posted on Thursday, January 04, 2007 2:50 AM by Jim

Kenny Williams airs it out

If you haven't heard it yet, South Side Sox has audio of Kenny Williams' interview with Mike North on The Score.  Williams' comments are well worth listening to Mike North, whose voice makes my speakers vibrate.  Man, I'm glad he didn't get the Sox radio job.

At any rate, there's one item that particularly made me think, and it's when Williams talks about how McCarthy's repertoire isn't well suited to U.S. Cellular Field.  Williams says about John Danks and Gio Gonzalez that "they both have movement -- and it's key in our ballpark -- they both have movement on their fastballs and sink on their fastballs to be able to get you a ground ball and keep the ball in the ballpark."

They go on to discuss that McCarthy's fastball was pretty straight, which is true, and that might cripple him in such a small park.  Fair point, but then again as I've said before, Danks' home run rates were far worse in the minors.  Danks gave up 1.41 home runs per nine innings, while McCarthy surrendered 1.11.  But what I didn't do was look up how their respective minor league parks played into it. 

Well, that doesn't favor Danks either.  Here's what the park factors say in terms of home runs:

McCarthy
  • 26.0 IP, 2 HR at Birmingham (0.54)
  • 119.1 IP, 16 HR at Charlotte (1.47)
Danks
  • 69.1 IP, 11 HR at Frisco (0.95)
  • 70.2 IP, 11 HR at Oklahoma (0.68)
Danks' homer rates mean that he'd give up around 18-19 homers if he pitched 119 innings at either level in friendlier parks, and that should be a significant warning flag.  On the other hand, when looking at his game log, I could maybe kinda sorta start to see where Williams is coming from.

After receiving a promotion to Triple-A midway through the season, Danks struggled in the early going, but ended up giving up only one gopher ball in his last 31 1/3 innings.  Meanwhile, he induced totals of 70 grounders, 30 line drives and 60 fly balls in Triple-A, which isn't a bad split.

So he's got that going for him, but should Danks start out in Charlotte next year as expected, we'll have a far better idea of how the two stack up.  Not only will Danks play his home games in McCarthy's park, but he'll also be McCarthy's age (22).

Comments

# re: Kenny Williams airs it out

Thursday, January 04, 2007 11:47 AM by Randy
I like the analysis here.

# re: Kenny Williams airs it out

Thursday, January 04, 2007 7:43 PM by johnny_mostil
I think... you need to be very careful here.

You're assuming something that isn't true about Danks and might or might not be true about McCarthy, and that's that these pitchers were using their full arsenals in all of their starts. Danks certainly was not -- he was quite publicly working on a straight change in early starts in Frisco last year, to the point of throwing it obsessively. The minors are developmental in nature, and winning -- and statistical results -- are secondary.

Another way of putting it is there are two games being played in the minors, the developmental game with anointed top prospects who WILL make it, and the survival-of-the-fittest game being played by the rest of the players, where they just try to get noticed.

Comparing their statistics is a risky exercise.

# re: Kenny Williams airs it out

Thursday, January 04, 2007 10:50 PM by Jim Margalus
I hear ya, Johnny, and thanks for commenting.

McCarthy impressed me because he was one of those late-round picks who made noise in the low minors, went through the refinement period late in the game and still looked to be an at-least-average pitcher in the majors at this point.

I read about Danks' Frisco experience, and also that he's started out shaky at each level but eventually has come around, and it looked like he was starting to figure out Triple-A. But he'll be going from a big park to a small park, so I'm anxious to see how that shapes his development.

Their repertoires are about the same, only thrown with different hands, so it'll be interesting to see how big these small differences turn out to be.