One Dodgers outfield prospect who shouldn't get buried in star-studded system

I made the trip out to see the Great Lakes Loons, the Los Angeles Dodgers' High-A affiliate, this past weekend, mainly to get my first live look at Eduardo Quintero and to watch one of my favorite prospects in all of minor league baseball, Emil Morales.

I had a weird feeling one of them wasn’t going to play, and sure enough, Quintero got to sit out the getaway day game. Emil Morales was in the lineup and did his thing with a double and drew a couple of walks. But the player who actually stuck with me all weekend was the one I didn't go there to see: Charles (or Chuck as they called him with the Loons) Davalan.

Dodgers fans shouldn't sleep on Charles Davalan

Davalan was the Dodgers' 2025 Competitive Balance Round A pick out of Arkansas by way of Florida Gulf Coast. He’s a Canadian kid from Waterloo, Ontario who transferred into the SEC and hit .346 with 14 homers in his one draft-eligible season with the Razorbacks before Los Angeles signed him for just under $2 million.

Listed at 5-foot-9, and known more for his bat-to-ball skills, Davalan often gets lost in the shuffle in a prospect pool with Josue De Paula, Mike Sirota, or Quintero. The Dodgers have seven outfielders inside the industry's Top 100, so Davalan's name doesn't get said nearly as often, even though he's currently the Dodgers' No. 6 overall prospect and has cracked the back of that same Top 100 list himself.

So watching a game in person, sitting third row and right next to the dugout, you notice things a box score doesn't capture. Davalan was up on the top step, tracking pitches and watching the game intensely.

When a pitching change came and he was on deck, he was locked in with the hitting coach over an iPad, working through an actual plan rather than just waiting for his turn. And when he got in the box, the way he took pitches said everything — a lot of people say you can tell a lot about a hitter by his takes and that’s exactly what I noticed.

It’s the kind of recognition that a genuine 60-grade hit tool does and scouts have said for a while that he doesn’t chase and rarely swings and misses. Watching it in person, that reputation checked out completely.

Davalan's been on an absolute tear the last month or so, including a three-homer week in late July that saw him slash .481/.517/1.037, and another multi-homer game just days before I saw him play.

While he didn’t get any hits and was actually caught stealing — he reached base by getting hit (twice) — and his baseball IQ stood out to me significantly. In a sport that's pushed hitters toward pulling everything in the air, a guy who works gap to gap, controls the strike zone, and runs the bases with real instincts is a refreshing style to watch develop in real time.

De Paula, Sirota, and Quintero are still the headliners in this outfield picture, and deservedly so. But spend an afternoon watching Davalan do the parts of the game that don't show up in a box score, and it's easy to walk away thinking he deserves to be a bigger part of that conversation than he currently is. Dodgers fans get excited, you have a fun one coming through the system.

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