I watched eight Arizona Fall League games over the last week, and today’s a good time to empty the notebook on some of the position players I saw. I’ve got a mix of updates on top prospects and notes on a couple off-the-radar names who impressed me. Let’s get to it, starting with perhaps the best player in the league.
Kilby looks great as a hitter. He’s quick and direct to the ball, he doesn’t leak early, his swing stays on plane forever, he adjusts well off the fastball, and he can use the whole field. He can seemingly get his hands everywhere, and the way he’s able to pull them in and turn around velocity is in a class with the Max Clarks and Kevin McGonigles of the world.
Kilby is also smooth and balanced at shortstop, rangy with a good internal clock. His throwing stroke looks pushy when he has time, but he can let it rip when he needs to get rid of the ball quickly. He looked like the best player on the field, and his stock surged for both Eric and me during my time in Arizona. Read the rest of this entry »
Major League Baseball is once again using the Arizona Fall League as a laboratory for potential rule changes at the major league level. In the past, the AFL has been a proving ground for rule alterations that have made their way to the top level of play, from the pitch timer, to limits on infield shifts, to the ABS challenge system; other initiatives, such as check swing challenges and fully automated balls and strikes, have previously been tested in Arizona but not implemented in the majors. This year, FanGraphs can report that the AFL is piloting new rules restricting defender positioning both on the infield (with the bases empty) and, perhaps more notably, in the outfield. Though MLB implemented restrictions on where infielders can play in 2023, this is the first time the league is piloting guard rails around where outfield defenders can be positioned when a pitch is thrown.
These restrictions first came to my attention during Monday’s game at Salt River Field, where Brendan Gawlowski and I noticed two things. First, Brendan noticed that the two teams’ corner outfielders were positioned both very close to the foul lines and much shallower than contemporary outfielders typically play. Of course, there are situations where a team might want to strategically align their outfielders like this, but for both teams to be doing so regardless of the hitter or game situation struck us as strange. Here is what that looked like on Monday:
Here in Arizona we are now through two weeks of play in the Fall League, with some schedule alterations (a few days of cancellation and a doubleheader makeup effort Tuesday) caused by the impact of tropical moisture coming up through Mexico’s Pacific Coast. Though roughly 60% of the slate remains, there are already some individual players who have moved the scouting needle either for me, or for the many folks here braving Bell Road and walk-prone pitching to sharpen their club’s understanding of these guys. I’ve pushed a bunch of updates to the 2025 Fall League tab on The Board, and below have a Map Key so you can quickly parse the basics of those updates, as well some scouting notes on the players whose grade or projection has changed.
Trend Column Map Key
You’ll notice the “Trend” column on The Board. There are several (mostly self-explanatory) symbols there to give you an idea as to the way a player has looked. The “Up” arrow indicates someone has played well enough, or looks different enough, for me to have upped their FV grade from prior reporting. It’s possible the upward trend will continue throughout the Fall and that the player’s grade increases yet again during offseason org list work. In the cases where the player is struggling so badly as to have earned a “Down” arrow, I haven’t nerfed their FV grade at this time because, historically, there are lots of great players who struggled in the AFL because of fatigue, indifference, or some other reason independent of their talent.
The target “🎯” signifies either players whom I haven’t seen yet, or players who might be Up arrow guys if they reinforce a good early look with more of the same. At a certain point (like a weekish from now) the games I decide to attend on a given day will be dictated entirely by who is left on my target list. The “New” tag indicates players who weren’t on The Board previously, and the Band-Aid “🩹” designation indicates either players whom I haven’t seen, or those who aren’t playing due to injury. Read the rest of this entry »
Eric A Longenhagen: Hello hello, it’s a gorgeous Fall day in Tempe and I’ve got a packed schedule that will likely compress today’s chat. I’m going to allow a couple minutes for some more questions to flow in before we begin in earnest.
12:05
Alex: What have you made of the Nationals’ hirings and how do you expect them to handle key players differently than the past regime?
