I know our team is going to keep getting better and better, not only today and through 2012 but

into 13 and 14 and beyond. And so that's a comfortable feeling as you can have as a general manager.

Good morning and welcome to episode 134 of Effectively Wild, the baseball

prospectus daily podcast in New York. I am Ben Lindbergh and in Long Beach, California,

joining me as always is Sam Miller and joining us for the first time ever is Craig Brown.

Hello Craig. Hey guys, how are you? Good. Good. Where are you joining us from?

I'm joining you from Kansas City, so I'm like right in the middle here.

Authentic. You're yes. You're in native. I don't understand. You're a baseball writer and you're

in Kansas City, but you're not currently tweeting about barbecue. I didn't know that that was allowed.

You might be. He could most well, I mean, I already had it tonight. I mean, we're recording

early in the morning or late at night or whatever. I've had my fill for the day, you know,

tune in tomorrow. We'll touch on that. Okay. So we've brought Craig on to talk about the royals

because he wrote the royals chapter in baseball prospectus 2013. So we will ask him some

questions and listen to his answers and then Pete already spoke to Sam Millinger, the sports

columnist for the KC star. So he will be coming up after this. So the royals, I guess the

biggest royals news of the offseason was already dissected 10 times and we talked about it

on the podcast and everyone talked about it and wrote about it, the trade, I guess. But what is

your initial reaction and has your reaction changed at all to the Will Myers James Shields?

Deal. My reaction was that I wasn't happy as you guys can probably imagine.

Because like you said and we've said, it was about kind of mortgaging the future for the present

and the present isn't really that bright and rosy for the team. It would make sense if they were

on the cusp of contention, if they had just kind of lost out to the Tigers last year

...