2023 Wrap Ups: Arizona Complex League

A thin year in the desert

Dialing down into the ACL season to prepare to write this wrap up, it occurs to me that I might have made a mistake last week in considering the draft class as a separate entity. While I enjoyed the chance to reconsider that incoming class as a whole, doing so certainly diminishes the prospect interest of the ACL level this year.

While the last few Arizona Complex level seasons have brought championship chases (including the first Giants’ league title since 2013) and a bevy of high upside prospect talent, this year was a bit more muted in both team and individual performances. The 2018-20 international classes furnished the Giants’ Arizona clubs with talent that almost immediately zoomed up the org’s prospect rankings — Marco Luciano and Jairo Pomares (2019), Aeverson Arteaga and Manuel Mercedes (2021), Diego Velasquez and Gerelmi Maldonado (2022) — that hasn’t been the case so far with the 2022 class that should have been leading the hype-o-meter this year. Nor did we get the type of high upside high school repeaters that we’ve seen recently, like Grant McCray and Trevor McDonald. Instead, we had to wait until the new draftees showed up in late July, led by Bryce Eldridge (Baseball America’s #2 ranked prospect in the ACL this year) to really shake things up.

But as we’ve already discussed Bryce and Co. in last week’s wrap up, today we’ll focus on those members of the extended spring training group of international signings and repeat-level high schoolers to dig up some excitement from this year’s Papago Park contingent.