What it means
When a Scottsdale local says the Fall League, they mean the Arizona Fall League, the six-team circuit Major League Baseball runs for its best prospects every October and November. The home team is the Scottsdale Scorpions, and the home park is Scottsdale Stadium, the same Old Town ballpark where the Giants train in March. The difference is the crowd. In spring the stadium holds a sellout of sunburned tourists; in October it holds a few hundred people, a row of scouts with radar guns, and the parents of the shortstop.
You will hear it in a specific way. “Fall League starts next week” is a sentence said with relish by the kind of fan who knows the Giants’ Double-A roster. “Want to catch a Fall League game?” is a cheap date. And “he played Fall League” is a line in the biography of a startling share of big-league All-Stars, which is why the league bills itself as baseball’s graduate school.
The site’s full guide to the season, the teams and the tickets is the Arizona Fall League page. This entry is about the name and what it carries.
Where you’ll meet it
Early October to mid-November, at Scottsdale Stadium and at Salt River Fields, where the Salt River Rafters play. In the sports pages when a famous prospect is assigned. In the spring training conversation, as the thing that happens in the same parks six months later.
Where the word came from
The name is plain description, and Major League Baseball supplied it. By the early 1990s the big-league clubs were unhappy with the traditional winter leagues in Latin America, where they had little control over how their prospects were used. MLB’s answer was a domestic league it owned outright, placed in Arizona because the Cactus League parks sat empty from April to February and the weather in October is what the rest of the country calls summer.
The league opened in 1992 with six teams in two divisions: the Grand Canyon Rafters, Scottsdale Scorpions and Sun Cities Solar Sox in the north, the Chandler Diamondbacks, Phoenix Saguaros and Tucson Javelinas in the south. The first game was October 6, 1992, Rafters over Scorpions, 6 to 4. That first season ran 54 games into early December; the schedule has since been cut to about 30 games a team, ending in mid-November.
Most of those original names have moved, merged or disappeared. The Chandler Diamondbacks surrendered their name when the real Diamondbacks arrived in 1998. Sun Cities, Grand Canyon, Phoenix and Tucson are gone as franchises. The Scorpions are the exception: the only club to play every season in the same city under the same name. The current six are Scottsdale, Salt River, Mesa, Glendale, Peoria and Surprise, each borrowing a Cactus League stadium.
The league has also acquired a second name worth knowing. Its all-star game began in 2006 as the Rising Stars Showcase and is now the Fall Stars Game, played in early November and televised; it is the one night the stands fill.
What it is not
It is not the Cactus League, though it uses the same ballparks; the Cactus League is spring training for the big-league clubs. It is not “fall ball,” which in Scottsdale means youth and college baseball. And the Salt River Rafters are a Fall League team, not a Diamondbacks affiliate, even though they share the D-backs’ park.
The fine print
The structure explains the atmosphere. Each of the 30 Major League organizations assigns a few players, generally their better prospects from the upper minors, to one of the six teams, so a Scorpions roster is a composite of five or six farm systems. Players are there to be evaluated, not to win, and the people doing the evaluating sit in the seats behind the plate. Peoria has won the most titles, seven. The Scorpions’ championships include their first in 1996 and, most recently, 2015.
The history has one celebrity chapter. In the autumn of 1994, Michael Jordan, then a Chicago White Sox farmhand on sabbatical from the NBA, was assigned to the Scottsdale Scorpions. For six weeks Scottsdale Stadium was the most photographed minor-league venue on the planet. He hit well enough to be respectable and went back to basketball the next spring.
The record has its holes. MLB publishes schedules and rosters but little history, so most of what is written about the league’s early years comes from secondary sources like Wikipedia and Baseball-Reference, which this entry relies on. Attendance figures are not published; “almost nobody” is an observation, not a statistic.