{"id":18952,"date":"2015-09-14T20:03:17","date_gmt":"2015-09-14T19:03:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/?p=18952"},"modified":"2015-09-13T20:07:21","modified_gmt":"2015-09-13T19:07:21","slug":"mlb-this-week-spotlight-on-the-nl-central","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/?p=18952","title":{"rendered":"MLB this Week: Spotlight on the NL Central"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/wp-content\/CovMLBUK2014.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-17885\" src=\"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/wp-content\/CovMLBUK2014.jpg\" alt=\"CovMLBUK2014\" width=\"220\" height=\"225\" \/><\/a>It&#8217;s almost certain that, with two weeks to go in the regular season,\u00c2\u00a0three of the five National League playoff spots will be taken by teams from the Central division.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s fortunate for us therefore that the three protagonists &#8211; the Cardinals, Cubs and Pirates &#8211; are scheduled to play day-games this working week in contests that will have a playoff atmosphere.<\/p>\n<p>Two of them are games from the Cubs-Pirates series and Tuesday&#8217;s potential pitching match-up between Jon Lester and Gerrit Cole could well be a dress rehearsal for a thrilling Wild Card game. That makes it all the more pleasing that BT Sport have found space in their schedule to show it live on Tuesday despite that being the first night of their Champions League coverage.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s assuming the Cardinals will keep a hold of the top spot\u00c2\u00a0in the division. That will not be easy and the Cubs will look to a series at Wrigley Field to eat into their lead, the first game of which brings us a great start to the weekend on Friday evening.<\/p>\n<p>All times are in BST.<\/p>\n<h2>Monday 14 September<\/h2>\n<p>No early games<\/p>\n<h2>Tuesday 15 September<\/h2>\n<div>18.35. Chicago Cubs at Pittsburgh (Lester &#8211; Cole) <strong>*BT Sport1<\/strong><\/div>\n<h2>Wednesday 16 September<\/h2>\n<p>No early games<\/p>\n<h2>Thursday 17 September<\/h2>\n<p>17.35. Chicago Cubs at Pittsburgh (Hendricks &#8211; Morton) <b>*BT Sport\/ESPN<\/b><br \/>\n19.10. Oakland at Chicago White Sox (Nolin &#8211; Quintana)<\/p>\n<h2>Friday 18 September<\/h2>\n<p>19.20. St Louis at Chicago Cubs (Lynn &#8211; Haren) <b>*BT Sport\/ESPN<\/b><\/p>\n<p><i>All of these games are available to watch or listen to live via an <\/i><a href=\"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/?p=18630\"><i>MLB.TV subscription<\/i><\/a><i>. TV coverage of MLB comes courtesy of the BT Sport and ESPN channels and these are highlighted above, as are any games that are available to view online for free via MLB.com. The above list of games just shows those starting before midnight UK time. The full schedule of MLB games can be found on <\/i><a href=\"http:\/\/mlb.mlb.com\/mlb\/schedule\/index.jsp\" target=\"_blank\"><i>MLB.com<\/i><\/a><i>.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s almost certain that, with two weeks to go in the regular season, three of the five National League playoff spots will be taken by teams from the Central division.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[82,532,535,70,553,66],"class_list":["post-18952","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-baseball-coverage","category-mlb-2","tag-bst-guide","tag-bt-sport","tag-espn","tag-gamedayaudio","tag-mlb-2","tag-mlb-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18952","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18952"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18952\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18955,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18952\/revisions\/18955"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18952"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18952"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18952"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}