Yankees Arizona Fall League Update: Week Two

The Yankees are now several weeks into their offseason, and the Red Sox are playing in the World Series. Lame. At least there are some prospects in Arizona that we can check on to keep us distracted! Since last week’s Arizona Fall League update, the Glendale Desert Dogs have improved their overall record from 0-6 to 2-10. It’s still not really what you want, but it could be worse. Let’s see how the Yankees’ players fared during week two.

Position Players

If you remember, all of the Yankee position players were off to a slow start during the first week of play. Oddly enough, that remained mostly true during the second week too. Outfielder Estevan Florial went hitless for five consecutive games, and he didn’t collect his second and third hits until Monday. On the plus side, one of those hits was an RBI triple. Hopefully that’s a sign that he’s about to turn a corner. He’s now slashing .097/.200/.161 with just three hits through 31 at-bats.

Thairo Estrada has a few more hits to his name, but none of them have been for extra bases. As someone pointed out in the comments last week, the most important thing is that he is healthy and moving well. I wasn’t able to find any video of him from the AFL so far, so I can’t really weigh in on that. He now has six hits, one walk, and seven strikeouts across eight games. Just like last week, Steven Sensley remains the best hitting position player of the bunch (at least so far). Three of his eight hits have been doubles, and he has four RBI.

Pitchers

The Yankees sent four pitchers to the AFL. Two of the four had a good week, and the other two got rocked. Let’s start with the good news. Right-hander Hobie Harris turned around a mediocre first week by tossing 4.1 scoreless innings during week two. Matt Wivinis followed suit with three scoreless frames of his own. He now has a 1.42 ERA through 6.1 innings with seven strikeouts and six walks.

On the flip side, three out of four of Kyle Zurak’s outings have been awful. He ended week one with a 54.00 ERA. To his credit, he did have one clean appearance since then where he recorded one out without getting into trouble. However, he followed that up with another doozy on Saturday. He was called on to start the bottom of the sixth inning and immediately surrendered a solo home run. After that came a double, single, runner who reached on an error, and two walks. He recorded all of one out before he was pulled from the game. Zurak has surrendered eight earned runs through just 1.2 innings now.

Jordan Foley had a similarly bad outing during the same game. With two outs and a man on second, he issued a walk, gave up an RBI single and a bases-clearing triple, and a runner scored on a wild pitch. Before his day was done, he was tagged for five runs off of four hits. He also struck out Skye Bolt twice, and five of his six outs came via strikeout. That’s something. The righty has an 11.37 ERA and opponents are hitting .296 against him across 6.1 innings.