3 Cardinals prospects to watch in the Arizona Fall League

The St. Louis Cardinals were just rated as having the best farm system in all of baseball by FanGraphs and fans have the opportunity to still see a few of those players in action despite the regular season being finished.

The Cardinals have three players to keep an eye on during Arizona Fall League Play

The Arizona Fall League is typically a place where organizations send their top prospects so they can get more exposure against some of the top competition from other minor league systems. The season began on October 6 and will conclude with the AFL playoffs on November 15. This short season is viewed as a way to push prospects to find their next level and give teams insight on their future plans before heading into Spring Training. Recently, though, some teams have been giving their best prospects the winter off as a way to avoid injury and have in turn sent some of their fringe prospects to the southwest to get valuable development time.

This year, the Cardinals sent eight players to play for the Glendale Desert Dogs, a team made up of Cardinals, Braves, White Sox, Dodgers, and Blue Jays prospects. Of those eight, only one player was included on MLB Pipeline's top 30 St. Louis prospects. The others have either battled injury or those that have been stuck at one level of the minors for an extended period of time and the team just needs to see what they have left in the tank. According to a recent article by FanGraphs, three Cardinals prospects have enough intriguing storylines to keep an eye on them during the next month of the AFL season.

In the site's breakdown of the AFL rosters, the first Cardinal player mentioned fell in the "potential dude" section of the analysis. Chen-Wei Lin, a 6'7 pitcher from Taiwan, is lauded for his power fastball and potentially great splitter coming out of his towering frame. After a nice 2024 season in Single-A, Lin spent this past year split between Peoria, Palm Beach, and Springfield, covering 50.1 total innings in 17 starts. He goes to Arizona after striking out 70 hitters in those starts but Lin also walked 39 batters for a 6.97 BB/9 rate. Lin has started one game since heading to the southwest and he displayed both the good and bad as he struck out four batters and walked three in two innings of work. With a fastball that can get to 100mph and a potentially nice array of offspeed pitches, the Cardinals will need to see improved command and the ability to work deeper into games as he approaches his Rule-5 season in 2026.

Next on the list is a name that some may be aware of in Travis Honeyman, who the Cardinals selected in the third round of the 2023 draft. In his two seasons of professional baseball that spans 102 games, the 24-year-old outfielder has an .803 OPS after progressing to High-A this year. FanGraphs is impressed by Honeyman's ability to avoid the swing-and-miss, putting up a swinging strike rate of just 7%. His overall K-rate in 2025 was just over 17% and he took walks over 13% of the time. He profiles as a "punchy hitter" who can be a fourth outfielder or 40-man depth piece.

Finally, an interesting category is the "key roster situation," which includes Cardinals pitching prospect Randel Clemente. The hard-throwing righty has been with the organization since signing as an international free agent from the Dominican Republic in 2020. Because he has been with the team for five seasons, Clemente is now Rule-5 eligible as a soon-to-be 24-year-old who made his way up three levels in 2025 before finishing in Springfield. Armed with a power fastball and devastating slider, he has even more command issues than Lin with a career BB/9 approaching 8.00. If he can pitch well in the AFL, he will either force his way to a 40-man roster addition in St. Louis or risk being left unprotected and scooped up by another team. If the command issues remain, however, it would not be surprising to see him go undrafted and given more seasoning in the minors.