I love the Arizona Fall League.
I remember going there as a professional scouting director and it was so much fun. You would get a chance to see the players that your organization sent as well as several other top prospects from other teams.
For the uninitiated, the Fall League is something of a nightly all-star game. There are roughly 180 players in the league that are distributed among six teams. Most of the players are prospects, and many are often top prospects. Indeed, this “Desert Proving Ground” offers baseball’s next generation a path to achieving big-league dreams.
Each of the six teams is comprised of five organizations. Playing time in the AFL is spread out like it’s a rec youth league soccer team. Coaches and trainers from different organizations also get the opportunity to travel to Arizona, often tethered to players who have specific development or health goals. A good example of this is a player like White Sox prospect Caleb Bonemer, who is learning to play a new position as he transitions from infielder to outfielder.
There are some days when team officials could double up on games. There is usually one matchup per day scheduled to begin at 1:30 p.m. Arizona local time while most of the games are set to start at 6:30. The games run long and the traffic can be bad—not Atlanta or Southern California bad—so this can sometimes be a dicey proposition.
And, beyond the games, the players, coaches, trainers, top scouts, front office officials and player agents shuffle in and out of the AFL. In some ways, it’s like the NBA’s draft combine in Chicago or the NFL’s in Indianapolis. Many of Major League Baseball’s power brokers are concentrated in one area, watching the MLB playoffs and often doing so together.
If you’re a baseball junkie and love prospects, there is no better place to be than Arizona in October. I know that sounds like an advertisement, but it really is the nexus of so many cool things happening all at once. If you really wanted to overindulge, you could even head to individual team spring training complexes to watch instructional league work.
The best Fall League I ever had was the one I never attended.
During my final months as general manager for the Braves, we made plans to send three of our best prospects—Ronald Acuña Jr., Austin Riley and Max Fried—to the AFL because we thought that they would impact our MLB club in the very near future.
Opening Day for the 2017 Fall League was Oct. 10. Nine days earlier, on Oct. 1, I resigned as GM of the Braves. So many people are involved in the planning and execution of anything and everything in an MLB front office that my resignation had no impact on plans that were made weeks and months in advance. Acuña, Riley and Fried went—so did other future MLB players Touki Toussaint and Alex Jackson—and set the league on fire.
Their team, the Peoria Javelinas, won the 2017 AFL championship.
Ronald Acuña Jr.
People always ask me if I signed Ronald Acuña Jr.
As a general manager, you don’t actually sign specific players. You have scouting directors, regional crosscheckers and area scouts who identify and sign players. The scout who signed Acuña for $100,000 was Rolando Petit. Petit was a regional crosschecker in charge of Venezuela, and he also signed players like Ozzie Albies (more on him later), Elvis Andrus, Martin Prado, Gregor Blanco and many other future MLB players. Petit had a long-standing relationship with Acuña’s family, including his cousins, the Escobars, which included a half-dozen or more MLB players, among them pitcher Kelvim Escobar and shortstop Alcides Escobar.
The international scouting director who authorized the signing of Acuña was Johnny Almaraz. Almaraz oversaw all of Petit’s signings and was also the leader behind the signing of Julio Teheran. Almaraz, who was also international scouting director with the Cincinnati Reds and scouting director with the Phillies, also signed Johnny Cueto.
The two people who should get the most credit for signing Acuña are Petit and Almaraz.
Acuña signed on July 2, 2014 but did not make his professional debut until the 2015 season. Entering that 2015 season not having signed for a lot of money and with zero professional experience, Acuña was not ranked among the Braves’ top 30 prospects in the BA Prospect Handbook. That season, Acuña hit .268 with four home runs and an .818 OPS as a 17-year-old between the Gulf Coast League and the Appalachian League.
Most prospects like Acuña would have been in the Dominican Summer League in 2015. As a front office, we resolved to push prospects at breakneck speed, and this was a very aggressive promotion. The fact that Acuña more than held his own told us he had a chance to be a special player.
Acuña was ranked as Atlanta’s No. 26 prospect entering the 2016 season. That year, he would miss significant time with thumb and wrist injuries. He returned late and we sent him straight to Rome for the last 40 games of the season, where he hit .311 with four home runs and an .819 OPS as an 18-year-old.
During the 2016-2017 offseason, we decided to send Acuña to the Australian Baseball League (ABL) to make up for lost time. He hit .375 with two homers and a 1.001 OPS, and the reports coming out of the league were that he was the most talented player they had ever seen. He was so dominant we brought him back after only 20 games. Word started to get out about Acuña, and he vaulted up to our No. 6 prospect and was ranked 67th overall heading into the 2017 season.
That year, as many of you readers may know, Acuña was named BA’s Minor League Player of the Year. In 2017, he hit a combined .325 between three levels and hit for the same exact .325, along with a 1.053 OPS, in the AFL and won the league MVP. Acuña also won the AFL championship game MVP award. He was 19 years old.
The following season, 2018, Acuña was called up to Atlanta on April 25—just late enough to provide an extra year of club control—and the rest is history.
Max Fried
The first time I heard Max Fried’s name was during the 2012 MLB draft.
Each year, I had the opportunity to sit in on regional scouting meetings. These meetings would feature area scouts talking about every player in their region. Scouts would talk about the players in their region and place them in preferential order. A few weeks later, we would build a draft board with regional crosscheckers and the final draft board would be finalized 24-48 hours before the MLB draft.
In 2012, Fried was the No. 2 player on our entire board (Byron Buxton was No. 1). From the area scouts to the crosscheckers, our guys loved Fried. He was the highest-rated high school pitcher on the final draft board since I joined the Braves in late 2006. I had never seen our scouts get so excited about somebody.
