Hello, Red Reporter

Back at the end of November, fearless leader BK officially stepped down as Red Reporter’s manager, drawing to a close a great five year run in charge of our favorite little corner of the internet. It was a decision I know he made with a heavy heart, as this place has meant a lot to him for what’s increasingly become a large portion of all our lives, and was one made due to increasing time constraints - not to search for a better spot to yap about Reds, life, and trains.

I knew it was coming, as he’d informed me as much prior to putting in his retirement papers. The concept at the time was to ideally keep RR chugging along as similar to how it had been in the past, with some in-house promoting the only thing needed to keep a roof over our heads and the kegerator in the break room running. The only caveat, though, was the timing - due to some concurrent hierarchical changes in the /mlb structure at SB Nation, the new corporate chain of command had to be sorted out before official decisions could be made at the RR level.

Those decisions have finally filtered through, and as of today I’m the new skipper here at Red Reporter dot com. Which, to me, is cool as all heck, since I know you guys!

I first stumbled across this place at some point a full decade ago, when the 2008 Reds looked like they might well be onto something, what with the likes of Homer Bailey, Jay Bruce, Johnny Cueto, and Joey Votto all set to break in together. I lurked as Slyde dropped repeated knowledge of projections and advanced metrics on my noggin, helping shape the way I view baseball today probably more than any single baseball writer I’ve come across. And, after signing up initially with an homage to the player with the highest career OPS in Cincinnati Reds history (min 874 team PAs), I quickly found that this place was rife with the kind of knowledge I was looking to discover. Some seven years of actively writing later, I’ve hammered out nearly 1,700 blurbs of varying quality here, and I’m proud of at least a solid third of them.

That knowledge at RR, mind you, is far from isolated to just baseball. Hell, it’s maybe 30% baseball on any good day. It’s topical, it’s philosophical, it’s musical, it’s beer. It’s the internet’s best recreation of a section at GABP that lets us hang out together 365 days a year, knowing that at the bare minimum we share a wholehearted fascination with the Reds. That’s merely the icebreaker to introduce us all, the password at the door, if you will, since my time around here has taught me there’s as much insight among you as with any group of folks I’ve discovered. That’s the kind of community this place is and has always been through the years, from JD Arney to FVA, boobsinho to Slyde, from ‘KRP on down to BK - and if there’s one thing I want to ensure I do while with the reins, it’s to make sure that’s still the case while I’m on watch, too.

I mean this as no slight to BK, since he knows what I mean when I say it: I hope you continue to show up here day in, day out, and don’t notice much of a change. The core group of idiots that has brought you delicious content here for years hasn’t bolted, and will continue to form the backbone of what you read here. We’ll be looking to add-in some new voices, of course, since that’s how we all got to where we are in the first place, but know we’ll vet them thoroughly and make them do push-ups every time they screw up a their/there, a compliment/complement, or a Tyler/Taylor in a Farmer’s Only.

Aside from that, I hope we can make 2018 and beyond an era full of inquisitive, enjoyable Reds-centric coverage, with enough JPEGs and Friday humor to make our Facebook following hate us just a bit. That’s what I am, that’s who we are, and that’s what Red Reporter should be, if you ask me.

I’d say let’s get this party started, but it’s been going strong for twelve damn years. Let’s just keep it rolling, shall we?