12:07
Eric A Longenhagen: I think the way things have trended in Boston from a talent acquisition and development standpoint have been very positive, and I’d be stoked to have the people chiefly responsible for that helming my club. They’re young kids with a lot of juice, too. Let’s see how things continue to trend, but this feels like a strong start.
Eric A Longenhagen: Howdy, y’all, it’s cloudy and rainy here in Tempe as the weekend slate has been disrupted by the remnants of Hurricane Priscilla. We need to precip, though, so it’s all good. Looks like starters for tomorrow’s game got moved up a day? At least it appears Rhett Lowder has. Let’s discuss…
12:03
Hazmat Corntail: Where do you see Jonathan Long fitting in long term with the Cubs, or does he need a trade? He seems pretty blocked right now
12:04
Eric A Longenhagen: Multi-positional part time corner guy
12:04
Ben: Hey Eric, hope you’re doing well. Who are you most excited about seeing in the AFL and why is it Alfredo Duno?
12:05
Eric A Longenhagen: It’s honestly just the guys I haven’t seen, or at least haven’t seen in a while, which is almost always players from orgs based in Florida.
12:06
Eric A Longenhagen: Also, and perhaps this was already reported but clearly I’m off the socials so I don’t know, Josue De Paula has a hammy thing and is probably a couple weeks out.
Ethan Petry Photo: Ken Ruinard/USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images
A lot of different types of players get sent to the Arizona Fall League by their parent clubs: prospects who have lost time due to injury, org arms there to soak up enough innings for the league to function, guys eligible for the Rule 5 Draft whose teams aren’t yet sold on putting them on the 40-man roster, and, quite often, the most talented and exciting players in minor league baseball. It’s a rich and robust tapestry.
Now that the league’s action has commenced, one use of the AFL is to provide a sort of decontextualized look at some of the players whose strong performance in 2025 was already cause for some re-evaluation. Here’s one player from each AFL roster who arrived with some helium, prompting us to ask if they’ve changed their scouting report, or are just progressively improving into the player we expected.
Glendale Desert Dogs Sam Antonacci, 2B, White Sox 2025 FV: Honorable Mention
Not only did the White Sox trade for Chase Meidroth months after giving Antonacci a slightly over-slot bonus in the fifth round of the 2024 draft, their Double-A Birmingham affiliate won the Southern League while slotting Antonacci in as the third straight feisty little bat-to-ball maven at the top of their lineup behind Rikuu Nishida and William Bergolla. At six feet, he’s a bit taller, but similar to Meidroth, below-average thump and a dearth of the athleticism necessary to drive a shortstop projection cooled early scouting reads for Antonacci, and he was an honorable mention for us on the White Sox list in April. Despite only playing his junior season there after two years of Division II ball, Antonacci is so Coastal Carolina-pilled that 35 hit by pitches form a substantial part of the .433 OBP he held over his first full pro season. (That he has yet to be plunked in his first three AFL games has to be, one would imagine, a source of deep personal disappointment.) Read the rest of this entry »
Megan Mendoza/The Republic/USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images
The 33rd Arizona Fall League season opened last night with a single game in Scottsdale. There are future stars in the Fall League every year, as well as many more workmanlike players who are competing for a 40-man roster spot on next year’s club. It’s a wonderful league for teams to develop and scout prospects because of the cross section of talent it tends to include (there are usually lots of good position player prospects), its timing (which allows players who were injured during the regular season to catch up on reps), and its structure (which allows for six weeks of steady looks). Teams almost always take the AFL seriously and send players here who they want to see more of, or who they want to test. Being on the roster is, on its own, a flare. It’s an indication that a player is worth paying attention to from a scouting standpoint even if I didn’t know the guy’s name until I saw a roster.
