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.)

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.