Creed Willems on playing for AFL title plus dimension change to Camden Yards

For some pro baseball players, a long, long season will end tonight in the Arizona Fall League championship game. O’s top 30 prospect Creed Willems is one of that group.

Spring training was a long time ago and so was his Opening Day with High-A Aberdeen April 5. It was a year where he missed several weeks mid-summer with a left hamstring injury. But he also advanced to Double-A Bowie for the season’s final 16 games. He put up a .784 OPS between the IronBirds and Baysox. He’s had a strong 19-game run for Surprise in the AFL, which hosts tonight’s championship game at 8 p.m. ET on MLB Network.

Then he will drive home to Texas and finally get some rest after a solid season for the O’s No. 22 prospect via MLBPipeline.com and No. 25 on Baseball America.

A catcher and lefty hitter, the O’s drafted Willems in round eight of the 2021 MLB Draft. He had a strong college commitment to TCU. But an over-slot $1 million dollar signing bonus sent him on his way to pro ball.

In 19 games for Surprise in the AFL, he’s hit a robust .338/.391/.500/.891 with five doubles, a triple, two homers and 11 RBIs. He played in the Fall Stars game.

“It’s been awesome,” Willems said of his AFL experience during a Friday phone interview. “I was really looking forward to coming out here especially after pulling my hamstring and missing a month. Just wanted to get my extra at-bats in. I was super pumped to get out here. We have a great group of guys. And you come out to play, but you also get to meet a lot of new guys and talk about each other’s experiences. I made some friendships that will last a long time.

“Our team, we’ve had a lot fun. We enjoy being around each other and we joke around a lot, but when it’s time to play we kind of flip that switch. I think it’s a special group that has made this a memorable experience.”

And now one game for a championship tonight.

O's players played with Mesa when it won the 2021 AFL championship and with Surprise when that club won the 2013 AFL title.

This Surprise team is managed by Double-A Bowie skipper Roberto Mercado and there are eight O’s organization players on the Surprise roster. Willems is likely to start at catcher tonight.

“It’s one final game to show what we’ve got. Have to go out, have fun and play our game. Not try to do too much,” said Willems who repped the Orioles in the Fall Stars game last weekend.

Last Thursday while catching, Willems took a foul ball off his right knee and that set him back a few days. It hampered him during the Fall Stars game, he missed a few days this week and was removed early from a game Thursday.

“But that was kind of a planned thing (leaving that game early) from the beginning of the week. Just to see how the knee was feeling. It was super swollen and painful earlier. But playing Thursday, it felt really good.”

So Willems expects to be in the starting lineup tonight for the championship game. One last chance to build on his strong AFL resume where he ranks tied for eighth in the league in batting average and tied for 17^th in slugging and OPS.

“You have some of the top prospects in baseball and some top arms. But I didn’t want to overthink it, where you can get yourself in a bind. At the end of the day, it’s me versus the pitcher. Just having a good solid approach has been big. Don’t try to do too much and just have fun. Just grateful for this opportunity,” said Willems, age 21.

In his 98 games during the regular season with Aberdeen and Bowie, he hit .243/.322/.462/.784 with 21 homers, two triples, 17 homers and 65 RBIs.

Willems, who pitched in high school touching the low 90s, has a strong throwing arm back of the plate and MLBPipeline grades it at 65 with a 45 for fielding overall. One recent game story credited him with a 1.90 pop time to second base in throwing out a runner.

He looks forward tonight to chasing a championship alongside some O’s minor league teammates.

The left field wall: The Orioles moved their left-field wall back for the 2022 season. After three seasons of data to reflect the changes, the O's Mike Elias said they "overcorrected" and now the wall is being moved back in. Not to the previous dimensions, but closer.

In some areas, it will be moved in by about nine feet to 13 feet and it will be lowered to about eight feet high, which should bring some outfielder-robbing homers back into play. Out by the bullpens, it is coming in about 26 feet per rendering.

The goal is to make the ballpark play more neutral than it did the last three years where it was decidedly in favor of pitchers with balls hit to left and left center.

For what it is worth, from 2022 to 2024, the Orioles hit 277 home homers to rank tied for 15th in the majors. In the three previous seasons (one shortened in 2020) from 2019-2021 they hit 281 home homers to rank eighth among all MLB clubs. Of course that counts all Oriole Park O's homers, not just those impacted by the dimension changes.

No doubt this news will be well received by power-hitting right-handed hitters like Ryan Mountcastle. In the last year of the old dimensions, in 2021, he hit 33 homers. Since 2022 he has hit 22, 18 and 13.

But here is a fact that is strange but true. Since 2022 when the wall was moved back, Mountcastle has hit 28 O's Park homers and 25 on the road. He slugged better at home in two of those three seasons.

Again, for what it is worth, the Orioles played .568 ball at home since 2022 with 138 wins and they ranked 11th in the majors in home win percentage in that span. They ranked fourth in road win percentage during that span with 137 wins, playing .564 ball. 

Said Elias: “This isn’t the kind of thing that we call a meeting for, but the feedback consistently was that the extremity of the disparity in the park was a little bit more of a topic of conversation than we had bargained for,” Elias said. “We didn’t like the degree to which this had become a distraction in many ways. I know the pitchers enjoyed it, but for our right-handed hitters in particular – our left-handed hitters, too – aspects of this were a little severe.

“As you see with the new intended dimensions, it retains some of the depth in left field, a good bit of it. This will be much more fair and favorable to the pitchers than the original dimensions of Camden Yards, but clearly it’s a lot less severe and I’m hopeful this will strike the right balance.”