Sunday Notes: NYY Prospect Dax Kilby is Debuting New Mechanics in the Desert

Dax Kilby is among the higher-profile prospects currently honing his skills in the Arizona Fall League. A 19-year-old shortstop whom the New York Yankees drafted 39th overall last year out of a Georgia high school, he ranks third in the Bombers system and No. 103 on The Board. Making up for missed time is part of why Kilby is in the desert. As Eric Longenhagen explained in his AFL preview, the 50 FV prospect dealt with a severe hamstring injury for much of 2026. He has shown promise with when healthy. This season, Kilby slashed a solid .242/.427/.403 with a 143 wRC+ over 154 plate appearances with Low-A Tampa. How does the youngster view his early-career acclimation to pro ball? “As I didn’t go to college, I’m seeing a lot better pitching,” Kilby told me on AFL media day. “I think that reveals a lot about who you are as a hitter. My first year, I was hitting a lot of ground balls [a 54.4% rate across 58 PAs] and using my speed to my advantage. That was definitely a change from high school, where the pitching isn’t as good and you can get into balls more often, for more power.” Longenhagen and Brendan Gawlowski are both bullish on Kilby’s potential to do damage going forward. Addressing the 6-foot-2, 190-pound lefty swinger’s quick hands in his recent scouting notebook, Gawlowski wrote that “the way he’s able to pull them in and turn around velocity is in a class with the Max Clarks and Kevin McGonigles of the world.” Kilby worked on mechanical changes in the weeks leading up to the AFL season. As he explained, the Yankees have him starting narrower and more open, the objective being two-fold: (1) allowing him to be more adjustable to different pitches, and (2) getting him more into his back hip, increasing the number of balls he is driving in the air. While his 40.2 GB% this year was an improvement from 2025’s pro-debut, it was still far from optimal. Radically alternating his stroke isn’t part of the equation. “My bat path has been super good,” Kilby opined. “I’ve always been a bat-to-ball guy who makes a lot of contact — I don’t strike out a lot — and we want to keep that the same. All we’re doing is implementing me getting a little bit more into my legs. I’m still looking to hit line drives. For me, staying up the middle of the field is the most important thing.” His initial efforts with revamped mechanics have yielded positive results: seven hits, including four doubles and a round-tripper versus Fall League pitching. As Gawlowski stated in his recent notebook, ”Kilby looks great as a hitter.” ——— RANDOM HITTER-PITCHER MATCHUPS Ted Kubiak went 10 for 25 against Joe Coleman. Tommy Harper went 9 for 17 against Ted Abernathy. Dave May went 8 for 20 against Steve Busby. Mike Hegan went 7 for 8 against Sparky Lyle. Ted Savage went 6 for 11 against Steve Blass. ——— Tyler Tolbert has turned into a pretty good hitter, albeit not one who is going to knock down many fences. The 28-year-old Kansas City Royals outfielder has left the yard just four times in 205 MLB plate appearances, and his totals down on the farm were also nothing to write home about. His game is built on speed. Tolbert has pilfered 43 bags in his limited time in the bigs, and his lowest full-season total in the minors was 48. Moreover, he was a perfect 60-for-60 with the High-A Quad City River Bandits in 2022. And again, he has begun to show that he can swing it a little. Tolbert batted .280 in his 57-at-bat cup of coffee with the Royals in 2025, and this past year he slashed .285/.347/.392 with a 107 wRC+. I asked the 2019 13th-round pick out of the University of Alabama at Birmingham about his growth as a hitter when KC came to Boston in mid-September. “I’m just continuing to get better,” said Tolbert, whose .246 batting average and .693 OPS while coming up through the Royals system didn’t exactly portend his recent level of success. “Each season you just try to find what works for you, and try to get into a groove. I’ve had good hitting years and I’ve had average hitting years. I don’t really chase numbers, though. I just trust my routine and my process. If you’re focusing on the process, the numbers are going to be the numbers.” Tolbert’s good years include his being honored as the organization’s George Brett (MiLB) Hitter of the Year in 2023, although — no disrespect meant — his numbers with Double-A Northwest Arkansas that season were far from Brett-like. He had 44 extra-base hits, including 10 triple and 10 home runs, but also just a 97 wRC+. Even when at his best, his wheels have been his carrying tool. “Yeah, I like to run a little bit,” a smiling Tolbert told me when I brought up his best attribute. “When I’m on first base, I’m in scoring position, but I also need to be smart. I need to know the situation and the scouting report. From there I can chase what I’m looking for.” ——— A quiz: Seven different players have hit 40 or more home runs for the Milwaukee Brewers in a single season, with two of them surpassing that number twice. Who are the two players with a pair of 