The Arizona Fall League is rolling along in the Valley, and the Salt River Rafters are right in the middle of the mix.
After nine games, the Rafters sit at 6-3, good for second place in a crowded race. Scottsdale leads the way, but only by half a game over Salt River and Surprise. Offense has been easy to find across the league, with teams averaging 6.11 runs per game, and that lines up almost exactly with last year’s 6.13 mark.
Salt River has been solid, if not dominant, on both sides of the ball. The Rafters rank third in OPS at .754 and fourth in ERA at 5.42.
They have been sharper in the field, though, posting the best fielding percentage in the league at .981. They’ve made just six errors, which is only one-third of the 18 committed by Surprise through nine games.
Arizona has eight prospects on the Rafters roster, with three position players and five pitchers in the mix. Demetrio Crisantes is the headliner.
Arizona’s No. 1 prospect and the organization’s only player in MLB Pipeline’s Top 100, he checks in at No. 84 overall. Crisantes came out hot, going 8-for-17 over his first four games.
That stretch included a 4-for-5 night against the Mesa Solar Sox, when he doubled, drove in four, scored three times and stole a base. Since then, the production has cooled.
He has added only one hit in his last 15 at-bats, struck out five times, and now sits at .281/.324/.438. Even with the dip, his .762 OPS still leads Diamondbacks hitters on the roster.
Nathan Hall has put together one of the strangest lines in the league so far. The outfielder has only three hits in 22 at-bats and has struck out five times, but he has also drawn 11 walks.
That leaves him with a .136 batting average and a .424 on-base percentage. His OBP is more than twice his slugging percentage, which stands at .182.
Whether that holds up is another question.
Third baseman Yassel Soler is also getting looks, though the results have been light. Ranked as Arizona’s No. 30 prospect by MLB Pipeline, the 20-year-old has gone 3-for-20 with two walks and no extra-base hits, leaving him with a .377 OPS. The age matters here, since he is facing some of the game’s top pitching prospects while still being very young himself.
The mound side is harder to read because the sample sizes are tiny. None of Arizona’s five pitchers has even reached three innings yet, so there is not much to draw from in terms of numbers.
Patrick Forbes is the only starter among them, and the organization is handling him carefully after a strained flexor limited him to fewer than 30 innings this year. The 2025 first-round pick, taken 29th overall, is likely to make only five or six AFL appearances.
He has made one start so far, giving up one run in 2.2 innings, and he has drawn positive reviews for his sweeper. Wes covered Forbes in more detail last month.
Among the relievers, left-hander Joe Ariola stands out the most. A 2025 seventh-round pick, he climbed through four levels in 2026 and finished at Double-A Amarillo.
The strikeout numbers are what really jump off the page: 64 punchouts in just 34.2 innings and 140 batters faced. In the AFL, he has thrown 2.1 innings over three appearances, allowing one hit with no walks and three strikeouts.
Against this caliber of hitters, that is notable.
The other lefty, Luke Craig, is still working back from a lot of lost time. He signed in July 2024 and has only 31.1 innings since Tommy John surgery in early 2025. He has allowed two runs in two innings in the AFL, but staying on the mound is the bigger story for now.
Connor Foley brings another power arm to the group. He struck out 46 hitters in 26 innings between rookie ball and A-ball, which likely helped him land a $1 million bonus from Arizona despite going in the fifth round. He did not begin pitching until his senior year of high school, so the learning curve is still steep, but he has already hit 98 mph and thrown 1.1 scoreless innings in the AFL.
Then there is John West, who checks in at 6-foot-8 and 265 pounds and might already be on his way to becoming Mark Grace’s favorite ballplayer. West profiles more as an innings eater, but his first AFL outing was rough, with two home runs allowed while he recorded four outs.
Salt River Fields is also being used to test out another rule change. The AFL has served as a proving ground for ideas like pitch timers and ABS challenges before, and this time the experiment is tied to outfield positioning.
Fangraphs reported, “Dark green hash marks have been painted on the outfield grass and at points along the arc where the infield dirt meets the outfield grass. Defenders have to stand within a certain distance of these hash marks when a pitch is thrown.”
The goal is to boost offense, much like the shift ban. Keith Law was unconvinced, saying, “The solution still rests with the pitchers, not rearranging the deck chairs in the outfield.”
In Other News...
D-Backs First-Rounder May Be Turning Injury Setbacks Into A Breakthrough
Patrick Forbes arrived in the Diamondbacks system with the kind of unusual backstory that tends to follow a young pitcher for a while. The University of Louisville alum was Arizonas 29th overall pick in 2025, but a broken hand ended his days as a two-way player and pushed him into pitching full-time, where the organization has been trying to sort out what kind of starter he can become. The early returns in the Arizona Fall League have at least suggested the arm talent is real, with his fastball and cutter already giving him a workable foundation.
Even after injury setbacks interrupted his 2026 season, Forbes has looked like a different kind of project in Fall League action, one with more options than before. The new wrinkle is a sweeper, a pitch that gives him another way to attack hitters and helps explain why the Diamondbacks remain intrigued by his ceiling even as he works through the bumps that come with a young arm. For now, the appeal is less about polished results than the signs of a pitcher starting to make real progress after a messy transition. [Read more 🡒]