Athletics Get Best of Swisher Deal

by
June 10, 2008

The Oakland Athletics organization made some key trades in the 2007-08 off-season. A trade with the Chicago White Sox saw the A’s send one of its key offensive cogs north in somewhat of a surprising move. First baseman-outfielder Nick Swisher was traded to The Windy City for disappointing outfielder Ryan Sweeney and top pitching prospects Gio Gonzalez and Fautino De Los Santos.

Swisher’s trade was a bit of a surprise considering he was a young hitter locked into a reasonable five-year contract that runs through 2011 and includes an option at $10.25 million for 2012. That said, Swisher has struggled this season with the White Sox and is hitting only .228/.343/.386 in 215 at-bats. His slugging percentage is down 70 points from his career average. Maybe the A’s knew something the rest of us did not (wink, wink, nudge, nudge, say no more)? Or maybe he is just having an off year. On the plus side, he’s still walking a lot (14.7 percent) and the club is in first place in its division.

Sweeney, a former second round pick out of high school, was in desperate need of a scenery change – and former Sox teammate Brian Anderson is no doubt envious of his good fortune. Sweeney, 23, is currently hitting .293/.353/.407 in 123 at-bats for his new club. Those obviously are not All-Star numbers but he has been a solid contributor for the organization.

Southpaw Gonzalez, 22, is currently biding his time in Triple-A Sacramento and gives the Athletics excellent starting pitching depth. If the club needed him, he could probably be at least a league average starter right now. Currently, he has a 5.71 ERA in 64.2 innings of work with 74 hits allowed and 35 walks. His numbers are a little skewed after he was roughed up in two of his last four starts for 17 earned runs on 20 hits in 8.2 innings.

De Los Santos, 22, was considered one of the biggest up-and-comers in 2007 after going 10-5 with a 2.65 ERA and 153 strikeouts in 122.1 A-ball innings. But he succumbed to Tommy John surgery after only five High-A ball starts after coming over to the Athletics. Gee… what a surprise. The White Sox organization has never traded (Mike) an injured pitcher (Sirotka) before. Luckily the track record for pitchers returning from the surgery is pretty solid.

Even with the injury, the trade seems to be in Oakland’s favor at this point.

You Aren't a FanGraphs Member
It looks like you aren't yet a FanGraphs Member (or aren't logged in). We aren't mad, just disappointed.
We get it. You want to read this article. But before we let you get back to it, we'd like to point out a few of the good reasons why you should become a Member.
1. Ad Free viewing! We won't bug you with this ad, or any other.
2. Unlimited articles! Non-Members only get to read 10 free articles a month. Members never get cut off.
3. Dark mode and Classic mode!
4. Custom player page dashboards! Choose the player cards you want, in the order you want them.
5. One-click data exports! Export our projections and leaderboards for your personal projects.
6. Remove the photos on the home page! (Honestly, this doesn't sound so great to us, but some people wanted it, and we like to give our Members what they want.)
7. Even more Steamer projections! We have handedness, percentile, and context neutral projections available for Members only.
8. Get FanGraphs Walk-Off, a customized year end review! Find out exactly how you used FanGraphs this year, and how that compares to other Members. Don't be a victim of FOMO.
9. A weekly mailbag column, exclusively for Members.
10. Help support FanGraphs and our entire staff! Our Members provide us with critical resources to improve the site and deliver new features!
We hope you'll consider a Membership today, for yourself or as a gift! And we realize this has been an awfully long sales pitch, so we've also removed all the other ads in this article. We didn't want to overdo it.




 

Marc Hulet has been writing at FanGraphs since 2008. His work focuses on prospects and fantasy. Follow him on Twitter @marchulet.

6 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
David Golebiewski
17 years ago

I would have to disagree with the assertion that the A’s are winning this deal.

A closer look at Swisher’s batted ball data shows that essentially nothing has changed about his game. His walks remain high, his line drive percentage is high and he’s actually hitting slightly fewer groundballs while whiffing less. The only negative aspect of Swisher’s stats is his BABIP, which is an extremely low .259. Given his line drive percentage (21%, according to First Inning), we should expect Swish to be batting about .320 on balls in play. If we adjust his line to add the additional .61 points, his line is .289/.404/.447 (and that assumes all were singles). In other words, nothing is wrong with Swish.

0