While most of baseball is focusing on the early rounds of the MLB playoffs, the prospect world is instead focusing on the Phoenix/Scottsdale area, where the Arizona Fall League begins on Saturday, showcasing some of the game’s most interesting prospects. Here are 10 players we’ll be watching out in the desert this year:

Jake Bloss, RHP, Mesa (Toronto Blue Jays)
Very few legitimate pitching prospects of note get sent to the AFL, especially ones with past major-league time like Bloss. If you’ve had a normal healthy season your team usually doesn’t want you throwing in more games in October and November. So the pitching staffs are often a mix of guys who missed most or all of the season, and fringe prospects (often relievers) who teams might want to take one last look at before deciding how to proceed on. Bloss fits into the former category; he missed the early part of 2026 recovering from 2025 UCL surgery and then was shut down again in August with a shoulder strain, only pitching 39 ⅓ innings total. A stuff-model darling mixing in two solid mid-90s fastballs, a multiple extraordinarily well-shaped breaking balls, and a splitter, Bloss has only rarely in practice pitched up to his Trackman readouts and hasn’t pitched a ton in general since coming over in the 2024 Yusei Kikuchi trade, so he’ll be looking to miss bats with quality strikes.