Charles Davalan didn’t head into the weekend as the main attraction for a Dodgers prospect watch, but he left looking like the guy worth remembering.
The trip to see the Great Lakes Loons, Los Angeles’ High-A club, was supposed to center on Eduardo Quintero and Emil Morales. Quintero wound up sitting out the getaway day game, while Morales still showed up in the lineup and delivered a double along with a pair of walks. Even so, the player who kept grabbing attention was Davalan, the outfielder most people know as Chuck with the Loons.
Davalan was the Dodgers’ 2025 Competitive Balance Round A pick, taken out of Arkansas after starting at Florida Gulf Coast. The Canadian from Waterloo, Ontario transferred into the SEC and hit .346 with 14 homers in his lone draft-eligible season with the Razorbacks before Los Angeles signed him for just under $2 million.
At 5-foot-9, he’s not the biggest name in a Dodgers system packed with outfield talent. Josue De Paula, Mike Sirota and Quintero get more of the spotlight, and for good reason. Los Angeles has seven outfielders in the industry’s Top 100, which helps explain why Davalan can get overlooked even though he’s the Dodgers’ No. 6 overall prospect and has already landed near the back end of that same Top 100.
Seeing him up close made the case for why he shouldn’t be brushed aside. Sitting third row and right by the dugout, the details stood out: Davalan on the top step, locked in on every pitch, reading the game with real intent.
When he was on deck after a pitching change, he was working with the hitting coach on an iPad, shaping an actual plan instead of simply waiting to hit. In the box, his takes told the story too.
That’s the sort of thing people mean when they talk about a hitter’s feel for the zone, and Davalan looked every bit like the kind of bat scouts have long described.
The recent production has been loud, too. He’s been on a tear over the past month, highlighted by a three-homer week in late July when he slashed .481/.517/1.037. Just days before this look, he also turned in another multi-homer game.
This particular game didn’t add hits to the ledger. Davalan was hit by pitches twice, got caught stealing, and finished without a knock.
But even without a hit, the baseball IQ showed up everywhere - the strike-zone control, the gap-to-gap approach, the way he ran the bases. In a game that keeps pushing hitters to sell out for pull-side lift, that kind of discipline and all-fields shape stands out.
De Paula, Sirota and Quintero remain the bigger names in the Dodgers’ outfield pipeline. Still, after watching Davalan for an afternoon, it’s hard not to come away thinking he belongs in that conversation a lot more than he’s currently getting credit for.
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