Well, I suppose the polite thing to do is to wish you a happy Zack Greinke Day. This changes things. Hopefully Royals fans are ready.
Greinke, of course, is all the rage these days in baseball. One of the ideas we explored in this morning's story is if he can take the Royals along for this joyride.
Sports Illustrated is introducing him on newsstands everywhere this week.*
* Anybody heard of this Posnanski guy? It's just one story, but reading it, he's pretty good. Guy's got a real future in this business.
ESPN is writing about Greinke, as is The New York Times, and Boston Globe.
My friend Jeff Passan has a Greinke story that should be posting around noon on Yahoo, and I believe you can expect Greinke stories at USA Today and Fox Sports, too.
And now's the part where we talk about the changes. There's been a lot of talk in Kansas City about the Royals being ignored or worse by the bigger baseball world.
They aren't the Yankees or Red Sox or even the Tigers, but the Royals are no longer baseball's stepchild. This started in spring training, when the Royals became something of a trendy pick to win the AL Central.
The Royals weren't picked by everyone, or even most folks, but the New York Times and others thought a combination of Royals' improvement and the division being wide open meant some real baseball could be played late this summer in Kansas City.
Greinke's success is only going to emphasize that*. It helps to have a face on something, and Greinke's will be the face of whatever success the Royals have this summer.
* Of course, a lot of this goes moot if Gil Meche's back injury causes him to miss significant time. There will be plenty of speculation and panic in other places, probably, and that's fine. But I'm gonna hold off until we know more.
If the Royals hang around .500 most of the summer and stay within a few games of the division lead, the perception of the team around the country will evolve.
This will require a change in a passionate fan base that's grown accustomed to being ignored by the bigger baseball world, and I wonder how smoothly that transition will go.
It's the equivalent of teams using that tired nobody-gave-us-a-chance line. The Royals, if you look at it objectively, may have been overhyped in spring training and that's just a shocking statement. Royals fans can no longer honestly say that nobody pays attention to their team.
I'm not trying to make the team out to be the Yankees or Red Sox or, hell, even the Rays from last year. The country is beginning to get to know Greinke, and once that happens they'll get to know the rest of the team if the Royals continue to hang in this thing.
The baseball world will be paying close attention to what happens in Kansas City tonight*. Zack Greinke is the hottest story in the sport right now, and because of where we are in the calendar, that makes him one of the hottest stories in all of sports.
* Of course, the weather report I'm looking at says 50 percent chance of rain tonight.
This is a small example of what the Royals have been building toward for years, and it should be enjoyed.
The Royals are in perfect position to make their national name. They've broken through one layer of anonymity because they have a good story to tell.
It's up to them now to make it last. All they need to do is win.
Sam, that's a super article. Please let Jeff know.
I kind of get the notion that Zack will actually open up with the media a bit, but only those reporters he knows well. Any time I see him interviewed by somebody else, he looks so uncomfortable it's cringe-worthy (and no wonder that he has wound up with a rep of not being too bright). We're just fortunate that so many of the good national writers are based here, otherwise the world would never be even vaguely exposed to the real Zack Greinke.