Cincinnati Reds links - Minor league season officially kaput

We have known of the pending demise of a the 2020 Minor League Baseball season for quite sometime now, but that doesn’t make the acknowledgement that it’s kaput any easier to confront. With the efforts to squeeze in even a 60 game big league season attempting to thread a needle in a wind storm as-is, the idea that the minor leagues - on such a larger scale - could sling a season together in the middle of this pandemic was obviously outlandish, not to mention downright reckless.

So, it’s with a heavy baseball heart that I relay that we’ll hear today that the 2020 MiLB season will officially be banged. Baseball America’s J.J. Cooper had the news.

It’s tough news on a number of levels.

It’s tough for baseball fans in locales without the usual access to big league ball, as there will be no local outlet to view prospects on the rise.

It’s tough for those prospects, who are losing a year of normal baseball development in their goal of reaching the big leagues one day.

It’s tough for the local economies, the vendors, the field staff.

It’s going to be tough for the MiLB franchises themselves, too. We learned long before the pandemic engulfed us that Big Baseball was already exploring a cull of some of the minor league franchises in an effort to ‘streamline’ the minor league system as a whole, and it’s hard to envision that news paired with a lost revenue year doing anything other than forcing several teams to fold for good.

There have been many sad days of late, and very many sad baseball days, too. This one is right down there at the bottom, frankly.

In other news, the ownership group of the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, California, United States of America, Earth, Solar System, Milky Way Galaxy are, in fact, a bunch of assholes.

Cincinnati Reds prospect Vlad Gutierrez has been suspended for 80 games after testing positive for PEDs.

MLB.com’s Mark Sheldon highlighted several of the top storylines facing the Reds as they near their report date back in Cincinnati. Frankly, there really aren’t that many tantalizing battles to anticipate in camp, which is usually (/fingers crossed) a good indication of a well-built roster.

Over at The Athletic, C. Trent Rosecrans spoke with GM Nick Krall at length about the building of the summer camp roster/pool/thingamajig, and it’s got some great insight into how the front office is trying to blend the win-now mentality at the big league level with the continued development of some of the top prospects in their system.

Here’s a picture of some delicious fried pickles, fried pickles I plan on consuming at some point later this evening:

Finally, a fond farewell to the legendary Carl Reiner, who passed away last night at age 98. A giant of a man who left his mark on so many aspects of this world.