I met Mike Swanson at a little diner a few blocks from the stadium. You know the type: greasy spoon joint, with a matronly proprietor who bakes the pies, brews the coffee and runs the register, all while chatting up the customers and dutifully ignoring the fact that the most popular athlete in Buffalo history was seated near the back.
I got the feeling he comes here a lot.
I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect. To be honest, I hadn’t expected the team to approve of my request for a longform interview with Mike “Barbed Wire” Swanson. Over the course of his 9-year career, Swanson has established a reputation for protecting his privacy. It’s not that he doesn’t appreciate the fans – nobody has been more dedicated to signing autographs or talking post-game than Swanson – but he’s always been something of an enigma off the field. This interview marks the first authorized profile of Swanson the man.
Swanson orders a coffee – black – and a slice of apple pie, ala mode. Even after years covering the sports beat, it always surprises me to see elite athletes eating something like pie and ice cream. The idea that someone could compete, and dominate, at the highest level of competitive baseball while maintaining the kind of diet common amongst ballplayers is astounding to me. But then, I guess guys like Mike Swanson are above the normal laws of nature and metabolism. No matter which way you look at it, Mike Swanson is special; he always has been.
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Born in Amite City, Louisiana, there wasn’t a lot about Mike Swanson’s beginnings to suggest a remarkable future. If you’ve never been to Amite City, population 4,110, you’re not missing much. Named for the Amite River on which it sits, the little town is the type of place that children dream of leaving. Sadly, it’s also the type of place that tends to trap its inhabitants. Indeed, Mike was the first Swanson in living memory to move away from Amite City; every one of his uncles, aunts, great-uncles and great-aunts (along, of course, with his parents and grandparents) had clung to that little riverside town and eked out whatever living they could. Amite City was a muddy, wet way of life.
Like most citizens of Amite City, the Swansons lived well below the poverty line. Mike’s father, Dale Swanson, found off-and-on work as a handyman of sorts – most often putting up fences for area farmers. Mike would often help Dale after school, and it was the cuts and scrapes he earned thus that earned him the nickname he’s still known by today. It was tireless work, and paid poorly. But Mike still remembers the days when keeping the family house meant getting that last mile of fence up before bedtime.
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Swanson Family Home, just outside of Amite City proper.
When I asked Swanson whether his poor upbringing might be driving his contract demands in the present day – rumour has it that Swanson is looking to become the highest paid player in baseball – he shook his head.
“Look, I don’t… of course I need to provide for my family, and you know baseball isn’t a lifelong career, this contract is going to be the most money I’ll ever make in my life. So I’m trying to establish myself financially, yeah, and maybe there is some of that childhood stuff in there. But you also have to consider… the money is more than money. Whatever my contract ends up being, that’s a concrete dollar amount that signifies what I’m worth in this league. And without sounding cocky, I do think I’m worth kind of a lot.”
It speaks to Swanson’s small town charm that a statement this bold can somehow come across as humble. Of course, it helps that the standard he’s set on the mound – elected to the All-Star game in every year of his career, four Steve Nebraska awards, the dozens of statistics he’s led the league in – contextualizes “worth kind of a lot” as an understatement.
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Maybe it was the hard labour he performed alongside his father, maybe it was his bloodlines (his father and grandfather were both football stars for Amite City High School, although neither ever amounted to any more than local celebrity), or maybe it was just luck of the genetic draw. Whatever the reason, Swanson quickly established himself as the most remarkable athlete the little town had ever seen. An athletic wunderkind, in his freshman year Swanson was playing varsity football, basketball and, of course, baseball.
“Mike was something special. We all knew that right away.” Jesse Crowley, Amite City’s English teacher, Baptist preacher and volunteer baseball coach, has nothing but praise for Mike Swanson the teenager. “It wasn’t just his talent, either. He had talent, don’t get me wrong. Buckets upon buckets of it. But for every part talent, he had two parts hard work. Never before or since have I seen a work ethic like I did on that kid. Whether it was in the classroom or on the mound, Mike gave it his all.”
Most memories of young Swanson are like that, glowing recommendations of not only his performance but his temperament, as well. Of course he had his flaws, though his success in the majors (along with his thoroughly likeable personality) seem to have discouraged most memory of them.
As a young man, much as today, Barbed Wire shied away from a leadership role on his team. He led on the field, of course – his generational talent and endless work ethic couldn’t help but inspire his teammates. But in the dugout, on the bus, in the clubhouse, Mike wanted nothing more than to just be one of the guys.
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Swanson orders another coffee. He also orders another pie a la mode, although this time he chooses the cherry.
“I guess I’ve just never been that vocal of a guy, you know? It’s never been my style, ‘rah rah’, telling the other guys what to do. I think that my play speaks for itself.”
And, of course, it does. This interview is taking place on an off day, the team having just returned to Buffalo from a series against the Blazers. Swanson started the first game and was clearly the standout for the boys in blue. Through eight full innings Barbed Wire faced twenty-nine pitchers, giving up only a single run (the team would go on to win the thing in the fourteenth inning, following a blown save by reliever Shawn Locke). It was a great performance, but for Swanson that sort of thing is just another day at the office.
“I don’t always play well, right? It happens to everybody, you have a bad game. And I guess one of my flaws would be, you know, not handling that very well.”
One has to wonder whether Swanson would have been better served pursuing basketball or football, a sport where one individual can have a significant impact on every game. He clearly burns with competitive desire, and it’s obvious how hard he’s taken the recent losses.
“Yeah, it’s one thing when I’m out there on the mound, and I can blame myself. But when I’m stuck watching the game from the sidelines… that’s eighty percent of all the games, right? And I can’t do anything.”
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It’s not something that came up much in high school.
Posting three straight high school seasons with an ERA below 2.00 (and winning the HSAS Outstanding Pitcher Award in all three years of his high school career), Swanson established himself first as the ace on his team (which took about fifteen minutes in his very first try-out); then as the best pitcher in the county (Coach Crowley figures he had the other schools on notice by the end of his second game); then as the best pitcher in the state (by the end of his sophomore year year Swanson was the unanimous selection for state MVP); and, of course, by the time of his draft year Swanson had emerged as the single most dominant draft-eligible ball-player in the world.
Dick “Hawkeye” Dittell was a scout for the Crawdads at the time, and was the first big league scout to start religiously watching every game he started; Swanson was fourteen at this point. Dittell chronicles the boy’s rise as a prospect, talking through the biggest wad of chewing tobacco I’ve ever seen.
“I got there first, yeah. He was right in our backyard, see? Louisiana boy, good arm, course we were interested. It’s funny, over the years there got to be more and more scouts… by the middle of his junior year you’d often see someone from every damn team in the league. Then, as his draft got closer, scouts started to drop off one by one. See, teams were startin’ to realize they had no chance. This kid, he wasn’t gonna be available at 20, or 15, or 10 or even 5. Pretty soon it was just the guys from Buffalo and Birmingham [who picked first and second in 2010, Swanson’s draft year]. And me. I knew we were never gettin’ the kid, it was just a damned pleasure to watch. Yes it was.”
As expected, Mike “Barbed Wire” Swanson was selected first overall by the Buffalo Bison in the 2010 MBBA Amateur Draft and given a signing bonus of $3,400,000. The poor kid from Amite City, Louisiana, whose father never made that much money over the entirety of his working life, was about to enter professional baseball.
