What is the story about?
Happy
Sunday everybody! Did you also spend your Saturday watching four hours of professional League of Legends? No? Just me? Oh, okay.
In Mariners news…
- Shannon Drayer looked back on the career and accomplishments of J.P. Crawford, and makes a convincing argument in favor of him being a future inductee to the Mariners Hall of Fame.
Around the league…
- The Peoria Javelinas cruised past the Surprise Saguaros in an 8-3 win to secure their eighth Arizona Fall League title.
- The ongoing trial against Guardians relievers Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz is currently focusing on some of the language used in texts sent by Clase; specifically whether or not he was speaking in code to bettors when he appeared to be texting about cockfighting, a legal enterprise in the Dominican Republic. The questions arise from how often “Zunino,” that being then Guardians catcher Mike Zunino, is mentioned around the supposed cockfighting conversations.
- The Baltimore Orioles are among the teams that have called the Diamondbacks about All-Star infielder Ketel Marte.
- Kris Bubic is reportedly drawing quite a lot of interest from a wide variety of teams as a potential high upside acquisition.
- Mark Feinsand at MLB.com matched all 30 MLB teams with one of the available free agents.
- The Los Angeles Angels agreed to a one-year, $1.2 million contract with catcher Tyler Heineman to avoid arbitration on Friday.
Nick’s pick…
- Yesterday in the Barclays Center, China’s Bilibili Gaming (BLG) and South Korea’s Gen.G Esports met in the heavily anticipated 16th League of Legends Worlds Finals. BLG had a gargantuan mountain to climb to even reach the Finals, having to go against one of the tournament favorites Hanwha Life Esports in a win-or-go-home best-of-three at the end of the Swiss Stage and sweeping them aside, only to come face-to-face with undefeated Dplus Kia in the quarterfinals, and sweeping them too. In the semis they had to go against the Faker led, 6-time Worlds champions T1, who had faced Chinese teams in a best-of-five series at Worlds thirteen times and never lost, but BLG refused to bow down and beat them in thrilling fashion 3-1. In the Finals, Gen.G suffocated BLG in game 1, but BLG evened the series with an incredible 53 minute win in game 2, then carried that momentum, as well as some absurd playmaking from their support ON (who was ROBBED of Finals MVP by the way!) all the way to a 3-1 gentleman’s sweep. At one point they were one loss from elimination, and needed to go through all four Korean teams in the tournament. But they ran the table and became the first Chinese team to lift the Summoner’s Cup in five long years.
- Babe wake up, new Summoning Salt video!
