Surprise!
An underdog team full of versatility, hustle and burgeoning talent claims a title
Welcome to Warning Track Power, a weekly newsletter of baseball stories and analysis grounded in front office and scouting experiences and the personalities encountered along the way. This week we make the drive out to Phoenix.
What is an appropriate reaction to a stadium that’s only 10 miles down the road but takes an hour to return from?
Surprise!
Best known as the Spring Training home of the Kansas City Royals and Texas Rangers, Surprise Stadium sits off the western-most stretch of Bell Road, on the outskirts of the Phoenix metro area. While many of the other Cactus League facilities are situated in relative proximity to the 101 Loop, Surprise requires a trip away from Arizona’s baseball nucleus.
When I worked for the Padres and spent six weeks annually in Peoria, I learned never to associate distance with accessibility.
During my time with the Diamondbacks, a team whose Spring Training site is on the east side of town, I must have grown nostalgic for the northwesterly municipality. How else could I explain the decision to assign myself scouting coverage of the Surprise Saguaros of the Arizona Fall League in 2013?
Here’s the great part, though: While any traffic-induced aggravation is long gone, the on-field talent I observed persists.
Last weekend, I was in the Phoenix area for a wedding (congratulations, Mongoose!) and spent Saturday evening at the AFL game between the Salt River Rafters and the Glendale Desert Dogs. I was curious to see if there was any truth to the rumors that the Fall League — once considered a finishing school for top prospects — had transformed into something more akin to Instructional League, where raw players can work on fundamentals away from the pressure of paying crowds.
The collective talent at Camelback Ranch last weekend was fine, but I kept thinking about the 2013 Saguaros.
That team took the cleanest, sharpest infield I had ever seen in the Fall League. Their pre-game work — from BP to relays from the outfield — was always professional and made scouting them a joy.
Gary Kendall, who until recently was coaching in the Orioles minor league system, managed the team.
Kendall, a Baltimore native, first joined the Orioles in 1991 as a scout and batting practice pitcher. He coached and scouted in the Padres organization from 1996-1999 before rejoining the O’s as a coach in 2000. For the past few seasons, he was the manager of the Triple-A Norfolk Tides.
“We had a meeting at the beginning of the season before games began to discuss how we were going to go about the season,” Kendall recently told me. He explained that there was a strong focus on “putting a stamp” on the players, a collection of talent from the Brewers, Indians, Orioles, Rangers, and Red Sox organizations.
A coaching staff with big league pedigree complemented a roster of rising stars and maturing role players.
Hitting coach Rich Gedman, pitching coach Steve Karsay, and coach Alan Mills brought about 33 years of Major League service to the clubhouse.
“As I looked at the team, I thought we had a lot of quality depth, along with overall talent and team speed,” said Kendall. “Guys were hungry.”
That depth included top catching prospect Jorge Alfaro, infielders Travis Shaw, Joey Wendle, and Jonathan Schoop, and outfielders Mitch Haniger and Tyler Naquin. The starting rotation was anchored by Eduardo Rodriguez, an Orioles prospect at the time.
All but two of the 17 position players on the roster made it to the big leagues at some point.
This team from Surprise had one more revelation — an A-ball second baseman named Mookie Betts.
“Nobody knew Mookie at the time,” Kendall says.
Betts, who turned 21 the day before the AFL opener, was one of the youngest players in the league. He had just come off a minor league season in which he logged 1,072 innings exclusively at second base. (He began that season at Low-A Greenville before getting promoted to High-A Salem.)
Betts was not one of the offensive leaders of the team, but his potential didn’t go unnoticed.
“Mookie was a relentless worker. You could not hit him enough ground balls,” Kendall said. “Then he’d go to the outfield and play around. There would be pitchers in center field shagging. We’re looking out there as Mookie’s running down all kinds of balls. I turned to Rich Gedman and said, ‘Geddy, are you seeing this?’”
When the director of player development from the Red Sox came to town, Kendall told him, “I don’t know what your plan is for Betts, but he’s probably our best outfielder — our best left fielder, our best center fielder, our best right fielder.”
Paced by a strong start from Eduardo Rodriguez and fortified by a bullpen that had secured leads all season long, the Surprise Saguaros defeated the Mesa Solar Sox — a team that featured Kris Bryant, C.J. Cron, and 2021 World Series MVP Jorge Soler — in the 2013 championship game.
“We weren’t expected to win,” Kendall admitted, but he added that the team was “the right set of guys.”
It’s not uncommon to encounter a Fall League team that collectively doesn’t show much desire to do the little things. That wasn’t the case with Surprise, though.
“Guys wanted to go first to third. They wanted to score from first on a double,” their manager said. “It was a never-say-die club.”
Thank you for reading Warning Track Power. The 2013 Saguaros inspire more anecdotes than one column can handle. Visit facebook.com/warningtrackpower and follow for more stories about this team throughout the coming days. Subscribe now to have WTP delivered to your inbox every week.