With 15 top prospects in the desert and a ball leaving a bat at 119.5 mph, evaluators say the future of baseball is bright, fast and extremely hard to park next to.
PEORIA, United States (The On Deck News) – The Arizona Fall League enters its closing stretch with 15 Top 100 prospects on its rosters, six of them inside the top 50, and a scouting community that has spent six weeks in the desert nodding thoughtfully at numbers on a screen. Evaluators say it has been the most productive stretch of squinting in the sport’s history.
What the Desert Has Taught Us
The league, which draws talent from all 30 organizations, spreads six teams across the Phoenix area: the Glendale Desert Dogs, Mesa Solar Sox, Peoria Javelinas, Salt River Rafters, Scottsdale Scorpions and Surprise Saguaros. Each is a coalition of five big-league clubs who have agreed, for six weeks, to be nice to each other’s pitchers. The Fall Stars Game is Sunday at Salt River Fields, with the championship the following Saturday at the Peoria Sports Complex, a schedule that the people who set it describe as “dense with baseball.”
The league’s notable feats are the kind scouts remember for decades, usually incorrectly. A Padres prospect hit a ball 119.5 mph, a number that, according to the same roster coverage, could top the league’s exit velocity leaderboard. One Royals prospect, who has played only 47 Rookie-ball games, would be the second-youngest player in league history at 17 years and 291 days, a detail that has made grown men in windbreakers feel, for a moment, very old. A Nationals pitcher with a triple-digit fastball is returning from lat surgery, and another arm has touched 101 mph, prompting a veteran scout to write “yep” in his notebook and underline it twice.
The Scouting Report on the Scouts
The real stars of the league, insiders say, are the scouts themselves, a rotating population of men and women who arrive each day in team polos and leave each night with sunburned forearms and an unshakable sense of accomplishment. A survey of 400 people at the concession stands found that 83 percent could not tell a scout from a retired man who simply likes baseball, and the other 17 percent were scouts.
“There’s a specific posture,” said Walter Dunleavy-Ibarra, a retired area scout who now volunteers as an usher in Surprise. “You stand at the railing, you hold the radar gun like it’s a sleeping bird, and you say ‘he’s got a nice frame’ to no one. If you say it to a person, they might ask a follow-up question.”
The league also keeps a long tradition of players who arrive having been traded, often more than once. According to the rosters, several came over in deals for established pitchers, and one found himself in the organization where his father once played, in a swap for a reliever. Fans say this is the most stable form of family business in baseball: the next generation inherits the stadium, and the stadium inherits a new logo.
Farm Reports and Reading Comprehension
The league also serves as the crowning chapter of baseball’s agricultural metaphor, which holds that every great hitter was once a seed, every prospect is a crop, and every general manager is a farmer who has never seen a tractor. Real farmers say they find the comparison flattering and a little confusing. “I’ve never once planted a shortstop,” said Bertram Okafor-Lindgren, who raises soybeans outside the city and attends two Fall League games a year. “But I’ll say this: the way people talk about a ‘plus bat’ sounds a lot like how I describe a good rain.”
The vocabulary overlaps in ways both are still learning. Evaluators sometimes say a prospect “runs great” and “has a lot of tools,” which, readers will recognize, closely echoes a classified ad for farm equipment where the seller admits he hasn’t tried it. The difference, scouts concede, is that in baseball nobody ever admits it.
The bigger story may be the players still waiting for a call. Several prospects face Rule 5 eligibility this offseason, and one had his Fall League showing described as perhaps his last chance to earn a roster spot. Observers compare the feeling to a corn rally told to wait outside the elevator: the crop is ready, the schedule is ready, and the people at the door are reading their phones.
Rookies Are Already Beating the System
The prospects’ rapid arrival is not a theory. According to the league’s list of bonkers stats, a record 16 players homered in their big-league debut this year, three more than the previous high, and a Tigers rookie posted a 6.7 bWAR season, the highest ever for a player who spent most of the year at 21 or under. Veteran scouts have taken this personally.
“You used to be able to say ‘he’s a few years away,’ and you’d be right for a few years,” said Dunleavy-Ibarra. “Now he’s 20, he’s on the roster, and I’m in a parking lot explaining to my wife why I didn’t say so in March.”
Local comedian Priyanka Hollenbeck-Reyes, who performs at a Glendale open mic on Fridays, has built a bit around the league’s hush. “The Fall League is the only place where a guy can hit a ball 119.5 mph and a hundred people in the stands respond by writing the number down,” Hollenbeck-Reyes told an audience of 40. “If I hit a ball that hard at a company picnic, I’d be fired by Monday. Here they give him a plaque and ask if he’s willing to play first.”
The team at Bohiney has said it will continue tracking the best exit velocities and the worst scouting cliches, and will publish both in a single ranked list when the final out is recorded. The league has asked that none of the cliches be read aloud near a pitcher with a 101 mph fastball.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/