Phase 1: White Sox Make Trade. Phase 2: ?

Phase 3: Jay Mariotti gets made fun of here.

Acknowledged, people are writing about far more interesting and mainstream things around now. But "journalists" just can't write these things and get away with them! I'm sorry! Jaybird, tell us, using as much anti-Sox spin as possible, why they got burned by Billy Beane in the Swisher deal?

Did Beane snooker Williams again?

Hot damn, Hawkeroo. We'd better rush down to beautiful U.S. Cellular Field before all the 2008 tickets are gobbled up. The White Sox just traded for a .262 hitter with shrinking power numbers who no longer was deemed necessary by Oakland's esteemed Billy Beane, never a good sign.

Obligatory immature reference to an increasingly senile broadcaster aside, Jay's one-track mind and ignorance pervades this paragraph. Let's just see how.....

The first, and most offensive thing is that Jay sums up Swisher as a ".262 hitter". Swisher drew 100 walks last year, dumbass. Who cares if he's hitting .262 when he on-bases (yes, that's a verb) .381?

"Shrinking power numbers" implies that there is some sort of a multi-year trend. Swisher has none. Here are 2B/HR/SLG stats for the past 3 years.

2005: 32/21/.446
2006: 24/35/.493
2007: 36/22/.455

So Swisher had a bit of a power outage in 2007. That isn't evidence of "shrinking power numbers". He's going to be 27 next year and playing in a hitter's park.

And thirdly, Jay, perhaps Swisher was no longer deemed necessary to Billy Beane because the A's are rebuilding! Dan Haren was traded away too....is he "unnecessary" to Beane as well? By the time the A's have a chance to be good again, Swisher will be fairly expensive, as his contract is back-loaded and the A's don't have shovels full of cash to hand out. There was little chance he was going to play out his contract on that team one way or the other.

But....you already thought about these things, right? Is it even the slightest bit unfair for me to claim that you couldn't have analyzed this worse?

Hate to be cynical about Ken Williams' belated offseason attempt to redeem himself, but acquiring Nick Swisher only assures the Sox of one thing: They're a little better than the Kansas City Royals.

It also assures them that Jerry Owens, one of the sorriest excuses for a major league player to luck into playing 90 games in a season, will not be starting.

As an auxiliary addition, the shaggy-haired outfielder might be a clever idea. But as a centerpiece of a disappointing winter, he's the booby prize after Williams lost big targets Torii Hunter and Miguel Cabrera to real American League contenders in Anaheim and Detroit.

Stop. The. Fucking. Presses.

Jay Mariotti has just suggested that Nick Swisher is somehow worse than Torii Hunter.

Jay Mariotti has just suggested that Nick Swisher is somehow worse than Torii Hunter.

Jay Mariotti has just suggested that Nick Swisher is somehow worse than Torii Hunter.

I didn't even copy and paste that. I had to type it 3 times. Jay has endowed me with the right to go statistical apeshit.

Swisher put up his best offensive season last year, with an EqA of .291. He's 27 this year. He's an OBP machine.

Torii Hunter has never had higher than a .282 EqA. He has never OBPed above the league average. He's 32 this year. He's an overrated defensive talent, as he was 7th/10 in the AL in zone rating for CFs last year, while his FRAAs are unimpressive on the whole.

Plus, look at the contracts. Nick Swisher is owed $3.5M, $5.3M, $6.75M, and $9M over the next four years respectively, with a 10.25M option for 2012. Hunter's proposed deal from the Sox was for $15M a season for those 5 years.

Damn, Kenny Williams sure whiffed on this one, huh?

When the Sox have three potential craters in their starting rotation, why trade the supposedly coveted lefty Gio Gonzalez -- for the second time, by the way -- for a player whose home-run production dropped from 35 to 22?

Because for some reason, Kenny Williams thinks he's in win-now mode, and Gio was not in the plans to fill one of those craters in 2008.

I absolutely love the 35-22 homerun cherrypick stat. Doubles went up from 24 to 36! OBP went up from .372 to .381! Batting average up from .254 to .262! Strikeouts down from 152 to 131! EqA slightly increased!

Sure, Swisher gets on base, but he's much more a complimentary cog than a difference-maker.

I love the "Swisher gets on base, but" clause. Like getting on base isn't the single most important thing for a hitter to do. It's like Jay's dismissing it as meaningless. And seriously, what's the cutoff between "complimentary cog" and "difference maker" in your world Jay? How does Torii Hunter fit into the latter while Swisher fits into the former? Can you explain that? Or is that more generic dumbass sportswriter speak?

In a murderous division, the Sox have no right to even think about competing against Cleveland and Detroit when they've done little more than get Swisher and shortstop Orlando Cabrera.

I agree here. The White Sox have a question mark and two losers making 60% of their starts. Therefore, they will not be a threat to win the division this year. However, their offense will be very good, and the bullpen is likely to rebound. Swisher is a good, relatively young, relatively cheap long-term solution for the outfield, so is the lack of likely 2008 success really a reason to damn Williams for making this move?

Williams, delusional as ever, is talking about a World Series title.

He has to. It's his job to, even if he doesn't believe it.

I'd never suggest the Sox, firmly the distant No. 2 baseball team again in the nation's third-largest market, slip back into the old Kids Can Play mode. But it's odd to give up three prospects to a shark like Beane, who knows a good young pitcher when he sees one.

That's a gross oversimplification of Beane. Beane is among the best judges of such talent, but there's nothing to say he's infallible or something. He's made his mistakes, and he's taking an educated chance on these prospects. He doesn't know for sure they'll pan out.

If Gonzalez and/or righthander Fautino De Los Santos pan out, along with outfielder Ryan Sweeney, Williams never will hear the end of it.

Ryan Sweeney has about a 2% chance of ever being as good as Nick Swisher. The pitchers will have to be damn good for anyone informed to criticize Williams heavily for this trade. Note I said "informed". I still expect you to criticize, Jay.

Anyone who read the best-seller, "Moneyball," knows how Beane has snookered Williams in the past. And that embarrassment vaguely involved Swisher, making me wonder if Williams is trying to exact revenge on Beane six years later.

What the fuck are you talking about? That embarrassment involved things like Chad Bradford, Ray Durham, Joe Blanton, and Royce Ring. It had nothing to do with Nick Swisher, except that Beane drafted him in the same year as the events of the book. I am staring directly at the book and quoting, pages 107-108.

"Billy's phone rings. It's Kenny Williams again. Williams is of no current interest to Billy. Nothing the White Sox will do will alter Billy's chances of getting Swisher."

The rest of Mariotti's article is just a bunch of Moneyball quotes and a basic plot summary. If I had to guess, I'd say this was the first time he's opened the book.

It's official, the White Sox cannot make a move that Mariotti won't slam. At a certain point, writing becomes so spun by personal grudges and established personalities that truth completely fades out of it. Jay is one such writer. Anyone who still takes anything he says to be true would do well to be reminded of this article.