KANSAS CITY http://www.atlantafalconsteamonline.com/john-cominsky-jersey , Mo. — The Kansas City Royals and the Texas Rangers, two struggling teams in last place in their divisions, will open a three-game series Monday night at Kauffman Stadium.

The Royals have lost six straight and 12 of 13. They have dropped 26 of 36 games at Kauffman Stadium, the worst home record in the majors. Overall, the Royals are 22-49. Only the Baltimore Orioles at 20-50 have a worse record.

The Royals are 27 games below .500 for the first time since concluding the 2016 season at 28 below.

The Rangers (29-44) are not much better. They’re buried in the basement in the American League West, 19 games behind the defending World Series champion Houston Astros, who swept a weekend series in Kansas City to extend their winning streak to 11 games.

The Rangers halted a season-worst seven-game losing streak with a 5-2 win over the Colorado Rockies on Saturday. They scored four in the ninth on Sunday to win a 13-12 slugfest over the Rockies in Arlington for their second straight victory.

While it was a mismatch for the Royals against the Astros, Kansas City and Texas match up more evenly on paper.

“Our guys, they walk in the clubhouse and the clubhouse has got life, has got energy,” Royals manager Ned Yost said. “These guys are pushing. They understand it’s a struggle for them right now.

“Again, I’ve broken this down to them numerous times. All you can do is show up every day with energy and go out and give your best effort, that’s it. Sometimes your best effort is an 0-for-4. Sometimes it’s a 4-for-4. They’re all incredibly talented. But you go out and give your best effort every single day. That’s what you get paid for.

“The contract doesn’t say, ‘When you sign your contract, you’re going to get X amount of dollars for 40 home runs, 200 hits. No. The contract says you’re going to get X amount of dollars for your best effort every day.’ And these guys are doing a great job of that.”

The Royals made a bevy of roster moves Sunday, bringing up infielder Adalberto Mondesi, outfielder Rosell Herrera and right-hander Wily Peralta from Triple-A Omaha. They optioned right-hander Scott Barlow and infielder Ramon Torres to their Pacific Coast League farm club. Left-hander Eric Skoglund was transferred from the 10-day disabled list to the 60-day DL.

Mondesi is the organization’s former top prospect but has not produced offensively in the majors.

“He’s never had success up here Qadree Ollison Jersey ,” Yost said. “He’s a young guy. You just try to pace him a little bit, play a couple of games here, a couple of games there and get his feet on the ground, let him start to have some success, which we all know he’s going to have, just let him ease into that.”

Whit Merrifield, however, left in the second inning with a bruised left knee after fouling off a pitch and Mondesi was immediately pressed into action. He went 0-for-3 and struck out twice.

Bartolo Colon will try to make history as he starts for Texas in the series opener. Colon has 243 victories, tied with Hall of Famer Juan Marichal for most in the majors by a Dominican native. He is also tied with Hall of Famer Christy Mathewson for 33rd on the career strikeout list with 2,502.

Colon is 1-3 with a 9.51 ERA in his past five starts. Opponents are hitting .336 against him with a .710 slugging percentage.

His season ERA has ballooned from 2.82 to 4.94 during that span while the season opponent’s batting average climbed from .212 to .258 in that stretch.

Colon is 15-11 with a 5.00 ERA in 32 career games, 31 of them starts, against the Royals. He had a no-decision in a May 26 start against the Royals, allowing three runs and five hits in seven innings.

He is 6-8 with a 5.53 ERA in 18 games in Kansas City. He has lost his last four starts at Kauffman Stadium dating to 2009.

Royals right-hander Ian Kennedy has only one win in his last 27 Kauffman Stadium starts. He should have won his last home start, pitching eight scoreless innings and yielding three hits on Tuesday, but the Cincinnati Reds won 4-1 in 10 innings.

Kennedy is 0-3 with a 4.40 ERA in seven career starts against Texas. He had a no-decision on May 26 in Arlington, allowing two runs in five innings.

He is winless in his last 12 starts, going 0-6 with a 5.98 ERA since his last win on April 7.

In the soundstage where Johnny Carson and Jay Leno spent four decades filming ”The Tonight Show,” a former Washington State computer science student named Seagull is pursuing a South Korean teenager with a very big gun.

