Eric A Longenhagen: It’s Halloween, and you know what that means; running back to the store once you realize the amount of candy you’ve eaten necessitates another bag. Bah haaaa haaaa!
12:17
Eric A Longenhagen: James and my write-up on Asian pros will be live momentarily, though all the reports are already available on The Board.
12:18
Eric A Longenhagen: Okay, let’s hit your questions.
12:18
Insert Witty Name Here: Gotta ask the obvious: what’s the 70, 60, 50, 40, 30, and 20 grade halloween candy?
12:20
Eric A Longenhagen: I have a 70 on Reese’s and Almond Joy, a 60 on Kit Kat, Twix, Reese’s Pumpkins and Snickers, 50 on Hershey’s anything, 40 and below on all fruit-related candies
Eric A Longenhagen: Howdy from the kitchen island in Tempe, where I need to pour coffee #2 before we start.
12:02
Tyler: Hi, Eric! Where are you at on Colt Emerson? He made some nice swing adjustments this year (dropping the leg kick for a toe tap) that helped him stay on his backside better, and he handled the AAA promotion well, albeit in a small sample.
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 »
Greg Wohlford/ERIE TIMES-NEWS-USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Image
Today’s postseason off day provides a nice opportunity to push an update to my Top 100 Prospects list. This is a “low-hanging fruit” update, more of a polishing and augmentation of the current list than an omnibus analysis of the entirety of the minor leagues. I mainly focused on the players who are closest to graduation, players who got a cup of coffee in the big leagues (sometimes a big cup, close to the maximum roster days without losing 2026 rookie eligibility) and who we basically can’t know any more about than we currently do before they graduate next year. I took a pass at the guys who were already on the Top 100 in a variety of ways; the cement is dry on their season-long stats and their underlying performance data, so everyone got a checkup in this regard, as well as via a TrackMan data check-in. I also watched all of these players swing and play defense at least a little bit just to re-establish an end-of-season visual understanding of their look.
Immediately below, you’ll see the updated list along with trend arrows indicating if a player’s FV grade has changed on this update, and then below that my thoughts on the clusters of players that formed throughout this process. The number of players on whom I have a grade of 50 or better is currently a little below 100, and the number of healthy players is even lower than that. As the offseason list-making process gets underway, there will probably be more players added to this tier, and any player’s grade is potentially subject to change as the down time allows for deeper analysis. Read the rest of this entry »
Eric A Longenhagen: Good morning from Tempe, where we’ll hit 100 degrees again today, hopefully for the final time this calendar year.
12:22
Eric A Longenhagen: I did an end of year update to the Top 100 Prospects list. The piece with all the writing is still with editing and will be published at some point today, but for now you can view the fresh list over on The Board.
Eric A Longenhagen: Today is Fall League Media Day and also one of the last days remaining on the instructional league calendar, so this will likely be more of a 45 minute chat today so I have the option of hitting both.
12:24
Rube: What happens in an expansion draft and what excites you about it?
12:27
Eric A Longenhagen: It probable the rules would be different from the last time MLB had one (like ’96 ish I wanna say?) but essentially teams got to protect 15 players on their roster from selection. The expansion team(s) gets to take a player from each other club in “round one”, and then those clubs get to protect a few more of their players before round two (I think it was three more guys)…
Eric A Longenhagen: Howdy from the gear-covered kitchen island in Tempe. We did it, guys. It was 105 yesterday and the high today is 87. It’s over, we earned it, party at the FG Desert Vista Compound on Sunday.
12:03
Jeb: Out of all the Pirates young pitchers, which one would you trade for a bat? What could they fetch back in return?
12:05
Eric A Longenhagen: I wonder if Chandler is the best candidate to trade, it might take him longer to polish up and make big impact than the current FO group has to make the team good.
12:06
Eric A Longenhagen: What would the return be? In a space like this, I feel like I’d just be bs’ing you if I offered names.
12:06
APBA Baseball 4ever: Hagen Smith and Noah Schultz – how many starts do you see each of them getting in the majors next year? If the answer is zero for Smith, that’s okay. Could you see Schultz getting 15+? Could you see Smith coming up in September?
12:06
Eric A Longenhagen: Schultz I’d put on pace for a September call up and Smith I don’t think will see the bigs until late the following year.
