The minor league season has officially concluded league-wide, with the Triple-A Championship Game on September 26th officially serving as the conclusion of the final game in Minor League Baseball in 2026. As thousands of players across all levels prepare for their offseason, there exists a handful in every organization who aren’t quite done with organized ball yet.
That is where we find the Arizona Fall League, which will be running for the 34th season since its founding in 1992 as an opportunity
for an assortment of prospects to gain additional in-game experience. It’s often used by organizations to compensate for lost time due to injury, give experience to lower-minor prospects against stiffer competition, or to use it as an extra opportunity to tweak or introduce something in a low-stakes environment.
The Yankees have sent players of all shapes and sizes to this, from non-prospects deep into the organizational depth chart to highly touted prospects like Aaron Judge, Gleyber Torres, Jasson Domínguez, and Alfonso Soriano. Two years ago, current Boston rival Caleb Durbin got himself on the map with a huge performance, proving that this stage can positively impact prospect buzz.
For those unfamiliar with the format, the league’s 30 teams are divided into six AFL clubs, which have a 35-man roster and contain the contingents from five different organizations. It changes every year, so the one that the eight Yankees representatives will be going to is the Salt River Rafters, alongside prospects from the Twins, Rockies, Diamondbacks, and Nationals.
With the AFL officially kicking off today at 3:30 p.m. EDT in Glendale, let’s meet the eight-man Yankees contingent:
INF Dax Kilby
The prized prospect of the bunch, Dax Kilby will headline the group. The 2025 first-round pick stole headlines with an incredible 19-game cup of coffee in Single-A Tampa last August that vaulted him onto Top 100 lists and raised high expectations for his first full professional season at age 19, but such a season was doomed from the start.
A hamstring injury suffered early in spring held him out of the Spring Breakout game in March and delayed his season debut until May 28th, but there was still plenty of runway from there. Unfortunately, after taking just two at-bats, he suffered a setback that held him out an additional six weeks. He finally returned for good on July 17th, but was limited to just 36 total games in what was supposed to be a big season for him. It comes as no surprise, then, that he’s getting extra reps here in Arizona.
In his extremely limited time at Tampa this season, Kilby was effective, slashing .261/.448/.435 with a 143 wRC+ in 154 plate appearances. He boasts an extremely mature approach at the plate, walking in a quarter of his plate appearances, but has yet to really tap into the power. He’s above-average at pretty much everything, something you love to see from a 19-year-old, but you’re looking for the standout trait.
Something to monitor in this, aside from how he performs against older pitching, will be his defense. He’s never been considered likely to stick at shortstop, but is a good enough athlete to feasibly play second base, third base, or even center field. We’ll see if he’s moved around or if one of the best prospects in all of the AFL will just get to man shortstop the entire time.
RHP Mack Estrada
Every year, you’ll see the Yankees send one or two guys to the AFL who don’t have much of a pro sample to go off of. This year’s version of that is Mack Estrada, the team’s 11th-round pick in 2024, who has just 4.1 professional innings through the first 2.5 seasons of his professional career.
Estrada is a guy that the Yanks invested a lot in, giving him a massive overslot of $640,340, the fifth-highest in the class, to get him out of a commit to go to Florida State out of junior college. He, like the rest of the team’s draft-year pitchers, was shut down to end the 2024 season, but went under the knife early in 2025 and missed the next season and a half due to Tommy John surgery.
He only got back to pitch in four games this summer with the FCL Yankees, where he struggled in a bunch of small, choppy outings. He’s spent the last two months in the complex, so we’ll see if he’s being utilized as a multi-inning guy in the AFL.
What can we expect from him? We don’t have data on how his stuff has looked post-TJS, but he’s more of a fastball/slider guy who was capable of getting it up to 96 on the heater in college. The Yankees love to tinker with young pitcher’s arsenals, so we’ll see if he has another offering or two.
RHP J.T. Etheridge
A handful of the players in this year’s AFL contingent missed time in the last two years due to injury, but few were able to get back from those injuries with enough time to be as impactful as J.T. Etheridge was.
An undrafted free agent out of Louisiana in 2024, Etheridge started his pro career strong in the FCL in May 2025, but struggled after a promotion to Tampa late in the season. His 2026 started as more of the same, pitching to a 6.51 ERA deep into August. As a prospect without much invested in you, it’s a dangerous game to play going into an offseason with zero production above rookie ball at 25, which he’ll be in January.
The fact he’s here in Arizona, though, shows that he did make some progress. Something seemed to click in mid-August, when he suddenly became the unlikely ace of a Tampa team that came within a game of a Florida State League championship. In his last six starts, he allowed just one run in 27 innings with 38 strikeouts, including a pair of scoreless playoff outings. The decision to send him came before a few of these outings, so the belief might’ve been there even longer.
