Get ready for daytime playoff baseball at Wrigley Field.
Major League Baseball on Sunday announced the first two games of the Chicago Cubs’ best-of-three wild-card series against the San Diego Padres will start at 2:08 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday on ABC-7.
Game 3, if necessary, would be played Thursday at Wrigley with the time and TV outlet to be determined.
The other National League wild-card series — featuring the Los Angeles Dodgers hosting either the New York Mets or Cincinnati Reds, to be determined by Sunday’s results — will be played on the same days at 8:08 p.m. on ESPN.
The Cubs secured home field for the wild-card round with Saturday’s win over the St. Louis Cardinals. They split the season series with the Padres; all six games were played in April.
“It’s the same for both sides, so I don’t put too much stock into that,” manager Craig Counsell said Sunday of the teams not facing each other since the opening month. “It’s fine. They’ve got good players. We’ve got good players. It’s going to be fun watching those guys compete against each other.”
The Cubs haven’t revealed who will start Game 1, but with rookie right-hander Cade Horton going on the 15-day injured list Saturday with a rib fracture, left-handers Matthew Boyd and Shota Imanaga are the most obvious options in some order for the first two games.
