampa Bay is 64-45 and leads the AL East. Chicago is 58-51, which nobody had on the card in April. The Rays are the team the Yankees are trying to run down, so this result moves two races at once.
- Rangers at Astros (7:10 PM ET). Houston is 56-55 and leads the AL West. Texas is 55-55 and one game back. Neither team has separated from the other all season, and the whole division is being decided by clubs hovering around .500.
- Red Sox at Dodgers (9:10 PM ET, ESPN). Los Angeles is 69-41, the best record in baseball. Boston is 58-51 and still alive in the AL wild card race. This is the late national window, so if you only watch one thing after 9 PM, make it this.
- Brewers at Angels (9:38 PM ET). Milwaukee is 68-41 and sits six and a half games up on the Cubs. The Angels are 42-68 and playing out the string. Watch it for the scoreboard, because every Brewers loss is a Cubs gain in the marquee game's real story.
The thread through today is the second-place team. Yankees behind the Rays, Cubs behind the Brewers, Rangers behind the Astros, Red Sox behind everyone in the AL East. Four teams good enough to win and none of them in front. That is what makes an August Saturday worth 15 games.
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