First, my own unsolicited take on this trade.

The news that took eighteen hours or so to emerge was not tremendously good for the Royals. Sending the White Sox $2 million dollars changes the complexion of this trade significantly. Don't get me wrong, it's still a minor deal in the grand scheme of things, but the real benefit to the deal is now much more murkier. The financial savings is murkier, and now, for this trade to work out, either Josh Fields or Chris Getz has to contribute to the Royals during their pre-arb years. Yesterday, there were two clear benefits to the move, now there is only one.

I understand that many of you were frustrated with Teahen's stagnation, but he was basically a generic player. He wasn't great, but he also wasn't part of the problem. (His defensive numbers have been pretty bad the last two seasons, but I consider that more a function of his playing all over the diamond and sample size issues. Which may be too generous.) I understand Dayton's desire to move him, but I also understand Kenny Williams's desire to have him. And in reality, the Royals and White Sox split the difference money-wise, a fitting gesture for such a "meh" trade that neither side really seems too fired up about.

I'm not really sure how to feel about this trade.  Fields' career with the Pale Hose was over, so I'm happy he gets to see a new organization.  I don't like that Getz is gone.  Teahen has been worth .4 WAR combined over the past two seasons and has seen his walk rate drop each year since 2007.  If he can get back to drawing walks like he did in 2006 and 2007, he can be valuable again. -South Side Sox

So now, the stakes, though still small, are raised for Fields and Getz. The Royals could have just let Teahen walk after all, so in effect, they bought the rights to Getz and Fields for two million. Neither player is actually that young, but both are still green in service time years, which does matter. There's a school of thought that suggests these are the best types of guys to have, mid-to-late twenties guys who are still cheap, while there's another school of thought that might argue that this is yet another non-rebuilding move from Moore. Personally, I know myself well enough to admit that if the Royals had gotten back some as-yet-unknown barely legal rookie ball prospect, I'd probably have been more excited.

In this case, we'll just have to... wait for it... trust the process, trust the scouting. Apparently Getz is the key to the deal for the Royals, with Fields being just another low OBP slugger with no glove (also another Born Again) who may or may not be a part of anything. I don't know. The curious thing is that at the very least the Getz trade should set in motion either a reconfiguration of the infield or another trade, or two. We'll just have to wait and see.

Pointlessly premature verdict: Cash to Chicago pushes this from a slightly interesting quasi-prospect grab to a mostly innocuous head-scratcher, for now.

A massive roundup of links about the trade and other matters after the jump:

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The Mark Teahen Era, one marked by so many trade rumors and so much uncertainty about Teahen's role on the team at any given moment, may be heading towards a fitting end: nobody seems to know what is going on.

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Saw it on MLBTraderumors from this link to NY Daily News

• The Royals shed Teahen's probable ~$3-4 million-ish salary. Getz & Fields are both league minimum guys.
  
• Presumably Fields will compete for the DH job. He really shouldn't be in the field. Then again, would a Fields at 3rd, Gordon at 1st, scenario stun you?
  
• Not immediately sure what to make of Getz. His (small sample) defensive numbers aren't good. Maybe he's a depth guy, maybe they have a plan to use him. Too early to say. I know that he wasn't popular in the White Sox clubhouse after making some seemingly innocuous statements about the younger players on the team energizing the club.

Jayson Stark wrote about this last week, including all of the relevant information: in the '00s, the Yankees have the most regular season wins, the most postseason wins, the most postseason series wins, most World Series appearances, and now, they have tied the Red Sox for the most World Series wins.

So are the Yankees the team of the '00s? They really should be, yet I'm hesitant to fully commit.

When I think back to this decade when I'm older, I think I'll mostly think of the Red Sox.

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More photos » by Charles Rex Arbogast - AP

Kansas City Royals starting pitcher Zack Greinke smiles and looks at the scoreboard after getting Chicago White Sox's Jim Thome to swing at a pitch during the sixth inning of a baseball game in Chicago, Wednesday, April 8, 2009. Is Greinke about to become the 2009 Cy Young? (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

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Are we building up to a Zack Greinke Cy Young? Greinke picked up another award late last week, seemingly building momentum for his 2009 Cy Young campaign... only that the voting for the Cy took place weeks ago and is already decided.

Only time will tell.

