MESA, Ariz. -- The third-youngest player in the 2026 Arizona Fall League might be the happiest on the entire circuit. Breyson Guedez, 19, wears a big smile in the on-deck circle, on the basepaths and in the outfield, and he is in constant motion in all those places.
Scouts and evaluators talk about a prospect’s ability to keep an even keel as a mark in his favor. Watching Guedez, you’d never know that things haven’t gone his way offensively with the Mesa Solar Sox.
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Through 15 games, he’s slashing .175/.288/.228, but the small sample size doesn’t tell the entire story. Guedez has put one-third of his balls in play (13 of 39) in excess of 95+ mph during the Fall League -- but nine of those found gloves of opposing fielders, including his 109.3 max exit velocity, the highest of any Athletics player in the AFL.
That penchant for line drives was evident throughout the regular season for Guedez, his first stateside. His 30.1 percent line-drive rate was second-best among all qualified Athletics Minor Leaguers and the top mark among all hitters across the Minors in their age-18 season who played above Rookie-level ball.
“He was born to hit,” said Mesa third-base coach Gunnar Buhner, who served as the Athletics’ Arizona Complex League manager in 2026. “There's just some people that are born, and out of the womb, they just can swing it, man. I mean, he can hit anything. He can swing at anything out of the zone and he gets good results.”
“He can hit with the best of them,” said Athletics left-handed pitching prospect Grant Richardson, Guedez’s teammate in both the Fall League and with Single-A Stockton. “He's fun to watch play ball.”
After the A’s opted for Guedez to bypass the Arizona Complex League, the Venezuela native hit his way out of Single-A after just 91 games, ranking second in the Cal League in hits (119) at the time of his promotion. He collected a .403 average with a 1.035 OPS over his final 13 contests, necessitating a new challenge: High-A.
Just five batters in their age-18 campaign got more than 40 plate appearances at the level, including Eli Willits (WSH No. 1/MLB No. 6), Juneiker Caceres (CLE No. 3/MLB No. 74), Brady Ebel (MIL No. 4/MLB No. 93), Elian Peña (NYM No. 3) -- the No. 3 prospect in the 2025 international class -- and Guedez. His 134 plate appearances with Lansing were the second-most among that group, trailing only Willits.
But that aforementioned innate ability to put bat to ball outside the zone caught up with Guedez in his brief Lugnuts tenure. His walk rate dipped to a drastically low 3.0 percent and his batting average on balls in play came back to earth (.320) after running an astronomically high .411 mark with Stockton.
COMPLETE ATHLETICS PROSPECT COVERAGE
As the left-handed-hitting outfielder makes his way up the system and through such forays as the Fall League, more experienced hurlers are apt to exploit his ability to expand the zone. That free-swinging mentality kept Guedez off MLB Pipeline’s Top 50 International Prospects list, even as he pulled down a $1.5 million signing bonus as part of a 2025 signing class that included two-way player Shotaro Morii (ATH No. 15).
All 548 of Guedez’s plate appearances in 2026 came against older pitchers, a trend likely to continue as he progresses through the Minors. Even with his numbers taking a dip after his promotion, he managed to hit .299 with a .773 OPS across the levels combined while ranging three-to-four years younger than his circuit’s average hitter.
All told, there are few teenage prospects in the game who raised their stock as precipitously in 2026 as Guedez, who now ranks as the Athletics’ No. 9 prospect.
But long before his successful run through Single-A, he grabbed headlines during Spring Training when he parked a 110.4 mph, 450-foot homer off eight-year MLB veteran Michael King, and then added a 425-foot roundtripper during Spring Breakout nine days later. That starting lineup included three players -- Henry Bolte, Tommy White and Joshua Kuroda-Grauer (ATH No. 4) -- who went on to make their MLB debuts in 2026, along with Leo De Vries (ATH No. 1/MLB No. 3), a glimpse into the talent the A’s have coming.
“You get a hug from Mark Kotsay at the top step? That's special,” Buhner said of Guedez’s Cactus League moonshot. “He's gonna be special.”