2024 Season Wraps: Arizona Complex League

An odd mix of new and old in the desert

As is the case every year around here, before we start looking ahead to the coming season, we need to take a moment to relive the past one. We’ll wrap up the season for each level, taking a look at the overall success of the season, memorable games and special accomplishments, and of course, we’ll take a look at which players made their case for There R Giants’ Top 50 list! We’ll start from the bottom and go level by level. Today we look at the ACL Giants.

Previous Season Wraps:

• DSL Giants

In 2024, the complex leagues became Ground Zero for a new experiment in player development. It was an experiment most unwillingly forced onto Farm Directors, who had to figure out how to run a functioning farm system with no more than 165 players on their domestic reserve list. That meant having a full lineup of players (and maybe one on the bench) and enough available arms to cover nine innings every night at four levels of baseball, while also monitoring the health of every player, revolving rehabbers through the Injured List, and trying to figure out who had to be pushed onto 60-day or season-ending lists, and who might be able to come back to action in less than two months. It was an unending, daily, stressful headache that consumed a lot of mental power for 30 hard-working officials across the game.

One alteration that they collectively hit on was to move the complex league schedule forward, so that it wouldn’t overlap with the draft. Eliminating the need to place newly drafted players onto a domestic-reserve list that was already straining at the seams from supporting five different active rosters gave them a workable plan. Many of the drafted players would, through this stratagem, might be kept “off the books” of the domestic reserve list until after the season was over (though I’ll admit the fine details of the CBA language here might need a lawyer parsing over them to make out the exact meaning).

Interestingly, this alteration in complex level season was an almost entirely abstract change. The players who make up what we call the complex level teams are actually in action from March through September on a fairly regular basis. They play games in spring training. They play games after spring training is over — what we call extended spring. They play games during the summer in their official complex season. And this year, they continued playing games up until last week, in this new “Bridge League” or “Extended Complex League” format. But though there is action going on all summer long, only one small sliver of that action ever shows up on these players’ Baseball Reference page. What the farm directors did was simply shift the window of when games and stats are considered “official” and when they aren’t. That’s an important consideration, as this is a level where there’s always more going on than meets the eye…