Best high school pitcher I’ve ever seen.
Freak athlete with presence who lives for the big moments.
Better than Cole Hamels.
What made this effusive praise all the more compelling to me was the fact that we had no chance at drafting this player. Why did the Braves’ draft room spend so much time talking about this special talent there was no chance we would draft him? Atlanta picked 21st that year—we took another high school pitcher, Lucas Sims—and knew Fried would be gone way before it was our turn to draft. He went seventh overall to the Padres.
Flash forward two years to 2014. On Aug. 5 that year, the Padres hired A.J. Preller as their general manager. On Aug. 20, Fried had Tommy John surgery.
As you may have heard, Preller likes to build good MLB teams and isn’t bashful about trading prospects to acquire impact talent. On Dec. 19, 2014, we acquired four minor league players from the Padres in exchange for star outfielder and former No. 1 overall pick Justin Upton. All four of the minor leaguers would reach MLB. The lead player was Fried.
Preller isn’t afraid to trade prospects, but there was likely a limited emotional attachment to Fried. Preller didn’t draft him. He never saw him pitch as a Padre, as Fried’s last outing was a full two weeks before Preller took over the club.
I loved Fried. And so did Chad MacDonald, who worked for the Braves as a special assistant to the GM (he was hired to do the same role this past year with the Rockies). Chad was also the scouting director for the Padres when they drafted Fried. Chad did have an emotional attachment to Fried, and a lot of insight into the person behind the pitcher. Chad pounded the table for Fried.
The person behind the pitcher was the reason why Fried wanted to pitch during 2015 instructional league for the Braves. After seeing pitchers like Brandon Beachy and Jonny Venters rush back from Tommy John surgeries, we would be taking no chances with Fried. Our front office leaders and medical staff sat down with him and told him he would have to wait until 2016 to get back on the mound.
Fried got better as the year went on in 2016 and was lights-out in the minor league playoffs. In the semifinals, Fried won the series-clinching game with 11 strikeouts over 7.2 innings. In the championship, he again won the series-clinching game with 13 strikeouts in seven innings.
Former Braves president John Hart called me on the morning of Game 6 of the 2021 World Series. Atlanta led the World Series 3-2 and Fried was set to pitch what could be the clinching game. I hadn’t spoken to Hart in months, but we talked about Fried in the MiLB playoffs five years earlier. Later that night, Fried would throw six shutout innings with six strikeouts to seal the Braves’ first championship in more than 25 years.
The AFL did not introduce its official “Pitcher of the Year” award until the 2021 season. If it had existed in 2017, Fried would have won this award. In a hitter-friendly league notorious for wind-blown home runs, he went 3-1, 1.73 ERA with 32 strikeouts in 26.0 innings pitched and only one home run allowed.
Austin Riley
Austin Riley was also a pitcher.
Most clubs viewed him that way entering the 2015 MLB draft. Coming out of DeSoto Central High School in Southaven, Miss., Riley was a well-known “circuit” player who had performed as both a pitcher and a shortstop. He was 94-96 mph on the mound with above-average offspeed stuff and tremendous athleticism. There was no question he had the potential to be an MLB starting pitcher. There were, however, questions about his bat and where he would ultimately end up playing in the field.
Or at least there were for most people. Not the late, great Roy Clark. And not hitting guru Greg Walker, either. Clark had drafted two-way players like Freddie Freeman and Adam LaRoche, and he felt like Riley could be this type of player. Walker thought Riley could be a “better Joe Crede” as a righthanded-hitting third baseman with a swing that Walker loved and the propensity to hit the ball the other way.
During 2015 draft meetings, Riley was the most talked about player in the room. And there were a lot of doubts. Was he good enough as either a hitter or a pitcher to take him where we needed to take him?
What about his body? Could he get into better shape? Was he projectable? If not, he would have to go to first base and we already had Freeman. And what about him being from rural Mississippi? Although he had performed on the showcase circuit, there had been few players from that area who had MLB success.
Clark and Walker would have none of it and continued to pound the table for Riley. We acquired pick No. 41 in the 2015 draft from the Padres as part of the Craig Kimbrel/B.J. Upton trade the night before 2015 Opening Day. Riley was a southern boy who wanted to be a Brave, and his agent, Matt Hannaford, worked with us to make it happen. We made the selection, but there was a lot of disagreement in the room and dissension in the ranks.
Riley began his professional career 0-for-16 in the Gulf Coast League. Calls from above me came in and began questioning if we knew what we were doing with Riley. After five days. It’s clear trying him as a hitter was a mistake. When should we begin converting him back to pitcher? Do we want to wait for Instructs?
In his sixth game, he went 1-for-3, and in his seventh game he went 0-for-3. He was 1-for-22 on the season (.045). The calls increased. I couldn’t do anything, so I just ignored them. And then Riley just started hitting. And never really stopped. He had a .255 average when we promoted him to the Appalachian League, where he hit .351 for Danville.
The following season, he went to Rome and hit .271 with 20 home runs and an .803 OPS as one of the youngest everyday players in the league. In the playoffs, he reached another level, going 10-for-22 (.455) with three home runs in six games.
And, in the 2017 AFL, Riley very likely would have won the MVP had we not sent Acuña. Riley’s performance included a .300 average and a 1.021 OPS with six home runs in 70 at-bats. He was 20 years old.
The Fall League is a special place, and this is a special time of the year in Arizona. Although I never got to see this triumvirate in Peoria, it has been rewarding to see the success that they have had in their careers.
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