Previewing this league with prospects’ scouting reports risks putting the cart before the horse because the scouting part has yet to happen. I want to give you the reports I already have, to play the hits and make sure you have Kevin McGonigle and Josue De Paula reports and tool grades in front of you (don’t worry, you will), but a huge part of the pro scouting exercise that is the Arizona Fall League is mining for the deeper cut prospects, and I can’t tell you who those guys are going to be just yet. But I can show you the initial steps I take to prepare to go to the field and try to systematically unearth these guys, give you the tools to do so on your own, and, in the process, let know you who it is I’m most curious and excited to learn more about for the next six weeks. Read the rest of this entry »
Eric A Longenhagen: Howdy from sunny Tempe, Arizona where last weekend I went people watching up by the college to see some Halloween craziness, and instead the lady sitting next to me at the bar had a seizure or a stroke or something and I got to play paramedic in front of like 24 people. Sometimes things don’t go the way you plan.
12:16
AN1: How are you feeling on Creed Willems? He has smoked some balls out west. Doesn’t K a ton either and is 21 for the first half of 2025. Anything there?
12:18
Eric A Longenhagen: I’ll take the under. He has power but chases a ton for a 1B and I’m not sure how long he’s going to be athletically viable. Some model-driven team would probably take him in a deal, though.
12:18
Dk: Would you trade Tong, Williams and Gilbert for Crochet? Would it be enough?
12:20
Eric A Longenhagen: I’d be trying to do better than that (I’d rather have Sproat than either Tong or Gilbert by kind of a lot, and I’d need to pry away at least one of Baty or Ronny Mo) but I appreciate you including Jett, who I think is gonna be good.
12:20
Scott M.: What do you make of Josue Briceno and Thayron Liranzo’s AFL performances so far? And what’s the likelihood either will stick at catcher?
We’ve reached the point in the Arizona Fall League calendar when the weather has officially shifted toward autumn, which makes being at the ballpark during the day about as close to heaven as one can get. The return of great weather also means the return of the Valley’s snowbirds, the (usually retired) folks who only live here during the pleasant time of year. The highways are suddenly very full again, and I’ve become a crabby baby about driving all the way to the West Valley for day games that then force me to drive home in rush hour traffic made more harrowing by the uptick in people. Opportunities to double up at East Valley stadiums are now golden, and I’ll be at Salt River and then Mesa each of the next couple of days.
We’re now deep enough into the AFL schedule that I’m starting to shift my in-person scouting focus toward hitters, especially when pitchers I’ve already seen a couple of times are in the game. It means spending more time down the baselines rather than behind home plate and (probably) more hitter-focused pieces like this for the next couple of weeks. But for now… Read the rest of this entry »
Travis Ice and I have begun early work on the Los Angeles Angels and Sacramento Athletics prospect lists, and because both franchises’ prospects are on the Mesa Solar Sox roster, I spent most of last week seeing whatever game they were playing.
At this point in the Fall League, the leaders in games played have laced up their spikes only eight or nine times. Anything you’ve read about this year’s AFL so far has encompassed just two weeks of part-time play for any given player. Remember this is a hitter-friendly league for a number of both developmental and environmental reasons, and that triple slash lines in this league are not a reliable proxy for talent.
Offensive standards at first base are quite high, and even though the collective performance of this year’s group was down relative to recent norms (by kind of a lot), it’s still a position from which we expect good players and prospects to provide impact power. Morgan has been a relevant prospect since high school, but a relative lack of power has tended to cap his projection into more of a part-time first base/outfield role.
During the 2024 regular season it looked like Morgan was more often taking max-effort swings and selling out for power. He reached Double-A and slugged .483 across three levels, but his middling raw strength and opposite-field tendency as a hitter (plus elevated chase rates relative to his career norms) suggested this was maybe not the best approach for him. In the Fall League, Morgan has been more balanced, really taking enormous hacks only in favorable counts. He’s still stinging the ball in a way that indicates he’ll be a doubles machine, and he seems less vulnerable to fastballs up and away than he did during the summer. We don’t have a way of truly knowing how Morgan will handle elevated big league fastballs until he faces them, but a more balanced, contact-oriented style of hitting is going to give him a much better chance of covering the top of the zone and being a more complete hitter. (An aside: Watch A’s prospect Denzel Clarke go first-to-third at the video’s 1:55 mark.)
