Sean Deveney Is Officially My New Punching Bag

As many people know, the Tampa Bay Rays are considering signing Barry Bonds. Sean Deveney really thinks they should. Which isn't wrong or anything. But en route to his argument that makes no mention of Bonds still being good at baseball (which is the #1 reason that a team should sign him), he gets pretty darned ignorant. Here's an excerpt.

The Rays are thinking this could be their breakout year. They're young and improving, but there are questions about the lineup.

Oh boy. Please, tell me what these questions are!

No one knows if Carlos Pena can repeat his out-of-nowhere, MVP-type performance of 2007.

No one "knows" anything about what a player will do in the upcoming season. You can make a similar sentence about any team in the majors. "No one knows if Ryan Braun is really as good as his rookie season indicated." "No one knows if Jorge Posada can keep posting these above-.300 EqAs into his late thirties." "No one knows if Ervin Santana will rebound this year." The purpose of you, the writer, the supposedly more informed person, is to give opinions and insights on these things.

And yes, such things exist that allow you to make reasonable forecasts. Pretty much everyone on the planet knows that it's tremendously unlikely Pena will do that again, and reasonably, he'll be pretty good, but not great, in 2008 (PECOTA forecasts .259/.372/.500 this year).

No one knows how the Cliff Floyd-Johnny Gomes designated hitter platoon will work,

What do you mean "no one knows how that will work?" Jonny (spell his name right, please) Gomes is better against lefties, so he'll play against lefties. Floyd is better against righties, so he'll play against righties. A "platoon" is one of the simplest baseball strategies to understand. I don't know what the hell you mean by this sentence.

or worse, what'll happen if Rocco Baldelli suffers another season-ending injury and Floyd and Gomes are forced to play in the outfield everyday.

Ummm....what will happen is exactly that. Floyd or Gomes will be in the outfield everyday. You answered your own "question". And both of them will probably play worse defense than Rocco Baldelli would have. These "questions" are completely stupid.

Even with a healthy lineup, is B.J. Upton really a cleanup hitter? Wouldn't he be better off batting third or fifth?

Hmmm. I don't know. That's a tough one, Sean-o. B.J. Upton hasn't completed his initiation into the "Fraternity of Cleanup Hitters." But you're right....I don't think he's really good enough to hit 4th, he's only good enough to hit 3rd or 5th. He's not quite as good as Paul Konerko, he's more like Jim Thome. He's no Manny Ramirez, I'll tell you that much, but he's good enough to be one of those David Ortiz types. Is Justin Morneau really a cleanup hitter? No way, Jose! He's one of those 5th-hitter types. Now Michael Cuddyer, THERE's a cleanup hitter.

Have I given enough proof to show your sentence was completely and totally senseless? I hope so, Sean.

Let's Learn About Nick Swisher

This is Sean Deveney. Doesn't he just look like a complete asshole? Well believe me, beneath the man-bangs and evil grin, there's a man with an exceptional propensity to spew irrelevant puffery. I guess what I'm trying to say is, Deveney really sucks.

Swisher should give life to glum South Siders

New acquired outfielder is exactly what the White Sox needed

We're going to write down a list of things that a new player must bring to his team to make them better. We'll call it "Sean's Ten Commandments for Newly Acquired Players."

There are, to the naked eye, five chains around the neck of Nick Swisher and a tangle of charms resting on his chest, visible beneath his South Beach-slick opened collar.

One is an Italian horn. There is an eagle. There are two Christian crosses.

Commandment #1: New player must have lots of neckwear. Must have five chains that apparently only have four charms between them. Must be a Christian. No heathens.

He's chatting in a banquet room at the Palmer House hotel in downtown Chicago during the White Sox's offseason fanfest, his hair slicked back with enough product to wallpaper a living room. He laughs and declares, "I'm a funny guy! I got a big mouth, but I am a funny guy!" and adds that he spends 80 percent of his life smiling.

"What about the other 20 percent?"

"Sleeping," Swisher says.

Commandment #2: New player must be "a funny guy". Must repeat himself a lot.

Commandment #3: Must sleep an unusually low amount.

This has been a gloomy winter for White Sox fans, who, after a lifeless 72-90 season in which just about everything went awry, listened hopefully as general manager Ken Williams promised them a "big fish." He then failed to land Torii Hunter. Or Kosuke Fukudome. Or Aaron Rowand. Williams has taken a pummeling in the local media and from those fans. But, spend even a few minutes with Swisher and you can't help mentally posing this question to South Siders: "Why so glum?"

We could start with BP's 77-85 projection for the season. After their 72-90 projection from last season was spot on, no Sox fans should exactly be encouraged by this.

Swisher might be exactly what this team needs —chains, hair, big mouth and all. The dude has personality, in a way that core Sox player don't. He's endlessly entertaining.

Commandment #4: Player must have large mullet-ish hair. No buzzcuts. Got an afro? Join the fucking NBA dude! He must "endlessly entertain" by doing such things as batting with his legs while performing a handstand. Also, he must have a personality, unlike core Sox players like A.J. Pierzynski, who is a lifeless asshat. Finally, his arrival must cue Sporting News columnist Sean Deveney to write the sentence "The dude has personality, in a way that core Sox player don't", which shows no care for editing.

