Good morning, Mr. Grienke

Well the 2011 seasons for the Brewers and Royals certainly got more interesting over the weekend.

We were getting ready for church yesterday when I logged on to check my morning news. And the Twitter-verse began to pop.

Royals trade Greinke to Brewers, the alerts said.

Awww yeah.

Within minutes I was watching the collective cheers of my Brewers-fan friends and the collective moans of my Royals-fan friends play out in Social Media World. Then my Royals-fan friends began asking for my thoughts about the prospects the Brewers sent to Kansas City in the deal.

My take was fairly simple: It’s hard to say. It seems to me that Alcides Escobar is a guy who was overhyped and may not amount to much. The others appear to have weaknesses as well.

I was pleased to see the Brewers get Yuniesky Betancourt in the deal also. But my interest in him stems solely from his stellar night in that once-in-a-lifetime doubleheader I experienced in August. Truth be told, I hadn’t heard of the guy until that night.

Time will tell. As much as I would looove to see the Brewers put it all together this year and make a deep run in the playoffs, I’m fully aware those hopes could be shattered the moment Greinke, Ryan Braun, or any of Milwaukee’s other key players goes down. Let’s also not forget the Brewers have a first-year manager at the helm, and a longer-than-we’d-like adjustment period could follow.

One more story stemming from yesterday's trade: I have a colleague whose teenage daughter is a big Royals fan, and with that a huge Greinke fan. So when my friend got the news alert on her phone Sunday morning that Greinke had been traded, she decided to forward it via text message to her daughter, who was still sleeping, and waited for her screams as signal that she was awake. … A few minutes later from the teenager’s bedroom: "What!? Are you kidding me!? What are the Royals doing!?"

Here’s some good reads …
a Brewers elevate to National League contenders by trading for Greinke
a Without Greinke, we’re Royal blue
a Greinke likes new digs with Brewers
a Joe Posnanski: The Greinke Trade

Update: 1.4.2010
Here's a good read by a former colleagues about how Milwaukee media covered the Greinke trade: Scooped by an amateur.