It has been a particularly complicated year.  Checking the date of my last fanpost, it strikes me that the world has made quite a few rotations in its annual slow-steady progression around the sun since I last shared anything signficant on this site.  It is interesting to how the blog community works; I still read this page everyday, follow the team, and more or less keep up with the conversations on the site, but once you slip out of the conversation it can be challening to wiggle back in again.

And a lot has happened in those eight months since I watched Voltron take down the Cisco Kid (destructor), slightly inebriated on a noisy corner in this chaotic and complex city of Santo Domingo.  We inaugurated the first black president of our occasionaly United States, and this president has more or less (but probably more) stayed the Bush course.  We are still dropping bombs on citizens in the mid-East and we are still bailing out banks while the unemployment lines grumble and swell.  

Opening day found me at a leadership training in Colombia for an international peace education summer camp organization.  In between sessions I would sneak in my headphones and check up on our Redlegs.  The night of our first rainout was a Friday night.  I remember that night because I cannot forget it.  I cannot forget it because somewhere between the time the Earth turned away from the Sun in the evening and turned back again in the morning I had fallen in love.  We don't speak much about love on sports blogs, but I have a growing history of speaking about things on sports blogs that we don't tend to speak much about.  Falling in love changes everything, and on that rainy Friday in Cincinnati, that cold and cloudy Friday in Bogota, everything was changed.

The summer came, the Reds went, and it was time to travel.  The love that was planted with the rain, sprouted and inched upward.  A return trip to Colombia brought flowers.  Coming home for the first time in a year, I realized that the only thing different there was me.  A road trip to Canada.  A reunion in Copenhagen.  A summer camp in Sweden. The June/July/August was a blur of memory and imagination, familiar and  strange, love and longing.

A month ago, I arrived back in this country of loudness, of baseball, of survival.  A country that is teaching me that the only hope we have to seriously improve this place we inhabit and every now and again appreciate, is to get together and collectively change ourselves and our communities, to demand more of our leaders, and lead instead of just making demands.  Finding the strength to keep learning here is not always easy, but I see no other way to live with dignity than to organize.

This past week, El Niño Destructor made his major league debut, striking out thunderously.  I look forward to his homecoming this winter and will definitely make an effort to get to a game or two with a camera to keep you Reporters abreast of his progress.  

K to BB ratio?  

Kids to Baseball Bats. 

Roar.