40-plus homer seasons as a Brewer? Bonus question: Who are the seven Brewers with at least one 40-homer season? The answers can be found below. ——— NEWS NOTES Shoki Oda, an 18-year-old right-hander with an upper-90s fastball, reportedly plans to sign with an MLB team rather than remain in Japan. The Yokohama High School product had been expected to be a first-round pick in this year’s NPB draft. The San Diego Padres are signing 20-year-old Japanese right-hander Tatsuya Nogami. Per Yakyu Cosmopolitan, the 2027 NPB Draft prospect plays junkoshiki, which uses a rubber-covered ball with a hard core. He has topped out at 96 mph. The Richmond Flying Squirrels are the recipient of MiLB.com’s 2026 Minor League Baseball Organization of the Year Award. The Atlanta Braves’ Double-A affiliate not only set a team record with 7,105 fans per game, it was the highest total attendance in the Eastern League since 2005. Bud Zipfel, a first baseman/outfielder who played in 118 games for the Washington Senators across the 1961-1962 seasons, died last weekend at age 87. The Belleville, Illinois native batted .220 over his MLB career, with 10 of his 78 hits leaving the yard. Zipfel hit two of his dingers, including his first, off of Phil “The Vulture” Regan. ——— The answer to the quiz is Prince Fielder, who had 50- and 46-homer seasons (2007 and 2009), and Richie Sexson, who hit 45 home runs in both 2001 and 2003. The other Brewers to go deep at least 40 times in a single season are Gorman Thomas, Christian Yelich, Ryan Braun, Chris Carter, and Ben Oglivie. ——— Last Sunday’s column included a pair of brief passages from Peter Gammons’s excellent new book It’s All About the Players. Here is another, this one in a chapter about Cal Ripken Jr. The subject at hand was baseball’s longest game, which took place between the Pawtucket Red Sox and Rochester Red Wings in 1981. “The game lasted thirty-two innings, until the curfew sent the players and the eight remaining fans home. Included among the players was PawSox reliever Luis Aponte. When he got home, his wife didn’t believe the story about the game going thirty-two innings, threw him back into the cold, locked the door, and thus forced him to go back to McCoy Stadium to sleep. The suspended game resumed two months later on June 23 during the ’81 major league strike, with the same two starting third basemen; Ripken with Rochester, Wade Boggs with Pawtucket.” The chapter also includes interesting facts about Cal Ripken Sr, who before becoming a big-league coach and manager was a minor-league catcher. As Gammons explained, the elder Ripken caught, among others, Jim Palmer, the legendary Steve Dalkowski, and Hall of Fame executive Pat Gillick. Not mentioned, but nonetheless noteworthy, is Gillick’s having gone 11-2 with a 1.91 ERA over 132 innings for the Fox City Foxes in 1960. Dean Chance, Boog Powell, Pete Ward, and Earl Weaver also played on that team. ——— Foster Griffin threw eight mostly-forgettable MLB innings before spending three seasons with NPB’s Tokyo Yomiuri Giants. The 183 innings he’s thrown since returning stateside have been anything but forgettable. Since signing with the Washington Nationals last winter, and subsequently being dealt to the Cleveland Guardians at this summer’s trade deadline, the 30-year-old southpaw has gone 16-6 with a 3.59 ERA. His three most recent appearance have come in the postseason, with Griffin garnering a win and a pair of no-decisions. I asked him about his M.O. on the mound when the AL Central champs played in Boston at the tail end of the regular season. Given his seven-pitch arsenal and 11th-percentile velocity, I suspected that he might be analytically-inclined. As it turns out, that isn’t so much the case. “I have a lot of pitches, and not necessarily any outliers metrically, so a lot of my pitching goes off of scouting reports,” said Griffin, who has fanned 15 batters and is yet to surrendered a walk in October. “I was also overseas, where [pitching analytics] aren’t as advanced as they are over here. A lot of it was kind of the eye test for me over there, but at the same time, I do have pretty decent knowledge of how my stuff plays.” Is he surprised that tech isn’t more prevalent in the Japanese baseball realm? “A little bit,” Griffin replied. “They’re pretty traditional, and a lot of the coaches pitched there a long time ago. They’re very adamant about doing things the way they did them back in the day. It’s kind of stuck that way for awhile. “I definitely respected the coaches,” he went on to say. “They helped me a lot, but again, a lot of it was going off the eye test as far as knowing what I needed to do as far as things like the movement profiles to get guys out. It’s just different compared to here.” ——— FOREIGN AFFAIRS The Japan Series — NPB’s equivalent to the World Series — will get underway next weekend with the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks matching up against the Yokohama DeNA BayStars. The defending champion Hawks defeated the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters to advance, while the BayStars