He boasted an impressive 32.9 strikeout rate with great whiff rates. He sits at 94 on his four-seam fastball and has both a sweeper and a slider that grade well above average. The damage off him primarily comes from the curveball and sinker, which he throws a combined 23 percent of the time. Expect him to tinker with those this fall.
RHP Antonio Gomez
While Kilby is the much more important prospect for Yankees fans to monitor this fall, I’d argue that the guy I’m most excited to see get extra reps here is Antonio Gomez. You may remember that name from a couple of years ago as a defense-first catcher whose bat never quite caught up with him. Yes, that is that same kid.
Gomez was floundering at Double-A Somerset in June 2025 when he was placed on the Development List. While that is usually a death sentence for any prospect, Gomez was different. Instead of being in organizational limbo, he was switching professions, going from a catcher with an 80-grade arm to a flamethrowing reliever. He made his pitching debut a month later and lit up the radar guns, but underwent elbow surgery after just four outings.
He returned this August and has just been trying to get into a rhythm as a pitcher. He’s only tossed 8.1 total innings across 10 career outings, so any experience he can get here in Arizona is extremely valuable. The thing that tickles your fancy about him is his alien fastball, which sits in the upper 90s with over 20 inches of induced vertical break, something you pretty much never see in the bigs:
RHP Anthony Mena
A late addition to the roster, Anthony Mena signed as an older international signing in 2024 at the age of 19 and didn’t make his stateside debut until 2026 after two solid years in the DSL. In 2025, he struck out 57 in 45.2 innings with a 3.11 ERA.
The results were pretty rough in his 16.2 innings in the FCL early this summer, but he got an aggressive promotion to Tampa midway through the season after a mountain of injuries completely destroyed their pitching depth. His stuff hasn’t quite caught up yet, but he did pretty well after the promotion, allowing just three runs in 16.1 innings across five multi-inning outings.
He leans on his low-90s sinker, throwing it 44 percent of the time, while supplementing it with a changeup, slider, and curveball, with the latter two generating the best results.
RHP Chris Veach
Our last pitcher of the bunch, Chris Veach, is the only one who isn’t extremely early in their development as a Single-A pitcher. A 2024 undrafted free agent out of South Carolina, Veach graduated from Tampa in 2025 after a terrific season, pitching to a 2.53 ERA with 75 strikeouts in 57 innings.
This year has been a much more difficult season for him, but not because of anything on the field. The 25-year-old missed nine weeks with an undisclosed injury in the summer, shortly after earning a promotion to Double-A Somerset in June. He was only able to get into 25 games and throw 29 innings, but he excelled while doing so, pitching to a 1.86 ERA with 39 strikeouts to 10 walks. He’ll be 26 in a month and a half, so the extra development will be very helpful for him.
We don’t have arsenal stats for High-A and Double-A, but a look at Veach’s repertoire shows he utilizes a heavy diet of changeups that is backed up by a trio of fastballs. Things might’ve changed in the last year, but he threw a breaking ball just 0.8 percent of the time last season. Could that be something they ask him to work on in the desert?
INF Core Jackson
Finally, to the position players. Core Jackson is the second-biggest name value prospect they’re sending to Arizona this fall. The 2025 fifth-round pick had a strong debut season in the system, splitting time between High-A Hudson Valley and Double-A Somerset.
Jackson, who turns 23 in eight days, slashed .262/.360/.459 with 41 stolen bases in 101 games across the two levels. He’s played an adequate shortstop, but has also gotten run at both second and third base. With Kilby on the roster, I can’t imagine he plays much shortstop this fall, even if both likely project as third basemen.
He was limited to just 101 games this year due to three very short stints on the injured list for minor ailments, which might be why he’s here. It could also be a big vote of confidence for an upper-minors infielder, who could be a good 2027 away from knocking on the door of the majors.
1B Kyle West
Our last Yankee heading to the desert is another 2025 draftee, and someone who managed to be one of the more unlikely 20/20 players you’ll ever see. Drafted in the 13th round out of West Virginia last year, it was a difficult debut season for West, who exclusively plays first base.
He slashed .226/.300/.394 with 20 home runs, 76 RBI, and 20 stolen bases in 124 games with Hudson Valley and suffered from a consistency issue. He’d have strong weeks, but immediately trade it with rough weeks. This is a guy who slugged .600 in the Big 12 just 18 months ago and was drafted for his slugging ability. The conditions in the AFL usually benefit offense, especially with the altitude. This guy could hit some moonshots if he gets a hold of one.
