There are countless variations on the same conversation to have over a long winter, but they all point to roughly the same obvious place — the media landscape around baseball coverage is shifting and unstable, and if you’re used to being moored in one spot, you’d better be willing and able to change.
I am neither, and so here are some words.
The beautiful thing about covering baseball every day is that it’s every day. When I talk to friends who have worked across different sports about the rhythms of their coverage, I have sympathy for why certain storylines are beaten into the ground and why it seems to me that there is pervasive shallowness that creeps through the coverage. That process is only accelerated by a media landscape that insists upon sound bites, video clips, short form debate, and apparently now busting open packs of collectibles as the best way to get people interested in a sport.
I don’t believe that’s true. I don’t have any interest in owning a podcast microphone or a video setup or a backdrop for my basement. That doesn’t make me one inch better or more noble than people who are having tremendous success in those fields. It makes me more stubborn, more apt to get left behind. The attempt here, then, is to plant a flag in such a way that says, hey, if you’re interested in reading about the St. Louis Cardinals and Major League Baseball, come read. If you think my expertise and voice have value, I will take dollars from you in exchange for them. It doesn’t have to be more complicated than that.
If you have read my coverage since 2019 at the Belleville News-Democrat, I have good news for you: nothing changes on that front. You can expect the same in-depth analysis there that we’ve always provided. I’m grateful that I have supportive leadership in place that is always encouraging of my ability to pursue outside, parallel avenues, and this represents that.
It’s a big ask to encourage readers to follow you around the internet with their wallets out, and I have no desire to overpromise. I don’t know how many posts will be here on a given timeframe, but there will be enough. My overwhelming desire in building out this space is that I think there is room for more, more, more. In an era where budgets are shrinking in newspapers — salary budgets, travel budgets, and crucially print space budgets — there have been countless stories over the last seven seasons that I have simply not had the space to publish. My hope is that stops now.
If you subscribe to this blog and you feel like you’re not getting your money’s worth, tell me, and I’ll get it back to you. The full-season pricing will be cut off at the conclusion of the Cardinals’ first road trip to Detroit and Washington in order to protect against people paying an undue share. The pricing — $31.40 for the season or $6.18 a month — reflects what I think is the right way to think about what the Cardinals mean to a full region of people, not just the pockets into which St. Louisians are eager to divide themselves. If I can think of a clever way to work in a 557, that’ll squeeze in as well.
There are massive shifts occurring everywhere around the Cardinals. The roster, the front office, the outlets providing coverage, the location of the television broadcast, all dramatically changed. Even KMOX puts the FM signal ahead of the AM signal in their marketing materials.
That is all reflective of a changing world and responsive to what traffic trends suggest readers want. Every piece of expensive data that exists in the field of audience engagement suggests that this is a very silly endeavor upon which to embark, and there is every possibility I will discover that it will fail.
I think there’s a real chance, though, that I’m wrong. I think there’s a real chance that there’s a real constituency of Cardinals fans who want to hear about what’s happening with perspective, insight, and the measured context of years spent at the ballpark day in, day out. I don’t have any idea what the future holds for any coverage outlets — I can take some grim guesses — but I do have some confidence that personal ownership and curation is going to be a big part of the future.
Today, ahead of the 2026 season, I’m attempting to take a big step into that future. Come with me — I think there’s a chance you’ll have fun and learn some things.