Their characters’ exploits inside ”Overwatch Brian Burns Jersey ,” the wildly popular multiplayer game not yet 2 years old, flicker above their heads on an enormous high-definition screen. Hundreds of mostly millennial fans in the renamed, sold-out Blizzard Arena put down their Doritos and roar for the combat between these six-player teams, eventually rising in ecstasy when the Dallas Fuel earn an unexpected point against the powerhouse Seoul Dynasty.

Here’s the new Johnny. He plays video games for a minimum $50,000 salary, health benefits, a retirement savings plan and a chunk of $3.5 million in prize money.

Esports history was made Wednesday night with the debut of the Overwatch League, the first attempt to present elite computer gaming within a traditional North American sports structure comparable to the NBA or NFL. The league’s 12 franchises represent cities from Shanghai to London, and they build teamwork and stress player development while competing on a weekly schedule stretching into summer.

If the esports industry is still in its adolescence, this well-funded venture is a significant milestone in its maturation. The Overwatch League is about to find out whether fans will grow along with it.

”It’s a new frontier,” said Ari Segal, president and chief operating officer of the Los Angeles Valiant. ”It is the biggest, boldest bet in sports and entertainment maybe since the NFL and AFL merged. Maybe since baseball introduced the designated hitter. I don’t even know what it stacks up against, because it is so different.”

Segal had a career as a hockey executive before he moved into esports last year. He is one of many seasoned professionals from traditional sports and business who couldn’t resist the opportunity to shape the future of professional gaming, which has expanded with all the cohesion of a pipe bomb.

Shortly after Blizzard Entertainment published this hero-based, first-person PC shooter to acclaim in 2016, the game developer announced plans for a league backed by deep-pocketed investors ranging from NFL owners Stan Kroenke and Robert Kraft to current giants of the esports scene.

They might not all know their way around a mouse, but they know a growing industry when they see it.

”I come from traditional sports http://www.carolinapanthersteamonline.com/greg-little-jersey , and from the outside, it seemed like esports had grown up as this exciting, massive, organic, somewhat unstructured ecosystem that benefited from that fact, but was also held back by it,” said Pete Vlastelica, president and CEO of Major League Gaming, which operates the league for Blizzard’s parent company.

”It felt to me a lot like boxing,” added Vlastelica, a former executive at Fox Sports. ”Anybody can create a circuit. Anybody be a trainer. Anybody can sign a fighter. Anybody can win a belt. But what’s the belt? I think boxing suffers from an ambiguity about whether any particular competition means anything, and it felt like that was really similar in esports.”

The Overwatch League aims to end that ambiguity with traditional sports touchstones, and it made sense to the luminaries from sports, tech and business who dominate the list of investors.

Kroenke, the billionaire owner of Arsenal and the Los Angeles Rams, also owns the Los Angeles Gladiators, who plan to be based within the vast entertainment complex around his Inglewood football stadium after it is completed in 2020. The Boston Uprising are owned by Kraft’s investment group, and they might end up based in Foxborough Will Grier Jersey , Massachusetts, to share some training facilities with the New England Patriots.

The San Francisco Shock’s investor group includes Jennifer Lopez, Shaquille O’Neal and Marshawn Lynch. The Philadelphia Fusion are owned by Comcast Spectacor, and the New York Excelsior are the property of a venture capital fund sponsored by the Wilpon family of New York Mets fame.

Many of the Overwatch League’s owners might not be gamers, but they understand the visceral importance of going to a good event. League commissioner Nate Nanzer is confident it will eventually harness income from ticket sales and concessions and other areas that haven’t meant much in esports so far.

”Why do people go to a Dodger game? You go because it’s more fun to sit with 40,000 other fans and cheer for a home run than it is to do it at home,” Nanzer said. ”Video games are so incredibly mainstream right now. It’s such a big part of our fans’ lives. When people play `Overwatch,’ they play a lot of `Overwatch.’ It’s a special moment to go share that with people who have the same passion as you.”

Although the geographical specificity of the teams is an important part of their future business plans, those home cities are largely theoretical at this point.

For this season and the near future, every team will live in the Los Angeles area and play all its matches in Burbank. Nanzer said the logistics of staging the competition around the globe were too enormous to be solved immediately.

That’s not the only geographical dissonance: The Overwatch League’s only ”European” team, the London Spitfire, are owned by an American esports organization, and its roster consists entirely of South Korean players living in Los Angeles.

But the Overwatch League has bought itself time to find its footing. The league has sponsorship deals with blue-chip companies including HP Inc. and Intel Corp., an