Peoria, Arizona (Arizona Fall League #6 - Baseball with a different vibe)

 

One of the joys of living in Arizona, for a baseball fan, is the Arizona Fall League. Starting right after the MLB regular season ends, the six-team AFL has three games a day, six days a week, until nearly Thanksgiving. And the players are good – for example, in the 2022 MLB All-Star game, roughly half the players selected to participate (including more than half the starters) had played in the AFL at some point.

For decades, players working their way up the ladder in the minor leagues frequently played “winter ball” in Latin America to keep their skills sharp, and to get to compete against a higher level of competition than they were necessarily seeing in the minors.

In the early 1990s, MLB decided that they wanted a more controlled environment for some of the top prospects, so they created the AFL. Each of the six teams is stocked with seven players each from five MLB teams (yes, that adds up to 35 per team, and I never have figured out how they decide playing time). The coaches are all from major and minor league teams, the stadiums are all well-kept Spring Training stadiums, and in the course of a week, scouts can see dozens of top young players without ever having to travel more than an hour’s drive.

For a fan, that means you can potentially see two games a day featuring players who will be in the majors in a year or two. While we were working, Kerry and I didn’t drive to Phoenix for fall league games, but the year after retirement we went to five games in three days, catching all but one of the stadiums, and another year I took in two games while Kerry was attending a meeting in the Phoenix area. We’ve been to some other random games over the years when we had fall business in Phoenix (other than the MLB postseason). This year, Kerry thought that 55 MLB and AAA games was enough, but I decided to come up for three games in two days, including one at the only stadium I hadn’t been to, Peoria.

Fall league games have a vibe of their own.

There aren’t many people in attendance, particularly for the afternoon games. Today’s announced attendance was 336, and given that there were 70 players, 4 umpires, 8 or 10 coaches, a woman selling tickets, a few people staffing the concession stand and souvenir shop, the volunteers at the security gate, etc., we didn’t outnumber the people there in an official capacity by a very large factor.

Most of crowd (I’ll note the exception below) are purely there to watch baseball, and aren’t particularly rooting for one team or the other. I counted caps or T-shirts from 15 different MLB teams in the crowd, a much larger number than you’d see at, for example, a Dodger Stadium sellout of 50,000. The crowd doesn’t cheer unless there is something worth cheering. The best defensive play of today’s game was a diving catch by the visiting team’s first baseman in the bottom of the 9^th inning that pretty much killed the final rally, and that got the biggest applause of the day (more about that play later). At one point, someone in the booth tried playing the Addams family music (duh-duh-duh-DUNH clap-clap…) when the home team got a couple of runners on base, but only one person in the crowd clapped at the “clap-clap” spot, so they gave up.

You can hear all the conversations around you, and they’re about baseball. Today I caught a fragment of someone discussing the attempted trade of Curt Flood in 1969 that led to free agency (pretty arcane, unless you’re a baseball fan), and after a nice hit by one player, a guy two rows back said to the person next to him, “You should have seen what his swing looked like two years ago.” OK, I’d expect those guys to be talking baseball, because it became clear as the game went on that they were scouts for major league teams, and the player in question, Sammy Siani (who had two more hits later), is working his way up through the system of the team that particular scout works for. I’m guessing all the scouts aren’t counted in the listed attendance, so the amount by which the paid attendees outnumber the people there officially just went down a little more.

One of my favorite conversations, was at a game in Scottsdale a few years ago. Scottsdale is a pretty wealthy suburb, with a beautiful brick ballpark downtown, my favorite park in the AFL. We sat down, and a young couple and small child came and sat a couple of rows in front of us. I whispered to Kerry that they looked more Scottsdale than Arizona Fall League. In a sense, they were both.

It turned out they weren’t a romantic couple, but the guy she was dating (though the child was from a previous relationship) was the best friend of the person with her. Where was the person at the center of this triangle? He was on the field, because he was a young man from the Phoenix area who had recently gotten a multi-million dollar signing bonus after being drafted in the first round of the amateur draft. In other words, he was one of the best prospects in a league full of prospects (and promptly hit a long home run in his first at-bat). Later, some other friends of the player, former teammates, etc., came over, too. It was clear they all wanted to be supportive, but didn’t want to intrude on his life. At one point, the young lady took her child out to the bathroom, and the various friends pounced on the best-friend. “Is she OK? Is she good for him? She’s not just a gold-digger, is she?” The response was that yes, she was OK, but I was truly touched by the fact that his friends cared about his personal well-being. I have no idea whether the relationship is still going, but I’m a Nolan Gorman fan for life because of the friends he has.

At another game, I was sitting behind a young woman who turned out to be the new wife of a player who was expecting to be in the majors the next year (he was, but so far that’s been his only season in the bigs). When I saw a young woman with a baby carriage among the retirees today, I had to wonder…

The game: Scottsdale Scorpions 11, Peoria Javelinas 6

I’m a fan of Arizona Fall League, but this game was ugly.

I think a bright sunny sky and swirling winds had something to do with it.

·       * One shortstop dropped a popup;

·       * Another popup fell between the shortstop, third baseman and left fielder who were all running into each other (we could hear them trying to call each other off);

·       * A centerfielder got a bad break on a ball that went over his head for a double and started a four-run rally;

·       * A left-fielder failed at a leaping attempt at a catch near the fence where it looked like he had misjudged where the fence was;

·       * In the ninth inning, the Scottsdale catcher settled under a foul popup, then had the ball bounce off his glove. But the first baseman was there, and made a diving catch, the best defensive play of the game (and the one that got the crowd most excited)

But the wind wasn’t to blame (other than that brutal popup) for the catchers both having a hard time.

·       * Each catcher had a passed ball;

·       * Each team had one play where they stole  a base, but we never got to see how good either catcher was at throwing runners out, because the catcher dropped the ball in each case and didn’t make a throw

Peoria’s pitchers walked 11 batters, the most I’ve seen in a game this season.

There was something very curious about those 11 walks. The MLB app has a feature that shows where a pitch is in the strike zone. In the automated systems, if any part of the ball crosses any part of the plate, it’s a strike. The minor league baseball app has the same feature, and so does, it turns out, the AFL app.

The first batter of the game walked. I looked at the app, and it said that every one of the four “balls” just grazed the plate – they were near-perfect pitches. Most MLB umpires get 90% or so of the calls right, so at this point, the home plate umpire had gotten two of six calls (33%) right. The trend continued. By the end of the 4^th inning, when I stopped counting, there were 26 pitches that had been called “balls” that looked like they were strikes on the app (out of 78 calls the umpire had made). No calls went the other way, and none were truly egregious – the called strike zone was just smaller than the app’s strike zone by an inch or so on each side, top, and bottom.

There are two ways that MLB is talking about using automated ball-strike calls. One involves just having the computer program tell the home plate umpire what call to make. I like that one, because it’s seamless, and completely takes the umpire’s foibles out of it. The other one is to have the umpire make the calls, but the batter or catcher (no one else) can challenge a pitch, the automated called is then given, and the challenges continue until each team has missed a certain number in the game. I think it’s clunky, but better than nothing.

In this case, no one made a challenge all game, despite what looked like a huge number of wrong calls, which tells me that they weren’t using the challenge system. But if they weren’t using the challenge system, and were using the automated system, it wasn’t talking to the MLB app. The third alternative is that the umpire missed a huge number of calls, but was more consistent than any major league ump I’ve seen this year. I’m betting the app was glitchy today.

But it won’t stop me from going to AFL games.