Swisher Eyes The Upper Deck

On February 20th, Anthony McCarron of The Daily News wrote an in depth article about Swish’s off season search for the prefect swing.

TAMPA – To get an idea how much everything changed for Nick Swisher last year, consider his new off-season home – Los Angeles. Before last spring training, he had just spent the winter living in his father’s basement in West Virginia, a no-frills existence dedicated to re-discovering his hitting stroke.

Now he’s a world champ with an actress girlfriend – Gossip Girl’s Joanna Garcia – and even did his own television work, doing a cameo on the CBS comedy “How I Met Your Mother.” But while Swisher may have a bit more glamour in his life, he still spent much of the winter doing the same thing – working on his hitting.

Swisher and Yankee hitting coach Kevin Long huddled for two weeks in Arizona in December deconstructing Swisher’s swing. Long stressed that Swisher find a comfortable hitting position with balance, so Swisher tweaked his stance to what he called “a no-stride stance – wait til you see it” and is hoping for even bigger things this season.

“I feel like (Long) understands me and when you run into coaches like that, you really need to lock in with those guys,” Swisher said Friday as he dropped his equipment off at Steinbrenner Field in preparation for Tuesday’s position-player report date. “I said, ‘Hey, man, let’s try to take this thing to the next level.’”

The 29-year-old Swisher had an OPS of .869 last season with 29 home runs and 82 RBI and finished second in the AL with 97 walks, all a “drastic improvement,” he said. He stumbled in the post-season, though, batting .128 with just one homer and two RBI and striking out 15 times in 47 at-bats.

He winced reading stories of how he poorly he hit in the post-season and ultimately said, as he put it, “Who cares – we won!” But he realizes that video of him struggling in the playoffs could be a pitcher’s blueprint this year.

“In the post-season, with a lot of the breaking balls in fastball counts, a lot of people will be looking at that and I worked on that,” Swisher said. “If you want to get better, you have to work on things you’re not good at.”

“I think he can be even more productive than he was and he was pretty productive for us,” Joe Girardi said. “I believe there’s more in there. He worked hard this winter, worked on cutting down some of the movement in his swing and wants to be more productive.”

Swisher moved west to be with his girlfriend and also acknowledged “I can’t do that snow anymore.” While in LA he changed his fitness workouts, which he says has helped him lose 12 pounds, putting him around 203. Restricting trips to his beloved burrito joint, Chipotle, to once a week helped, too, as did shunning pizza and burgers, he said.

“I started doing a lot of boxing and it’s really shed weight,” he said. “I feel quick, I feel strong. I just had a blast with it. It was a controlled atmosphere, it’s not like I was throwing haymakers out there.”

Now he’s just ready for baseball to begin in earnest. “One of the coolest things I’ll always be able to say – I was a champion,” he said. “Now it’s back to work, man. I think we’ve all had that itch for awhile to get back into the rhythm of things, go back to the yard every day.”

The original article was published February 20th, 2010 in the New York Daily News.