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2002 season Final Report Player reports by team The 11th Arizona Fall League season was another great one. A number of significant individual batting records were broken, including homeruns, batting average, on-base percentage and slugging percentage.
While it was the record-setting exploits of Ken Harvey (Royals - 1B) and Taggart Bozied (Padres - 1B) that made the news, there were also a surprising number of stellar pitching performances. Notable in this group were the breakout seasons by Bobby Jenks (Angels - P) and Jerome Williams (Giants - P), and the surprising performance of Josh Stewart (White Sox - P). AFL fans were able to watch two of baseball's most highly-rated prospects in Mark Teixeira (Rangers - 3B) and Rocco Baldelli (Devil Rays - OF). Both players should be impact players at the major league level. A welcome change in the league this year was the return of Saturday night and Sunday afternoon games after a one-year absence. The only negative in 2002 was the annual shortage of healthy pitchers in the last few weeks of the season, causing far too many games to be shortened to seven innings. Major League Baseball needs to figure out how to get enough pitchers in the league for the entire eight weeks of the season. It's just not fair to either the fans attending the games or the hitters needing the extra work.
Included in this section is my annual evaluation of nearly every player who appeared in the Arizona Fall League. My comments on the players are based on my own observations combined with their individual statistics. With so many players to watch, I don't get to see many of the players enough to make a good judgment on their skills. That's especially true in the case of pitchers. I can then only relay their stats. This presents a problem in evaluating performance in a development league, as many players are here to work on specific areas of their game. For example, a pitcher may be asked to throw his weakest pitch almost exclusively in order to strengthen that part of his repertoire. Obviously, his statistics are going to suffer. Thanks to all of you for reading my weekly reports and for e-mailing your great comments and suggestions. I'll see you next year! --- Bill Mitchell Player reports by team
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