Believe it or not, the acquisition of Nick Swisher by the White Sox is the only MLB acquisition in history to satisfy Commandment #4. I'm not even joking.

For example, there has been a long-simmering — but bogus — Internet rumor that Swisher began dating model Danielle Gamba after he saw her in a magazine. "Really, I never even met that girl," Swisher says. But with a guy like Swisher, it seems somehow plausible. Jim Thome, Jermaine Dye, Paul Konerko — they're not exactly the type to be the subject of model-dating rumors.

Commandment #5: There have to be rumors of him dating a model to bring up the interestingness level of a team that otherwise contains model-less teammates after the departure of Scott Podsednik. Said model is worth at least 6 wins.

Manager Ozzie Guillen says one of the Sox's problems last year was the lack of attitude, something Swisher can fix. "Swisher, he is a guy I hated," Guillen says. "Every time we play them and he is taking pitches and making our pitchers work, I would turn and say to the bench, 'I hate this guy.' I am not gonna hate him anymore. I am gonna love him now."

I'm sorry, Sean, but did you just reduce useful things like taking pitches and making pitchers work to something irrelevant like eliminating a "lack of attitude"? That isn't a good thing to write! And if you didn't mean that, you shouldn't have confused the world by juxtaposing the two in the same, brief paragraph!

Swisher has swagger, but what folks in Chicago haven't recognized is that he qualifies as Williams' big fish — perhaps a bigger fish, even, than Hunter, Rowand or Fukudome.

Commandment #6: Player must have "swagger", a word that means absolutely nothing in the context of baseball.

Commandment #7: Player must be a "big fish" or also acceptably a "bigger fish" to qualify as the player that his new GM mistakenly promised the world was coming.

Now Sean talks briefly, almost footnote-esque about stupid and pointless things like OBP and HR and moving from a bad hitter's park to a good hitter's park. Whatever dude, BOOOOOORRRIIINNNGGG! Get back to the commandments!

No question, Rowand and Hunter are top-shelf center fielders. Swisher is not. But he can be an average defender out there. And the White Sox would be thrilled to have Jerry Owens win the job in center this spring, to bring the speed and on-base percentage he showed in the minors to the big leagues. If he does, Swisher will move to left. If he doesn't, the defense will survive.

Ugh. You're going to go make me grab my issue of "Baseball Prospectus 2007" now. Great.

At Triple-A, Jerry Owens had a .330 OBP. Not indicative of good things. Double-A, a very batting average inflated .393. And in A-ball, he had a .365 OBP, which is totally uninteresting.

He is projected to have a -2.4 VORP in only 30% of the playing time this season. Jerry Owens is terrible at baseball, and no team should be "thrilled" that he wins a starting spot.

Owens, Swisher and new shortstop Orlando Cabrera could revamp a bone-dry offense.

One of those three players is notably good at offense. One is mediocre, the other is awful.

It's unlikely Dye and Konerko will endure the slumps that sunk last season

WRONG!

We're almost done with the non-puffy section of the article, I promise.

The pitching is still a major question, but let's remember the White Sox were World Series champions in 2005 and won 90 games in '06. Maybe last year was the aberration, and maybe '05 and '06 are better indications of how good this team can be.

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2005 and 2006 are better indications of how 2008 should go than 2007??????

You've got to be fucking kidding me. Seriously.

Okay, enough of Deveney being wrong. We're getting back to him being puffy and stupid now.

Last season, once the slumps started spreading, no one in the locker room snapped the White Sox out of it. "Our guys, our best players, are all nice," Guillen says. "Too many nice guys. We needed someone to go and kick some butt."

Commandment #8: New player must be a "butt-kicker." No nice guys. Must be a proven cure for "the slumps", a made-up contagious disease that has an appearance caused by variance and luck and people not noticing just how often things are average.

That's where Swisher comes in. He is gritty on the field

Commandment #9: Player must resemble David Eckstein in dumbass media speak.

not afraid to speak his mind off it.

Commandment #10: Must be a good candidate to appear on MTV's "The Real World".

For those of you who didn't endure the torture of reading Sean Deveney to find these commandments (you're WELCOME, jerks), I'm going to reprint them all here. Yahoo!

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Sean's Ten Commandments for Newly Acquired Players

#1: Thou shalt wear lots of neckwear.

#2: Thou shalt be "a funny guy".

#3: Thou shalt not sleep very often.

#4: Thou shalt have long hair, be entertaining, and have entertaining hair.

#5: Thou shalt have rumors circulating about you dating a model.

#6: Thou shalt have "swagger".

#7: Thou shalt be a "big fish" or "bigger fish".

#8: Thou shalt be a "butt-kicker".

#9: Thou shalt be gritty.

#10: Thou shalt act like you're a character on MTV's "The Real World".

*******************************************************************************

So as you can see, under this set of commandments, Nick Swisher is basically Jesus. Rejoice, South Side, your season is saved!

(On a side note, I actually do think that Nick Swisher is a total badass, and want to meet him if and when I make the trek to Arizona this spirng.)

(But Deveney still sucks.)