On Tuesday afternoon, MLB announced the list of players heading out for the Arizona Fall League this season, with play beginning on October 3 and running through a league championship game on November 14. Eight Orioles prospects are going to be in action with the Peoria Javelinas alongside of players from the Cardinals, Mariners, Padres, and Reds.
The eight Orioles are: OF/1B Ike Irish, OF Vance Honeycutt, INF/OF Brandon Butterworth, RHP Braxton Bragg, LHP Kailen Hamson, RHP Kiefer Lord, RHP Patrick
Reilly, and RHP Teddy Sharkey.
This is a fairly typical group of guys for the Orioles to send to the AFL in that most of them missed substantial development time either this year or last year or both due to injuries.
Irish, the team’s first round pick last year, had an excellent first full pro season interrupted by a torn meniscus in his knee; his season ended on July 22, when he was almost certainly closing in on a promotion to Double-A. The AFL assignment will hopefully help him hit the ground running at Chesapeake next season.
Butterworth, kind of a super utility guy who the team acquired in last year’s Laureano/O’Hearn Padres trade, was also sidelined for a decent chunk of this season, ending up with 75 level-appropriate games being played. He finished the season at Triple-A, which is probably a higher level of competition than what he’ll face in Arizona. He hit .269/.377/.497 in 52 games for Chesapeake, which is interesting.
Bragg, Lord, Reilly, and Sharkey are all guys who had Tommy John at some point in the last couple of seasons, whose development paths were thrown off as a result. This quartet of pitchers, all of whom were drafted from the college ranks in 2023, all become Rule 5 Draft-eligible this offseason.
Since they’ve missed so much time, the AFL assignment will allow the Orioles to have a little bit more information about how they’ve recovered and what kind of form they have after the elbow ligament surgery recovery, and they can hopefully make a better decision about who to protect. Except for Lord, they were all getting good or at least decent results at the level the Orioles had assigned them by season’s end, Frederick or Chesapeake.
Hamson makes the AFL cut, with the Orioles probably just wanting to get the Australian-born lefty some more action to try to help him work on severe command problems. Hamson walked 69 batters in 67.1 innings this season, and no, I didn’t mistype that. That’s more walks than innings pitched. It’s not nice.
Then there’s Honeycutt. He tantalized with his bevy of big league spring training home runs, then went on to do more of what he has done so far in his pro career when assigned to Frederick. That is, he struck out a whole lot and had extremely bad hitting numbers. The Orioles bumped Honeycutt up to Chesapeake for the final few weeks of the season anyway and he responded with a .288/.381/.616 batting line in 20 games, where he struck out only 25% of the time.
That’s a high rate for a Double-A player but it’s a low rate for Honeycutt. If he is able to put up a solid batting line in Arizona while limiting the strikeouts again, there will be a little bit of hope that he’s not a total lost cause.
