The start of the 2022 MLB playoffs signals the final days another busy season in the long career of Cardinals beat writer Derrick Goold.

“I’m lucky to have grown up where I lived, around the people I grew up with,” Goold said. “I’m tremendously fortunate.”

Goold, 46, was born in Elgin, Illinois, but very early on in his childhood his family would move to Louisville, Colorado. Goold was a very creative kid, often spending his free time drawing and writing his own comic books and novels. Goolds parents supported this creativity and reading, taking him to the book store and buying one book for every A he got in school.

“I always enjoyed writing,” Goold said. “I was around people who really fostered creativity in writing and reading,”

Goold would also end up developing a major interest in baseball, but because there wasn’t a baseball team in Colorado at the time, Goold gravitated to the most publicized in the league, which was the New York Yankees. Though they weren’t especially good during his childhood, Goold’s dad would tell him stories of the Yankee’s famed past. Goold would also spend his free time reading different stories from around the league in the newspaper.

“I grew up in an area without baseball, but yet was able to foster a real fascination with Major League Baseball by way of the newspapers,” Goold said.

This interest in baseball and writing led him to join the Centaurus High School newspaper, where his teacher gave him the idea of becoming a journalist. His experience with journalism in high school led him to choose to attend Mizzou for their journalism program. Goold would go on to cover the football and baseball teams, both starting in his freshman year. He’d go on to work for four daily newspapers while in college.

“It was excellent,” Goold said. “Mizzou offered me an opportunity to get right into the business of newspapers,”

After he graduated from college in 1997, Goold would travel to work at the New Orleans Times Picayune where he covered local high school sports and then eventually LSU football and women’s basketball. He would then travel back to Colorado to cover the Denver Nuggets and assist on the coverage of the Avalanche and Rockies before making his way to St. Louis to cover the Blues for the Post Dispatch in 2001. Then, in 2004, he was finally offered the beat for the Cardinals and has remained on the baseball beat since.

“Well, I wanted to be a baseball writer, and that was one of the big draws to come to St. Louis,” Goold said. “To maybe someday possibly cover baseball there was a big deal, and to see if I could do it and to see if I could rise to that occasion,”

Goold has spent the last 22 years covering sports at the professional level as a beat writer and has become one of the most well respected writers in all of baseball. He has covered the Olympics, World Series, and a Super Bowl, but even after covering some of the biggest sports events in the world, he still enjoys the challenge that comes with big moments and seeing if he can rise to the occasion of the moment.

“You might write a story that you think man, this is the best story I’ve written and the newspaper will say that’s great, today is done, move on to tomorrow, what do you got for me next,” Goold said. “I really like the challenge of that.”