Per Greg Johns: "Mariners selected to play in Arizona Fall League include OFers Kyle Lewis & Braden BIshop, inf. Eric FIlia and C Joe DeCarlo. Mariners pitchers selected for Arizona Fall League: Matthew Festa, Darin GIllies, Max Povse and Art Warren."
Kyle Lewis is still Seattle's best prospect. His stats have crashed in August but they pulled him out of the field for the most part and just had him DHing. Whether that's simply precautionary because his knee is still giving him issues I don't know, but he is not a DH type - you gotta let him play the field. Hopefully they do in AZ.
Braden Bishop is fascinating to me, because I disliked drafting him but he's the one guy we've really managed to tweak at the plate and get way better results than I expected. When you look at where he's come from with his 5:33 eye in Everett to a 60:80 eye between High A and AA, they've really gotten some much more quality swings out of him. Bishop looks legit now at the plate and he's always brought a glove. With Lewis likely to be manning a corner after that knee injury rather than a full-time center field, Bishop still has a path for this team. He might also be their best available trade chip as a batter.
Eric Filia doesn't strike out (63:42 eye in 535 PAs) and is old as dirt, prospect-wise. I assume they want a better look, but he's a fascinating CTZ guy with minimal power. He can't really play CF though so you're trying to get a .310/.400/.400 guy on a corner. He's still interesting to me.
Joe DeCarlo is a former 3B who has been converted to catcher. He was one of our cold-weather draftees and we like to convert strong-armed infielders with questionable range to catcher (Littlewood was like this too). Low average but good walks and decent power. He's trying for the Greg Zaun approach as a backstop, and he needs all the reps he can get.
Matt Festa from the 2016 draft has been closing some in High-A and has run a 13K / 2.5 BB rate for the year. That's probably good. I assume they want a longer look at him for a full-time closing role next year, as well as some work on his secondaries.
Darin Gillies has been Just A Guy this year in AA after jumping over High-A entirely. He hasn't been bad, but as a strict bullpenner his work hasn't really stood out. I think they have some tweaks for him too, in order to see if they can recapture some of his low-minors magic when he was fooling more batters.
Max Povse has been bounced from the rotation to the pen and now in his last couple of starts in Tacoma they were stretching him back out as a starter. Hopefully they pick one, and it's the starting role. We'll see.
Art Warren really surprised me. He was so wild in High-A last year and got transitioned from mostly-starting last year to a pure pen role this year, with a lot of finishes. I consider him another random pen arm (so great to have a ton of those 9K / 3 BB pen arms lying about) but I wouldn't have bet on him being the one sent to the AFL. Hopefully they can finish ironing out his control issues there.
It's an interesting squad, at least.