In the 24 hours since White Sox GM Kenny Williams decided to pull the trigger on a trade that sent Nick Swisher to the Yankees, we're still trying to figure out why he did it.
Consider me a Williams apologist. Since the Sox won the World Series, I've mostly given him the benefit of the doubt when it comes to trades. And he hasn't let me down.
Until now.
While I can make a semi-credible argument why Williams made this move -- which I'll get to in a minute -- there's a much longer list of reasons why the deal was a bad idea. Here's the quick rundown of why this is lame:
1. Williams never sells low, but there's no other way to describe this trade since Swisher batted .219 last year. It's hard to win on the trade market like that.
2. The Sox sent three of their four best prospects to the A's for Swisher, but got a bag full of crap back for him.
3. Even though Swisher was awful last year, let's not forget he was still better than Jerry Owens or Brian Anderson, the top two options the Sox have left for CF.
4. Swisher is very likely to be better next year.
5. Lost in the numbers Swisher posted last season was the fact that he played all over the place. When Paul Konerko missed time, Swisher slid into the first base spot. Most of the season he played a decent centerfield (better than Ken Griffey Jr., anyway...). He's also a very good defender in right and left fields, where he also logged time. That flexibility is valuable.
6. Why sell low this early in the offseason? His value won't get any lower by waiting for another team that wants to take a chance on him.
7. Why trade Swisher this early when his multi-position talents can give you flexibility with your own offseason plan? Obviously, things didn't work out like Williams thought they would last winter. But because Swisher can play four positions, the Sox could have had the luxury of finding the best available players and re-arranging the pieces from there. Now they're locked into finding a CF elsewhere, or finding an infielder good enough that they can live with Owens or Anderson as a glove-only CFer in the lineup.
8. The Sox have a lot of corner-OF/1B/DH-guys, including Swisher, Konerko, Jim Thome and Jermaine Dye. If Williams didn't want Swisher in centerfield, then there were basically three spots (1B, RF, DH) for those four guys). But despite wanting to have a more athletic roster, Williams turned around and traded the most athletic guy.
9. If the Sox just wanted salary relief, Swisher was the guy making the least amount of money from that group.
10. The market might not be hot for Konerko, because he's also coming off a bad year and has a full no-trade clause. But Thome and Dye might have yielded more in return than Swisher since they had good seasons in 2008.
So that wasn't a very quick rundown, mostly because there are a lot of reasons this was a bad idea. I probably even missed a couple.
How could this be a good idea? Here's my best effort to play the devil's advocate:
1. Williams thinks Swisher is finished: His bat did look slow last year, and guys who can't keep their batting average up during the prime of their careers don't usually age well.
2. There's something we just don't know: Maybe Swisher was a poison pill in the clubhouse. Maybe the Sox learned something unsavory about his character. Maybe Swisher loves the movie Con Air. All are reasons to want to get rid of him.
3. Long-term salary relief: Swisher makes less than Konerko, Thome and Dye in 2009, but Dirty 30 would have been on the books for the next three years.
4. There's something bigger coming: This trade will be a moot point if Williams has something spectacular up his sleeve. He's done it in the past, why not now?
5. It had to happen now: Williams had to clear some salary before the big move could materialize and this was the first thing to develop.
6. It had to happen now, part II: Williams is so convinced Swisher is done, he didn't want to risk being stuck with him in 2009. Another bad season and the Sox would definitely be stuck paying for the rest of his back-loaded contract.
7. Conspiracy theory: Williams has traded so many guys right before they've blow up, he felt like he had to tank one deal to keep other GMs from thinking he's playing with loaded dice.
8. The haul is better than it seems: Wilson Betemit was once a top prospect for the Braves and is still youngish. Jeff Marquez was a first-round draft pick. The other guy... ehh... who am I kidding? These guys suck.
That's all I've got. And I think if you compare the lists, besides the difference in lengths, the pro-trade-Swisher list has much more of a just-trust-me-because-I'm-Kenny Williams feel to it.
Then again, Williams has a World Series title. He's only had one losing season in eight years as the Sox's GM. And he's coming off a year in which he won a surprising division title.
Maybe the surprises will keep on coming. But if this deal works out, shock might be more appropriate than surprise.
Your second set of points are key here. In a vacuum, the trade stinks, but it also reeks of Lee-for-Podsednik, i.e. it's part of a bigger plan. The fact that he traded Swisher of all people indicates that he's got a lot of work planned this winter. Think about it: this is a guy he coveted a great deal and gave up his best minor league chips to get. And yet he goes ahead and flips him after one year? That doesn't sound like the KW I know.
Swisher is not a guy we'll miss, nor a guy that'll make the Yankees any better. The damage was done when KW gave up our best prospects for him. This is damage control now. To see him go on to be Dirty .230 for the next two years in Chicago would've been a petrified raisin on a hot turd sundae. This is just the beginning of a fun offseason. We'll see how it affects the 2009 Sox.