How Nick got here

As Nick Swisher is, in five games, taking the Yankees by storm, Times beat writer Tyler Kepner played a fun little game with Nick. While we know Swisher arrived on the Yanks through a trade with the White Sox that saw Wilson Betemit, Jeff Marquez and Jhonny Nunez end up in Chicago, Swisher’s path to the Yanks actually started nearly twenty years ago. As Kepner details in The Evolution of a Trade, when the Yanks signed Ruben Rivera out of Panama in 1990, they set the wheels in motion that would eventually land them Swisher. It’s baseball’s own version of the Kevin Bacon game.