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While the Brewers have wrapped up their 2024 season, another league is just starting play down in the desert.
Monday is Opening Day for the 2024 Arizona Fall League, the 32nd installment of one of the sport’s top prospect showcases. Six Fall League teams are each made up of players from five organizations and play a six-week regular season, plus an All Star game and two rounds of playoffs. Over the years more than a thousand participants in the league have gone on to play in the majors, and the list of the top alumni features several current and future Hall of Famers.
This season the Brewers’ AFL contingent will play for Peoria alongside prospects from the Padres, Mariners, Braves and Marlins organizations. Their team will likely generate a fair amount of attention from scouts, as four of MLB Pipeline’s current top 100 prospects are on the roster and one of them is one of the game’s most interesting curiosities: Padres catcher Ethan Salas just turned 18 in June but has already logged 177 professional games in the US-based minors.
Top Pitching Prospects
The AFL’s top prospect lists are often headlined by position players, as teams are typically reluctant to assign extra work to their top pitching prospects. Combine that imbalance of talent with Arizona’s dry air and elevation and the league is often a great place for hitters to show off their skills. The Brewers’ top invited prospect is someone who might do just that: Corner infielder Brock Wilken was the #18 overall pick in the 2023 draft and came to pro ball as a bat-first prospect. He had a rough season in AA, however, as he was hit in the face by a pitch just five games into the season and missed time, then struggled mightily down the stretch for Biloxi.
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Wilken will be joined on Peoria by two of the Brewers’ youngest prospects: Outfielder Luis Lara and infielder Juan Baez are both just 19 years old and spent the 2024 season with High-A Wisconsin and Low-A Carolina, respectively. Lara is a speedster who generates a lot of value with his baserunning and ability to cover a lot of ground in center field, while Baez is a career .295 hitter in the minors with solid contact skills and a low strikeout rate.
Where the Brewers might stand out from their peers, however, is in the potential of the pitching prospects they’re sending to the desert. To start, this will be their first opportunity to see right-hander Coleman Crow since acquiring him last winter. Crow is 23 and has experience pitching at the AA level but has been sidelined since April of 2023 while recovering from elbow surgery. He was the player that came back to Milwaukee in the deal that sent Tyrone Taylor and Adrian Houser to the Mets.
Significant Investment
Crow isn’t the only Fall League pitcher the Brewers have made a significant investment in, however: Lefty Mark Manfredi was a ninth-round pick in the 2023 draft and quickly impressed with his velocity. He started the year pitching in the rotation for Wisconsin but has also worked in short relief, which is likely his long-term role. In May MLB Pipeline identified him as a potential future closer.
Manfredi’s professional career is a little further along than a teammate who was drafted ahead of him: Righty Ryan Birchard was the Brewers’ fifth round pick in 2023, but injuries limited him to just eleven regular season outings in 2024 and he’s been sent to the AFL to get some extra work in this fall. He’s struggled with command during his comeback but was lights out before the draft in the MLB Draft League in 2023, where he struck out 16 of the 29 batters he faced while walking just one.
The Brewers have also had significant luck finding something in pitchers they sign as undrafted free agents or independent leaguers, and this year’s AFL class has two of them as well. Nick Merkel went unsigned out of NAIA Central Methodist University in 2022 but pitched in 40 games for AA Biloxi this season and struck out ten batters per nine innings. Will Childers, the son of former Brewer Matt, also reached Biloxi this season in his first full pro campaign and struck out 10.4 batters per nine innings there.
Peoria opens play on Tuesday with a day game against Glendale, the first of 25 times when one of their games will be live streamed this fall. It’s obviously small consolation for Brewers fans who would rather have seen the Crew advance in the MLB playoffs, but from top to bottom this Arizona Fall League contingent is perhaps more likely than most to feature players who will go on to contribute at the MLB level one day.
