South Side Sox on the Farm Podcast 1 — Happy Opening Day!

With a minor league season debuting tonight, it seemed a good time to unveil a new site podcast, SSS on the Farm. It’s envisioned as a weekly or bi-weekly snapshot of the system. We should chat with everyone on a routine basis. Heading into the season, here’s our lineup:

• Jake Mastroianni (Birmingham Barons)
• Julie Brady (Winston-Salem Dash)
• Dan Victor (Kannapolis Cannon Ballers)
• Tiffany Wintz (Kannapolis Cannon Ballers)
• Sean Williams (Arizona)
• Kim Contreras (Arizona)
• Non affiliate-based writers who will be working on Minor League Updates, including Darren Black, Joe Resis, Brett Ballantini and Year of the Hamster.

Darren and James Fox (minors at Future Sox, majors at SSS) both hopped on with Brett to debut the podcast, so you know we’re not messing around. Yet somehow, these two prime experts (who often have fiery behind-the-scenes debates on our SSS Slack and Twitter), agree on almost everything. No fisticuffs, raised voices, or derisive laughter.

Do better next time, guys.

Highlights of the premiere:

• Are the only interesting aspects of the White Sox system residing in Kannapolis?
• The new trend of aggressive assignments ... and how the White Sox are contributing to the trend
• What does the loss of the Great Falls Voyagers do to the White Sox system, and how might MLB make accommodations for losing an entire “class” of minors?
• Pet prospects from both of our experts
• Conversely, James and Darren peg their most overhyped prospects
• How much of Double-A and Triple-A will serve solely as showcases for trade deadline deals to fuel a White Sox playoff run?
• What will be the effect of full-year play for guys hitting the ground running at Single-A, given some have never endured such a long season?
• Is Jimmy Lambert (Opening Day Charlotte starter) going to be Michael Kopech Phase 2 in the majors for the White Sox this season?
• “Engineer” Brett Ballantini fails “host” Brett Ballantini and “podcast producer” Brett Ballantini by failing to fully plug in his “fancy” podcast mic, leading to low volume and incidental audio noise. It’s only been like 100 podcasts, people, but I’ll promise again to avoid such pratfalls in the future

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 South Side Hit Pen YouTube channel.