I think the absolute ceiling for his production looks something like Brandon Belt’s or Daniel Murphy’s pre-Juiced Ball era statline. More likely Morgan’s output will look something like Ji Man Choi’s or LaMonte Wade Jr.’s. Morgan is not a guy who is going to hit 20 homers per year, but a heady, well-rounded offensive skillset coupled with his excellent, profile-seasoning first base defense make him better than the 40 FV grade player I evaluated him as during the year. He is making a case to be elevated into the back of this offseason’s Top 100 list.
I gave Durbin short shrift last year even after his .353/.456/.588 line in the 2023 Fall League. He had a good 2024 at Triple-A Scranton, including a strong second half after he returned from a fractured wrist. Durbin is short — really short, he’s 5-foot-6 — but he’s not small; he’s built like a little tank. His compact, stocky build helps keep his swing short and consistently on time to pull the baseball. His quality of contact in 2024 was commensurate with a guy who slugs under .400 at the big league level, but he was dealing with an injury that typically impacts contact quality for a while after recovery.
Perhaps most importantly, Durbin looks fine at both second and third base and has also been playing all over the outfield. Defensive versatility might be his key to being rostered consistently. Durbin ran a jailbreak 4.10 for me last week, but his home-to-first times have been close to 4.4 seconds on normal swings. That’s not blazing and slower than what’s typical of a decent center fielder, but any kind of outfield viability would help the former Division-III standout become an improbable big leaguer. Durbin has played sparingly in center field during his career, and it’s going to be very difficult to evaluate him there this Fall League unless he starts getting reps there every day, which I think is unlikely. It’s more of a thing to watch develop into next spring.
Alderman, a 2023 second round pick out of Ole Miss who had some of the best exit velocities in that draft class, is currently leading the AFL with six home runs. He hit one on Friday at a whopping 119.5 mph. It went out on a line, ricocheting off the side of the batter’s eye, which you can see in this frame:
Friday, Marlins outfielder Kemp Alderman hit a homer that left Salt River Fields in a real hurry, at 119.5 mph. pic.twitter.com/HBvj2F0oud
Like Durbin, Alderman missed time in 2024 with a broken hand. It’s good to see Alderman hitting with elite peak power coming off of this particular injury, but I’d advise everyone to pump the breaks on his overall prospectdom at this time. He loads his hands so deep, high, and late that I worry he’ll struggle against better velocity as he climbs the minors. Though Alderman’s regular-season strikeout rates don’t raise alarm, I don’t think 30-ish games at each A-ball level is a meaningful sample, especially for a draft pick out of an SEC school. It’s fine to be hopeful that I’m wrong or that Alderman will make necessary adjustments once better stuff starts beating him, and he clearly has the power to clear the offensive bar at a corner outfield spot. But even though he’s raking out here, he does not have an opinion-altering look. I know Marlins fans have gone through this a lot lately, where they have a minor leaguer with elite power but an insufficient hit tool to profile (Peyton Burdick, Griffin Conine, Jerar Encarnacion), and I worry Alderman is another of this ilk.
Alert Ben Lindbergh, we have a knuckler. The 25-year-old Kirby was an undrafted free agent out of UConn in 2023 and spent most of 2024 in Fort Myers either on the Complex or FSL roster. His knuckleball needs to be more consistent for him to be considered a prospect at all, but for now it’s a lot of fun to watch a guy whose primary pitch is his knuckler.
The Arizona Fall League has a knuckleballer this year, Twins righty Devin Kirby. pic.twitter.com/Z6c7ik6vH4
These players have had their scouting reports added to the Fall League tab on The Board. Head over there to check out their tool grades and scouting reports.
