Nick Swisher

Nick Swisher played four seasons for the New York Yankees (2009-2012), and he packed more personality into those four years than most players manage in ten. He came over in a change-of-scenery trade from a White Sox team that had benched him half the year, won the right field job outright, helped bring home a championship in his first season, and spent the next three years being the loudest, most fun teammate on a roster full of quiet professionals -- right up until his free agent decision, almost as an afterthought, handed the Yankees the draft pick that became Aaron Judge.

From Oakland to Chicago to the Bronx

Swisher was a first-round pick in his own right -- 16th overall by the Oakland Athletics in 2002, out of Ohio State, where he'd hit .323 with 35 homers over three seasons. He had a couple of productive years in Oakland's Moneyball-era outfield, got flipped to the White Sox before the 2008 season, and then had a miserable year in Chicago under Ozzie Guillen. (The two never really got along, and Guillen kept saying so, loudly, for years afterward.)

The Yankees bought low. On November 13, 2008, Brian Cashman sent Wilson Betemit and a pair of minor league arms -- Jeff Marquez and Jhonny Nunez -- to Chicago for Swisher, with a throw-in reliever named Kanekoa Texeira coming back too. Nobody circled that trade on a calendar. It turned into one of Cashman's better ones.

The Personality Nobody Asked For (and Everybody Needed)

Swisher walked into a Yankees clubhouse that, in the Jeter-Rivera-Posada era, ran on quiet professionalism. (Read: the quietest professionalism this side of a monastery.) He was neither quiet nor especially interested in earning respect the slow way. Hitting coach Kevin Long put it simply: "He's an energetic guy, the team feeds off him." Swisher's own explanation was just as simple: "I wasn't told I needed to help lighten up the atmosphere when I got here. It just kind of happened."

He backed it up with a genuinely good first year -- 150 games, 29 home runs, 82 RBI -- and the Yankees won it all that fall, sweeping the Twins, beating the Angels in six, then taking down the Phillies in six games for championship number 27. Swisher didn't hit much in that World Series (2-for-13 across five of the six games), but a ring's a ring, and it counts exactly the same as anyone else's.

2010 was even better on the stat sheet: a .288 average, 29 more homers, 89 RBI, and his only career All-Star nod, courtesy of the fans' Final Vote. For one summer, he was a legitimately above-average everyday player -- which is a strangely boring way to describe a guy whose pregame energy made every regular-season game look like it mattered a little more than it did.

Then came 2011 and 2012: 47 more homers combined, a stretch at first base when Mark Teixeira's calf gave out, an ALDS loss to Detroit in 2011, and an ALDS win over Baltimore in 2012 that only set up an ALCS sweep at the hands of the Tigers again. None of it did anything for his October reputation. Which brings up the uncomfortable part.

The October Problem

Swisher was, by any honest measure, one of the coldest postseason hitters the Yankees have run out there in the last few decades. Across four trips to October, he hit .162 with 4 home runs and 7 RBI in 36 games -- a number so far below his .268 regular-season average that it became its own running storyline. He'd get hot for a series (.333 in the 2010 ALDS) and then go ice-cold everywhere else. Nobody ever accused Swisher of not caring about October. They just accused him of not hitting in it, four years running -- and the numbers back that one up completely.

Walking Away, and Handing Over a Pick

After the 2012 season, the Yankees gave Swisher that $13.3 million qualifying offer -- a one-year, prove-it tender under a free agency rule that had only existed for one previous offseason. Swisher turned it down, signed a four-year, $56 million deal with Cleveland that December, and left the Bronx for good.

Here's the part Yankees fans actually care about. Because Swisher declined the qualifying offer and signed elsewhere, the Yankees collected a first-round compensation pick in the 2013 draft -- 32nd overall. They used it on a massive corner outfielder out of Fresno State named Aaron Judge. Swisher's exit, unremarkable as it looked at the time, is directly responsible for the Yankees even having that draft slot. (Nobody's building a shrine to a declined qualifying offer. But maybe somebody should.)

He never got a second ring, and the postseason numbers never caught up to the personality. But the loudest guy in that clubhouse ended up being the answer to a trivia question that actually matters: who got the Yankees the pick that became Aaron Judge? Nick Swisher did. Just by walking away.