Intro

With the Arizona Fall League kicking off today, I decided to write a preview of a league I love so much. This years Arizona Fall League rosters feature 14 players from our mid-season top 100 list, and for my money this is one of the deepest groups of hitting talent to hit the league in a long time. On the pitching side of things I will say that this might be the weakest group we’ve ever seen. Last year we had premium talents like Jackson Jobe and Ricky Tiedemann, and those players just do not exist this time around. There are always some concerns about the quality of play and the quality of pitching and those will remain loud this year. 

As part of this preview I have a Google Sheet that I’m pairing with this and on the tabs I have ranked every hitter participating this year from 1 to 93. I have included their PLive+ score as a reference to provide an impartial view of their performance this past season. The rankings come solely from me, and they are ranked by how I would take them if I was building a farm system. Each rank has an accompanying player capsule that functions as a miniature scouting report. The next tab has my top 25 rankings for pitchers, and that was a tough group to parse through. The hitting list will likely hold up a lot better than the pitcher one. I then included a separate tab for each team with the rosters. There is a place for notes and I plan on updating those notes as I watch games and talk to scouts and others in attendance this year.

One important thing I also included on the sheet was each player's 40-man roster year. The ones highlighted in green are already on a big league 40-man roster, and the ones highlighted in red will be available to everyone in the Rule Five draft if they are not added to their clubs 40-man roster after the conclusion of the AFL and World Series. 

Here is my 2023 version of the same sheet here. I think the list holds up pretty well.