This past Saturday, the Arizona Fall League played host to a tripleheader, with start times staggered enough to see at least most of all three contests at the various ballparks in the eastern part of the Phoenix metro area. My notes and thoughts on the standouts from that day, as well as Monday’s solo game in Peoria, are below. You can find the end-of-year reports and grades on the 2024 Fall Leaguers on the Fall League tab of The Board. Read the rest of this entry »
Last week I covered the American League half of the flurry of transactional activity that occurred as a result of the 40-man roster and non-tender deadlines. Is any one move here as impactful as signing a Yoshinobu Yamamoto or a Matt Chapman? No, but when your favorite team experiences a rash of injuries in June, whether or not they have the depth to scrap and compete is often dictated by the people and processes that surround this day. Below are my thoughts on the National League, with some quick scouting snippets on most of the added players and thoughts about roster construction where I had something to say.
Arizona Diamondbacks
The Diamondbacks lone addition was lefty Blake Walston, a former $2.5 million high school signee who, despite being young for his class and physically projectable as an amateur, has seen his fastball velocity plateau and slightly decline since he signed. He’s had fits and starts where he’s thrown harder, but for the most part, Walston’s fastball still sits 89-92 mph and his performance peripherals took a nosedive in 2023, though part of that was likely because of the PCL hitting environment. The lanky 22-year-old is still a fair long-term prospect because of his age and what one could reasonably hope will still be late-arriving physicality, but for now, I’d consider him at the very back of Arizona’s 40-man starting pitching depth chart. Read the rest of this entry »
This week’s 40-man roster deadline was less eventful than usual (we only had one trade on deadline day), but as always, a number of young players became big leaguers in a certain sense, and teams had no choice but to indicate what they think of lots of fringe prospects who they either did or did not choose to roster. This day of clerical activity is the culmination of the efforts of the players themselves, the people in player development who have helped turn them into big leaguers, and the scouting and decision-making portions of each org that put their stamp of approval on the prospects. Is any one move here as impactful as signing a Yoshinobu Yamamoto or a Matt Chapman? No, but when your favorite team experiences a rash of injuries in June, whether or not they have the depth to scrap and compete is often dictated by the people and processes that surround this day. I’m more focused on analyzing roster depth, fit and flexibility in this space than on scouting players (especially when they’re star prospects you already know well). I’ll have a separate post on the National League. Read the rest of this entry »
The Arizona Fall League begins tonight and (with Sean Dolinar’s help) I’ve assembled the scouting reports for prospects on Fall League rosters in one place over on The Board. As players are identified as Board-worthy prospects throughout the fall, or if players who are already on The Board have their scouting reports updated, there will be an indicator in the “Trend” column denoting change, so check back frequently for updates. You’ll want to reference that table a bit as I briefly preview the AFL below. Some Fall League games will be streamed on the MLB.TV app and online; you can see a schedule for that here. Here are a few key things I’ll be focused on during the next six weeks, things readers should be watching for.
The Potential Stars
This one’s fairly self-explanatory. The Fall League is pretty consistently loaded with excellent prospects, usually hitters. There are about a dozen slam-dunk Top 100 prospects in this year’s league, and many more players who over the next several weeks will make an argument to be included. Peoria and Surprise have the two strongest collections of position player prospects this year, while Salt River’s pitching staff (led by the Tigers and Braves arms) is a cut above the rest at first glance, though keep in mind that prospect-y hype does not always equal success in this league from a team win-loss standpoint. Read the rest of this entry »