Royals:

• Players pick Greinke as American League’s top pitcher - KansasCity.com
• Royals Caribbean Report (11/2) | Kings of Kauffman | A Kansas City Royals Blog
• The Royal Tower: Young Players
• A Minor Review of ‘09: Kansas City Royals | FanGraphs Baseball
• Kansas City Royals – Kauffman Stadium " Stadium Journey Development Blog
• Did Brad Lidge Just Shape the Royals' Off-Season Plans? - Royals Authority
• Tangled Up In (Royal) Blue: Most Disappointing Royals Season? Part I: 1983
• Fire Dayton Moore: Quick Reminder: Dayton Moore is under contract through 2014
• Taking Out the Royal Blue Trash " KC Monarchy
• Big Donkeys: Big Donkeys Mailbag: the chickens have come home to roost

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Above all else, this will be remembered as the week that Dayton Moore v. Insanity Wolf came into our lives, probably the single funniest blog post I've read all year. Meanwhile, earlier this week, there was an out-of-nowhere Greinke to the Brewers rumor, which I first heard about via Schaum on Twitter. For the Brewer response, click here.

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More photos » by Ted S. Warren - AP

The Dayton Moore Era has reduced us to this. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)

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Jose Guillen will earn $12 million dollars next year. He's not a good baseball player: he can't hit anymore and he is probably one of the two or three worst outfielders in the American League. He's in the way. He makes life more complicated for the Royals, and frankly, the Royals don't need things to be any more difficult than they already are.

The Royals need to trade Jose Guillen. Everybody realizes this. The only problem is that there is no real trade market for a terrible and expensive ballplayer with injury history who also happens to have a horrible reputation in the industry (Dayton Moore everyone!).

I don't think we can overstate just how unappealing he is right now, which is why the Royals should simply release him and move on. I really have no sense of how likely this is. Yes, just two years ago Moore voluntarily brought Guillen in, and yes, his bad play is not a recent development. That being said, Moore has shown an ability to cut bait on a failed experiment (Tony Pena Jr., Gload) albeit in a tardy fashion before. It would not stun me if this happened, although it would not stun me if Guillen is the Opening Day starter in right-field either.

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I don't want this to be personal, but as a fan, I have to say, I didn't start this fight.

Trey Hillman and Dayton Moore have lectured us all season. Their mistakes, we've been repeatedly told, are actually our mistakes. Their failings, we've been repeatedly told, are really just our failings. See, the fans and the media have both a moral and an intellectual shortcoming: we're too impatient and we're too dumb. Since this summer, the Royals have consistently pushed a bizarre social criticism on the public, claiming that Americans are too into instant gratification, which has poisoned our abilities to fully appreciate all the great progress they've made with the Royals.

Most recently, Ken Davidoff at Newsday passed along this:

"It’s challenging because most of the time, our local media and even our fan base, they don’t want to hear about the process. They don’t want to be educated on the process. But it is a process. ...People don’t want to take the time to learn, because we’re not bred that way, culturally. It was an easier sell in the other culture, in Japan (Hillman managed the Nippon Ham Fighters from 2003 through 2007), because they’re very used to processes. And they don’t care how long it takes, as long as you get it set to last."

Hillman hit all the talking points here: fans don't want to learn (he's the man who famously said, "I can't educate" when questioned) and they can't, or won't, because of American culture. He also used the now infamous phrase, "process" to describe the supposedly impossible to understand and appreciate method employed by Dayton Moore and Hillman and everybody else to rebuild the Royals.

We've seen the phrase "instant gratification" from both men. And obviously, anyone walking down the placid, slow-moving, mostly silent and dark, streets of Tokyo would instantly conclude that Americans alone like to have their desires quickly sated.

Despite blogging on baseball for a number of years now, there's actually quite a lot of jock culture that I don't agree with, don't celebrate, don't endorse, and just plain don't believe in. This is, parenthetically, why many of us turned to the internet in the first place, to give voice to different points of view within the sports we love. That being said, if there's one locker room or sports radio code that I do think has merit, it's this: if you haven't done anything, shut up. This snippet of jock code is valuable because we can see its merits across life. It touches on issues of experience and authority, which should be important in evaluating someone's statement. If it's your first day in the office, don't tell your boss about your great new idea, if you've never been a parent, tread lightly on giving your buddy parenting advice, if you're a grad student, it's not your place to stand up at the Department-wide meeting and propose a major curriculum change. And, if you're a rookie, don't walk into the clubhouse and start asserting yourself. Prove it on the field, over time, and earn respect.

Dayton Moore and Trey Hillman are both, essentially, rookies. They are rookies at their current level of employment. This is not to say that they may not be great General Managers and Managers someday, but it is to acknowledge that, at present, they have not, as they say, done anything at their current level. They need to hold the Alex Gordon mirror up to themselves. The unfounded arrogance of team management in the past year has been absolutely stunning, and I'm not the only one to notice it. On and off the record, just about anyone close to the team has remarked about the siege mentality that's taken over, and that mentality is driven by an unwillingness to take criticism or even acknowledge slight mistakes.

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