St. Louis Cardinals: Spring training, regular season delayed

The recent decision by Major League Baseball to delay the start of the regular season will impact the St. Louis Cardinals in many ways. Here is our reaction.

As former St. Louis Cardinals great and Hall of Fame second baseman Rogers Hornsby once said, “People ask me what I do in winter when there’s no baseball. I’ll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.” In light of the recent decision by the MLB to delay the start of the 2020 season, it looks like the waiting will have to continue.

While we still don’t know of the plan in place for when and how the season will continue, in the meantime, there are more important things to worry about.

From the safety of the players and the thousands of fans that go to games, to the livelihoods of the workers at Busch Stadium and other venues across the country, there are so many reasons that MLB followed the suit of the other major sports leagues in stopping play.

In terms of the Cardinals themselves, the biggest impact would be for players who are injured. Andrew Miller, Brett Cecil, Miles Mikolas, and even Jordan Hicks will now have more time to prepare themselves for the season. Players like Paul Goldschmidt who are dealing with nagging pain will rest up and be ready to go as well.

Older players who have struggled this spring, like Dexter Fowler, might get a chance to recover their form. Questions about contracts and service time will impact where young players like Dylan Carlson start the season.

Goold brings up a good point about Opening Day being in flux. It’s fair to say (now two weeks away) that the game, if it is played, will not be played in front of fans. There really isn’t any way to know how this season is going to go, but we have past seasons to look at for shortened seasons and how they usually go.

For the here and now, enjoy the Cardinals game today, we are about to be back in limbo which nobody is looking forward to.

As of writing this, the MLB came out and is officially pushing back the start of the regular season as well.

This really is strange times, especially for someone who has no memory of any of MLB’s past shortened seasons.

Hopefully, the world and the baseball season will be able to return to normalcy sooner than we know it, and these questions will work themselves out.

This is, of course, incredibly disappointing news. However, in this newly extended offseason, we here at Redbird Rants will continue to talk Cardinals and do our best to keep up the excitement for the upcoming season. Stay safe out there and let’s hope we can get back to baseball soon.