If there's one way Kenny Williams has made an impact on me as a baseball fan -- aside from building a team that won a World Series for the first time in 88 years, of course -- it's that he's made me a lot more aware of the farm system.
It's somewhat counterintuitive when I think about it now, but I suppose I took prospects for granted during Ron Schueler's term. He wasn't going to part with them, so I was going to see them at some point. And they were likely going to suck, starting with Scott Ruffcorn, ending with Kris Honel and all the players acquired in the White Flag Trade except Keith Foulke in between. So they didn't warrant my monitoring, I thought.
But Kenny's so proactive with dealing his prospects that you really have to understand the farm system in order to evaluate the job he's doing. Take the Jim Thome and Javier Vazquez trades for example. The centerpieces of the Sox packages weren't Aaron Rowand or El Duque/Luis Vizcaino, respectively -- they were Gio Gonzalez/Daniel Haigwood and Chris Young. Without that knowledge, you might think Kenny was on the winning end of two salary dumps; with it, you'll have to wait and see and hope that Young doesn't turn into some Super Mike Cameron, and Gonzalez into a lesser Billy Wagner.
At any rate, I've been paying more attention to the Sox minor league system now than I have at any other point, looking to see if there's any relief help on the way when we find out that Boone Logan officially can't retire big league hitters, or if any of the outfielders are ready when Pods goes on the DL at some point.
Right now, the player I'm paying the most attention to at this point isn't anywhere close to making the big leagues; he's currently playing High-A ball for the Winston-Salem Warthogs. Lucas Harrell is his name, and he
picked up a win in his first start of the season today.
Harrell, the fourth-round pick of the Sox in the 2004 draft, is only on my radar screen because I covered his high school (Ozark) during the Missouri state baseball championships. I didn't see him pitch that day (he pitched the game prior), but he played shortstop and reached base on all four plate appearances.
Yet his name probably wouldn't have stuck with me if it weren't for the fact that he had some of the strangest on-field mannerisms since Turk Wendell. He led off for Ozark, so it didn't take long to notice that he took long to get into the batter's box. And right before stepping in, he'd take off his batting helmet and smell the inside of it -- if he wasn't yelling at himself into it.
He also left
the bill of his highly salt-stained cap as straight as the day it was born, enjoyed making his uniform far dirtier than it had to be when he slid, and he walked with a limp that seemed to come and go. A writer who was more familiar with him said that wasn't due to injury; it just showed up whenever he felt like it.
He was a showboat through and through, but you couldn't knock him for it because he played a perfect ballgame that day. And he was one of the top pitchers in the state, with a sub-1.00 ERA and over 100 strikeouts in only 71 innings. A month later, the Sox drafted him.
In the Sox system, he looks like typical low-minors material, with inconsistent control and stuff that might be overpowering if he can harness it. But he's still worth following just for the remote chance that we'll get to see if his high school antics carry over into the big leagues. Confidence didn't seem to be a problem, so you never know.