Sox Pop on the Farm Podcast 38 — 2023 Charlotte Knights preview — 2023-03-31

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

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