Flame-throwing Orioles prospect put himself on 2026 radar with strong AFL performance

There’s a reason Baltimore Orioles fans kept hearing Luis De León’s name every time an Arizona Fall League box score hit their timeline. In a league where hitters usually have the upper hand, the 21-year-old lefty showed up hammering the zone and daring everyone to hit him. Most of them couldn’t. By the time the dust settled in Arizona, De León had gone from “interesting arm in a deep system” to “why wouldn’t this guy be in the 2026 conversation?”

For an organization that’s already graduated wave after wave of position-player talent, De León represents the exact kind of lottery ticket Mike Elias needs to hit on: a low-cost international signee who suddenly looks like a real big-league weapon.

The Orioles picked him up out of the Dominican Republic for roughly the cost of a nice family vacation, and four years later he’s carving some of the game’s best prospects in the desert with mid-90s sinkers and a breaking ball that just falls off the table.

Luis De León’s AFL breakout gives Orioles a new 2026 rotation wild card

The appeal is pretty straightforward. De León is a long, wiry 6-foot-3 lefty with real arm speed and a fastball that plays heavier than a typical four-seamer. When he’s synced up, it sits in the mid-90s, runs in on right-handers and sinks under barrels, which helps explain the elite ground-ball rate he posted in the AFL to go with more than a strikeout per inning and an ERA in the mid-2.00s. Most hitters either beat his sinker into the dirt or headed back to the dugout shaking their heads at the slider that just vanished on them.

What pushes this beyond “fun relief prospect” and into genuine 2026 intrigue is the rest of the package. The slider has real bite in the mid-80s, and he’s started to lean on a firm changeup (and even a splitter at times) that fades away from righties instead of just running into their barrels. When he sequences his pitches and lands them enough, you can squint and see a mid-rotation starter. When the strikes waver, the fallback is still a nasty, multi-inning bullpen arm who can kill rallies with ground balls and strikeouts.

It wasn’t always trending this way. De León’s first ride through a full season was anything but spotless. He missed plenty of bats in Single-A, but once he made the jump to High-A, the cracks showed up: the strike zone shrank, the workload caught up to him, and his numbers slid late in the year.

Rather than letting that be the ceiling, he came back in 2025 and pushed his way up the ladder, jumping three levels and finishing the season overpowering Double-A hitters with a mid-3.00s ERA and north of 100 strikeouts in under 90 frames. By the time he got to the Arizona Fall League, he no longer felt like a developmental flier — he looked like a left-hander who finally understands how to weaponize his stuff.

Is there risk? Absolutely. The delivery can get out of sync, and when it does, the walk totals climb and the ball doesn’t live at the knees as often as it needs to. That’s the line he’ll walk in 2026: either he tightens the command and forces his way into the long-term rotation plans, or he leans into the chaos and becomes the kind of high-octane reliever contenders unleash in October. 

But after what he just did in the Fall League, it’s fair to say this much: De León shouldn’t just be a name buried on a prospect list anymore. He belongs squarely on the Orioles’ 2026 radar. And if they’re serious about sustaining this run, they need an arm exactly like his to hit.