Trade Evolution: From Rivera to Swisher

Over the weekend I was checking out the New York Times Bats blog and saw Yankees beat writer, Tyler Kepner had an interesting post on "The Evoltion of a Trade". He is able to show how Ruben Rivera (early-mid 90's Yankees prospect who once stole Derek Jeter's glove) turned into current fan-favorite, Nick Swisher. I'll let him show you how it's done:

1990 – Yankees sign Rivera from Panama.

1997 – Yankees trade Rivera to Padres in Hideki Irabu deal.

1999 – Yankees trade Irabu to Expos for Jake Westbrook (and others)

2000 – Yankees trade Westbrook to Indians for David Justice

2001 – Yankees trade Justice to Mets for Robin Ventura

2003 – Yankees trade Ventura to Dodgers for Scott Proctor

2007 – Yankees trade Proctor to Dodgers for Wilson Betemit

2008 – Yankees trade Betemit to White Sox in Swisher deal

There you have it. How Nick Swisher became a Yankee, in eight easy steps.

As a sports nerd, I've done this many times before. It is very rare that trade likes this go on for this long. That same Irabu deal also yielded Ted Lilly...who was traded for Jeff Weaver...who became Kevin Brown. Eventually, some of the chains, like that one, end at the player's free agency/release.

I just did a search off the top of my head of player trade evolutions that have gone on for a while like this. Here's what I came up with: How the Dodgers turned Mike Piazza into Andre Eithier (AO will be short for And Others since almost every trade has other moving parts):

1998 (corrected) – LA trades Mike Piazza (AO) to Atlanta for Gary Sheffield (AO)

2002 – LA trades Sheffield (AO) to Atlanta for Andrew Brown (AO)

2004 – LA trades Brown (AO) to Cleveland for Milton Bradley

2005 – LA trades Bradley (AO) to Oakland for Andre Eithier

Or how Cincinnati turned Paul O'Neill into Sean Casey:

1992 – Cin trades Paul O'Neill (AO) to Yankees for Roberto Kelly

1994 – Cin trades Kelly (AO) to Atlanta for Deion Sanders

1995 – Cin trades Sanders (AO) to SanFran for Dave Burba (AO)

1998 – Cin trades Burba to Cleveland for Sean Casey

And back to the Yankees current roster, how they turned Nick Johnson into Xavier Nady:

2003 – Yankees trade Nick Johnson (AO) to Montreal for Javier Vazquez

2005 – Yankees trade Vazquez (AO) to Arizona for Randy Johnson

2007 – Yankees trade Johnson to Arizona for Ross Ohlendorf (AO)

2008 – Yankees trade Ohlendorf (AO) to Pittsburgh for Xavier Nady (AO)

The cool part was that one of the AOs in the Randy Johnson trade to Arizona was Alberto Gonzalez...who was traded for Jhonny Nunez...who was traded for Nick Swisher. How's that for coming full circle!