Hey everyone, this is Mike Ekstrom writing to you from the mighty Peoria Saguaros (we’re 8-2 and in 1st place) of the Arizona Fall League. For all of you who aren’t familar with me, I have spent four seasons in the Padres minor leagues and spent this whole season as a member of the San Antonio Missions. This September I made my major league debut with the Padres and made eight appearances for the big club.

So far the AFL has been a lot fun for us. Not only have we been playing well, but it’s a good group of guys, the weather’s awesome, and we have some great coaches.

I must say the game’s seem to be played a little differently in the fall league. In the regular season if you look at a box score and see that seven pitchers threw in the game it might be a red flag that things went badly. In the AFL that’s just another day. It’s pretty nice though to have our set routines and know when we pitch a couple days in advance. Also, maybe you see a team score nine runs in a game once a week in the regular season, here games are routinely 9-7 or 11-6. Today we lost 18-10 for example. Maybe some of the football season is rubbing off in our scores.

One other thing that’s been interesting for us is to see how other organizations go about their business. Our team is made up of Padres, Cardinals, Nationals, White Sox, and Mets. For the most part we all do the same stuff, but everyone has their own fine points that are different. I think it’ll be really helpful to see other ways to do our work and maybe I’ll find something that works better for me. You never know right.

Well that’s about all I got for y’all, hope I could shed a little light on the AFL experience for ya. Thanks for reading, Mike.