After a week-and-a-half stretch of there not being any baseball games at the minor league level, the Arizona Fall League got back to things on Wednesday. Last night saw Glendale take on Scottsdale in a road game that they would lose on a walk-off home run.
The Reds players had an impact earlier in the game. Tyler Stephenson started at designated hitter for the Desert Dogs and was hitting 6th. He went 2-4 with a double and scored a run. He was drive in by Jose Garcia in the 7th inning after that double. The Reds shortstop prospect finished the game 1-4 with that RBI. Later in the inning the bases were loaded for Jonathan India. He didn’t get a strike to swing at, walking on four pitches to plate the second run of the game for Glendale and tie the game.
Jonathan India has gone 0-3 with a walk and a strikeout in all three games he’s played in this Arizona Fall League season. The hits by both Tyler Stephenson and Jose Garcia were their first out of the two games that they’ve played in.
Stuart Fairchild got his first start of the AFL season, going 0-4 on the night. He played right field. Cory Thompson was the only pitcher to take the mound from the organization on the night. The reliever came out of the bullpen to follow starter Griffin Roberts. It wasn’t a smooth debut for Thompson, who allowed two runs in an inning of work on three hits and a walk. While the game didn’t go as well as he would have hoped, we do get something from it. Scottsdale has pitch tracking (I’m not sure if it’s the old Pitch F/X or if it’s Trackman) in the stadium. That gives us 26 pitches worth of information on Thompson to look at. You can see the entire box score for the game right here.
Cory Thompson Scouting Report
This is going to just be a quick report based on the pitch tracking data. The fastball worked 90.3 MPH to 94.1 MPH. The pitch had a little bit of cutting action to it and had a little bit of rise to it. His change up worked 84-87 MPH. There was more horizontal action to the pitch than with his fastball, but on the vertical plane it work pretty much the same as the fastball. Of course it needs to be noted that there were only four change ups thrown, so the sample size is very small and not worth looking too deeply into. He also threw a curveball on the day. It worked in the 79-82 MPH on the night.