SCOUTING REPORT

               Every baseball fan fancies himself a scout and I am no exception. I say that with full knowledge of the fact that predicting the future of players in the diamond sport is difficult, the differences in its levels being steep. The kid who looks great in high school or college often fails in the minors and some minor-league stars never make it in The Show. Adults make a living off trying to overcome the prophetical obstacles, probably more than should.

     

          But scouting is a game anyone can play for fun and I do it yearly at the Arizona Fall League. The AFL is the finishing school to which all 30 Major League teams send some of their more promising young prospects. Each team assigns seven.They’re grouped in six teams of 35 that play a 32-game schedule running from early October through the second week of November, this year ending today.

               It’s baseball at its purest, with individual performance all. The audiences in the Phoenix area’s spring-training parks consist mainly of real scouts and geezers like me with nothing better to do. Starting about the second week we’re joined by the gaggle (giggle?) of girlfriends the players attract in the normal course of things. Six weeks with pay during the desert-lovely autumn, with most nights off, is about as close to paradise as most of these young men will get. It’s a wonder they go home.

               My first general impression of the current season is that the pitchers have it over the hitters, continuing the situation that’s prevailed in the Major Leagues for several years.  A decade or so ago, when I began taking in fall games, most of the young arms here delivered heat and little else. Now many sport a variety of deliveries, to the discomfort of the batsmen. Thus does the game evolve, although the results might not be universally appealing.

               My second take is that I saw no prospects whose talents immediately dazzled. That’s in contrast with past years, when the potential of the fledglings Ryan Braun, Tommy Hansen, Starlin Castro and Nolan Arenado was apparent to anyone who looked. Ditto last season for Kris Bryant, the Chicago Cubs’ phenom now poised on the cusp of the Bigs. This year the crystal ball was hazier.

               Exhibit A in that regard was MARK APPEL, the young man whom the Houston Astros made the No. 1 pick in the 2013 draft and paid a reported $6.35 million to sign.  Like any top draft choice, the 6-foot-5 right-handed pitcher out of Stanford U. came with a can’t-miss label, but he’s struggled in the minors, posting a 5.93 ERA in 121 innings over two seasons in classes A and AA. He started well here, posting 14 straight scoreless innings, and added two more when I saw him in a game on October 31, but the first solid hit he gave up that day (a triple) seemed to unnerve him and he went on to surrender six runs on three more hits and three walks before being pulled with no outs in inning five. His problem seemed to be one of confidence, but that could be the worst kind.

                 Proving a point that baseball makes repeatedly, the three best pitchers I saw had nothing close to Appel’s credentials coming in.  C.J. EDWARDS, a Cubs’ farmhand, was a 48^th-round draft choice in 2011 out of a South Carolina high school, but the skinny right-hander has been brilliant in three minor-league seasons through Class AA. I saw him pitch five innings in two starts. He struck out seven and the only run he allowed shouldn’t have been earned because the player who scored it reached on what should have been scored as an error. He throws fastballs in the low-90s but isn’t afraid to throw breakers when he’s behind in the count, and gets most of his strikeouts therefrom. 

               As if the San Francisco Giants don’t have enough pitching, they have a budding closer in STEVEN OKERT. The 23-year-old lefty, a fourth-round draft choice in 2012 from Oklahoma U. with a heavy fastball and good slider, has struck out 17 in 12 innings of relief here while walking just one. I saw him pitch two of those innings and only one batter of the six he faced hit the ball.               

              The mantra of Ray Miller, the old Baltimore Orioles’ pitching coach, was “work fast, change speeds, throw strikes.”  He would have loved CHRISTIAN BERGMAN.  Bergman is 26 years and a bit elderly for the AFL, and doesn’t strictly qualify as a prospect because he started nine games for the Colorado Rockies last season, but I love him because he’s the quickest-working pitcher around next to Mark Buehrle. Bergman doesn’t have great stuff but moves the ball around, pitches to contact and manages to get batters out. I’m rooting for him to succeed.

              

              The best position player I saw was FRANCISCO LINDOR, a shortstop in the Cleveland Indians’ chain. A 21-year-old native of Puerto Rico and a first-round draft choice in 2011, he had four hits the first game I saw him, including a home run and a double. That he didn’t do that well thereafter is attested by his .265 AFL batting average, but every time I was there he made good bat contact with surprising authority for his smallish size. He moved well in the field and his minor-league tab shows stolen-base ability.

               The notion that draft position isn’t everything was underlined by a couple of 22­-year-old New York Yankees’ power prospects, AARON JUDGE and GREG BIRD. Judge was a first-rounder in 2013, Bird a five-rounder in ‘011, but the left-handed Bird easily was the more-impressive plate performer here, leading the league in home runs (6), runs batted in (21) and total bases (55). A couple of his homers were of tape-measure quality. At 6-feet-7 and 230 pounds Judge is the bigger guy, and may catch up, but Bird’s bat looked quicker and I’m guessing he won’t.

Sons of several former major leaguers are on AFL rosters, including those of Dante Bichette, Dwight Smith, Raul Mondesi and Lee Mazzilli.  There’s also a BOOG POWELL. He’s no relation to the old Orioles’ giant; indeed, at a listed 5-10 and 185 pounds the Oakland A’s prospect is a quite-different physical type from the original. Still, every time I looked he was getting a hit, stealing a base or making a nice catch in center field, and might be one of those scrappy players who finds a major-league niche.

TIM ANDERSON, whom the Chicago White Sox hope will crack their lineup at either shortstop or second base, gets an “A” for being an ath-uh-lete, but a lower grade for his awareness of the strike zone. TREVOR STORY, a Rockies’ second-base prospect, looked good in the field and showed extra-base power, but also was something of a “K” machine. Outfielder EDDIE ROSARIO of the Minnesota Twins chain is a singles hitter in the mold of the Philadelphia Phillies’ Ben Revere, a Fall League standout of a few years back.  Twenty-year-old COREY SEAGER looks Hollywood-cast to be a future L.A. Dodgers’ shortstop, and usually plays like it, too.

When some of the all-caps names I’ve tagged make it to the Bigs, remember where you saw them first.