Royals Trade Mike Sweeney Just To Get Their Name In the Paper

KANSAS CITY, MO--The Kansas City Royals pulled off a blockbuster trade on Saturday that caught the attention of everyone in the league. The team traded their best player, Mike Sweeney, to the Anaheim Angels for a minor league prospect and some cash. Though the move made very little sense for the Royals, it did get the team’s name mentioned in the sporting press.

“Look! Look! There we are!” cried GM Allard Baird, as he pointed to a USA Today article describing the trade. “See? It’s right here: ‘Royals trade Sweeney to Anaheim.’ That’s us. We got our name in the paper. Yes! Where’s the phone? I gotta call my wife. She’s gonna totally freak.”

Afterwards, Baird was thrilled to see his team mentioned on ESPN.com, CNNSI.com, MLB.com, and even Sportscenter. He spent the day fielding phone calls from excited family and friends.

“Pretty much everybody I know has called me today,” said Baird. “They all want to tell me they saw the Royals mentioned on Sportscenter or read about it somewhere on the Internet. Geez, people I haven’t talked to since high school are calling me up and acting like we’re best friends. I think this trade is really going to put the Royals on the map. Granted it’s not the most intelligent trade in sports history, but you can’t buy this kind of publicity. Now everyone in America knows that, yes, we do have a major league baseball team here in Kansas City.”

Baird has instructed his secretary, Anne, to purchase as many copies of USA Today as possible and use a magic marker to highlight the team’s name in the article. She will also be taping every Sportscenter episode for the next week in an effort to capture a mention of the Royals on tape.

“I’m just going to hand out copies of the article to everybody I know, so I want Anne to go out there and pick up as many as she can while it’s still on newsstands,” said Baird. “We just want to make sure we have proof of this. When I’m an old man, I’ll be telling my grandkids about the day that the Kansans City Royals got mentioned in the national press, and all we had to do was trade away our best player. What a coup.”

Baird and the Royals have been following the winter meetings closely this year. With team like the Red Sox, Yankees, and Diamondbacks dominating the press coverage, the Royals knew they had to do something drastic if they wanted to be mentioned in the newspaper. It was Baird’s idea to trade Sweeney, one of the cornerstones of the team, in order to generate some buzz.

“Every time I turn on the TV or pick up a newspaper, I’m always hearing about some other team,” said Baird. “I’m just damn tired of being on the outside looking in. We are a card-carrying member of major league baseball and we will not sit here and be ignored, at least not until the season starts.”

Even though the Royals are enjoying some extensive publicity, the biggest beneficiary of the trade appears to be the Anaheim Angels. The Angels received a top-notch starter for a prospect that most scouts never expected to make it out of Double A.

Angels GM Bill Stoneman insisted, however, that it was a good deal for both sides.

“I wouldn’t say that this was a lopsided trade. I think that’s unfair to the Royals and to the prospect that we gave up,” said Stoneman. “The prospect, second baseman Julian Tarasco, was one of the top players in our system until he got in that car accident and had to have his leg amputated. Now that he’s gotten used to his prosthetic his mobility is actually pretty good. Also, his bipolar disorder is back under control since he was tracked down by police in that Mexican brothel. All in all, I’d say the uh…um…the…ah, fuck, what was their name again? The Royals! That’s it. The ‘Royals’ have acquired a pretty fine baseball player.”

The Angels also provided cash to the Royals, Stoneman pointed out.

“We paid Mike Sweeney’s plane fare out of town, which was a pretty generous gesture on our part. We also gave them one of those huge coupon books that has discounts on everything from pizza to movies, so they should have plenty of things to keep them busy while their team is plummeting to the bottom of the standings.”

The Royals will probably face some heat for trading away their best player, but for now the team is going to enjoy its brief time in the spotlight.

“The repercussions of this move might be pretty bad, especially since we got so little in return,” said Baird. “But right now there’s nothing you can do to wipe this smile off my face. The Kansas City Royals on the front page of USA Today’s sports section. Right there in black and white. The Kansas City-Fucking-Royals. They even mentioned me personally in paragraph 2 where it says ‘GM Allard Baird approve the reckless and wrong-headed trade, and should probably have his head examined.’ Yes! Thank you very much. Guess who’s getting laid tonight?”