punched their ticket by beating the Hanshin Tigers. In the KBO, the Kia Tigers beat the LG Twins in each of the first two games of their best-of-five semi-final series. Former MLB right-hander James Naile went seven innings for the Game 1 win, while 23-year-old superstar third baseman Do-yeong Kim crushed a pair of home runs. Adam Oller, who pitched in MLB from 2022-2024, then went six frames for the W in Game 2. The winner of the series will go on to meet the Samsung Lions in another best-of-five, while the KT Wiz have a bye to the best-of-seven championship series courtesy of owning the circuit’s best regular season record. John Gant went 9-2 with a 1.49 ERA over 133-and-a-third innings for the Chinese Professional Baseball League’s Wei Chuan Dragons this season. The 34-year-old right-hander made 173 MLB appearances from 2016-2021, taking the mound for the St. Louis Cardinals, Atlanta Braves, and Minnesota Twins. This was Gant’s first season in Taiwan. ——— A random obscure former player snapshot: Ron Rightnowar spent nine seasons in the minors before making his big-league debut at age 30. Signed as a non-drafted free agent by the Detroit Tigers out of Eastern Michigan University in 1986, the right-hander was subsequently traded to Milwaukee in 1993 for a PTBNL (Nikco Riesgo), then went on to take the mound 34 times for the Brewers in 1995. Rightnowar finished the season — his last in pro ball — with a 5.40 ERA and a 2-1 won-lost record. The first of Rightnowar’s appearances came on May 10, two weeks after the season finally got underway — and nine months after the last game had been played. On August 12, 1994, unable to come to terms with ownership, whose demands included a salary cap, the players went on strike. At the time, the Montreal Expos, who had MLB’s second-lowest payroll, boasted a record of 74-40, the best in either league. As history books sadly show, no World Series was played that year. ——— LINKS YOU’LL LIKE At Bless You Boys, Brandon Day wrote about how MLB created a Dodgers monster, and they want the players to help slay it. Orioles owner David Rubenstein said the quiet part out loud in a recent interview with Baltimore Baseball: team owners make a ton of money. Mike Axisa weighed in on Rubenstein’s refreshingly-honest comments at CBS Sports. The Athletic’s Chad Jennings looked at 10 moves that helped build the World Series-bound Brewers. MLB.com’s Michael Claire wrote about four NPB stars who could be MLB-bound. Could the St. Louis Cardinals use an upgrade in center field? Jake Wood addressed that question, offering a few possibilities along the way, at Viva El Birdos. ——— RANDOM FACTS AND STATS Cincinnati Reds batters had a 25.5% strikeout rate this season, which tied for the highest of any team. Reds batters also a .278 BABIP, which tied for the lowest of any team. Milwaukee Brewers batters had a .316 BABIP, the highest of any team. Tampa Bay Rays batters ranked seventh in that category at .296, while the Cleveland Guardians ranked 25th at .281. The Arizona Diamondbacks committed 24 throwing errors, the fewest of any team. The Seattle Mariners committed 62 throwing errors, the most of any team. In 1979, Fred Lynn finished fifth in AL MVP voting after leading the circuit in batting average, on-base-percentage, and slugging percentage. He was also tops with a 175 wRC+ and 8.6 WAR. The MVP award went to Don Baylor, who led in runs scored (four more than Lynn) and RBIs (17 more), logged a 142 wRC+ and 3.6 WAR. On today’s date in 1977, Reggie Jackson went deep in three consecutive trips to the plate as the New York Yankees captured a World Series title by beating the Los Angeles Dodgers by a count of 8-4. All told, “Mr. October” had 10 home runs and a 1.212 OPS over 116 career plate appearances in the Fall Classic. Cornelius McGillicuddy — a.k.a. Connie Mack — retired as manager of the Philadelphia Athletics on today’s date in 1950. Eighty-seven years old at the time, Mack had managed for 53 seasons, three with the Pittsburgh Pirates and the rest with the A’s. Prior to trading in the tools of ignorance for a suit — he was famously dapper in the dugout — Mack caught for three clubs from 1886-1896. Players born on today’s date include Roy Cullenbine, one of the most underrated hitters in MLB history. A switch-hitting outfielder/first baseman whose career spanned the 1938-1947 seasons, Cullenbine logged a .408 OPS, tying him with Jeff Bagwell for 31st on the all-time list (minimum 4,000 plate appearances). Suiting up for six teams — primarily the Detroit Tigers, Cleveland Indians, and St. Louis Browns — the Mount Clemens, Michigan native also had a .276 batting average and a 135 wRC+. He won a World Series with the Tabbies in 1945. Also born on today’s date was Skeeter Newsome, an infielder who played for the Boston Red Sox, as well as for both Philadelphia clubs, across the 1935-1947 campaigns. A mediocre-at-best hitter — just a 62 wRC+ — the Phenix City, Alabama native went on to be a successful manager down on the farm. Skeeter skippered four squads to league championships in his 11 seasons at the helm.