Cardinals on My Time is back for the winter in a little different capacity! With the offseason and winter looking questionable at best and the Cardinals sitting in an awkward spot, I decided to take the opportunity to expand my podcast a little bit.
Since writing all things St. Louis Cardinals for the past few seasons, my attention around the league has significantly dwindled and I cannot have that happen. Rather than just reading through articles or trying to find new podcasts, I decided to bring the external talent to me and then share it with those of you who are in the same boat. I am fortunate enough to do that through the platform called MILLIONS, which is where I will be hosting my LIVESTREAM podcasts before publishing them later on normal platforms.
In my MILLIONS debut, I was joined by Jessica Kleinschmidt who was previously of MLB.com and NBC Sports covering the Athletics. Through our conversation, I quickly realized she was the perfect person to have one and discuss the impending winter of negotiations and hearsay. Jessica is a self-proclaimed CBA professional, so it was great to hear information from someone with ties to players and owners while also discussing what could happen this winter.
CBA talks are going to go to an interesting place during the MLB offseason
In the episode, we covered plenty but I really wanted to get into comparing the make up of both the A’s and Cardinals. The more Jessica talked, the more it seemed like these are teams sitting at a similar point in their building for the future. The Cardinals obviously have Chaim Bloom as POBO, but yesterday the Athletics also announced their own POBO, Taylor Smith, who had similar lineage to Bloom and is probably going to do things that look like what we saw in St. Louis.
When we spoke CBA, we got into what the lockout will mean for the fringe 40-man players and the Rule 5 draft. Jessica and I are both smitten by Rule 5 stories and hope that the process stays in some capacity, but it will be interesting to see how teams around the league handle their player protections by the 40-man deadline. The negotiations will probably get messy with a lot of players vs. owners conversations happening beyond the salary cap commercials we are already seeing during game broadcasts.
Finally, Jessica teased that she is going to be diving deeper into her Athletics coverage in some capacity, but could not announce the full details just yet. By the end of the episode, I was glad to have expanded from rehashing the same Cardinals conversations we hear every week and get some more look around MLB. If you enjoyed the episode, make sure you drop a like, comment, and/or subscribe on your favorite platform!
On Thursday at 6pm, I will be having Double-A pitcher Michael Watson on MILLIONS and prospect guru Kareem Haq will help me lead the conversations. I will be posting a link to that stream on my socials but if you follow on MILLIONS, you will get notified when we go live.
I hope to have plenty more for you all in the near future. Thanks for sticking with me!
