SSS on the Farm Podcast 38 — 2023 Charlotte Knights preview
It can’t be worse than 2022... can it? Darren Black and Brett Ballantini discuss a more fortified rotation and outfield corps
It’s another season in Charlotte, and hopefully a good for a Knights team that wasn’t just bad in 2022, but embarrassingly so, as just one-third of Charlotte starts were made by legit starting pitchers.
Darren Black hopped on with Brett Ballantini to discuss the highest level, yet somewhat AAAA status, of the Chicago minor-league system:
- The biggie: Will the Knights start actual starting pitchers this season? With Davis Martin, Sean Burke, Jonathan Stiever and John Parke, it appears so. Maybe not 100% of the time, but we’re hoping for 80%.
- Brett immediately carves out an exception to the 100% goal — if Davis Martin or Sean Burke need to be called up immediately to take the spot of our fifth starter, [redacted], all good
- Between Gregory Santos and Franklin German, there are two MLB-ready arms in Charlotte, and on the southpaw side, it’s Tanner Banks. All in all, not the worst way to break camp
- Darren was forced into an altogether-too-long segment on Yolbert Sánchez, who has seen his star fall right off of the map — especially once José Rodríguez is promoted from Birmingham
- At some point, Darren goes from intermittent Zoom camera to gone for good, so forgive the 30 seconds of tech failure ... just cue up the Yakety Sax, please
- Given just three true outfielders on the South Side (or 2 1⁄2, or just two, depending on how you feel about your corner outfielders getting caught in the fishing nets) are the Knights stocked with ready band-aids? More so than in 2022, says Darren
- Next week, with the rest of the minors opening on April 7, we’ll run our other three affiliate previews
Listen below, on our built-in Megaphone player:
or follow along with every episode at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or wherever you consume your podcasts. Or, you can watch the podcast on the Sox Populi YouTube channel. (Except this one, Darren’s camera fritzed out.)