A Second Team in Arizona
The Brewers will field a 2nd team in the Arizona League this summer at the renovated Maryvale Baseball facility. This will allow the Brewers to continue to fill their pipeline with younger players, both foreign and domestic, and develop them at a state of the art facility. I had a chance to ask David Stearns about it on Tuesday morning.
Stearns told me, “This is a product of our investment in our Maryvale facility in its entirety. We have more room down there. Frankly, we want more players there because we’re going to have a tremendous amount of resources there and we want those resources to get used.”
The Brewers also needed the roster spots to keep promising young players in the system and give them the chance to grow on the diamond. The Brewers have made a commitment with their international signings and also drafted a good deal of “high ceiling” high school talent in the last two amateur drafts.
“We’ve also skewed younger in our signings. We have a very robust Latin America program that is turning out a number of real quality players every single year that are progressing through our system. On top of that, the last two years we’ve drafted a number of very young high school players in the domestic draft. When you combine all of that, we certainly have ample opportunity to fill in a second Arizona League team. It’s an efficient way to take advantage of a state of the art facility in Maryvale and so we’re very excited to have it,” Stearns said.
This figures to be just another benefit of the newly renovated Maryvale this coming year.
