And like your dentist armed with drill and saw, I come bearing ill tidings. Mark Prior's Achilles will keep him out for a bit, Juan Cruz has been traded for a fermenting pile of cold sesame noodles, and even resident scrub Jose Macias will be sidelined for about a month with a torn meniscus.

On the (hopefully) brighter side of things, this is my first bit of web scrawl on my new home, The Cub Reporter. Christian has graciously asked me to lend a hand in co-authoring this space, and, well, I'm humbled and eager to join in the fun. For you few, proud few, band of brothers, who have seen my regular blather over at ball talk, you can expect more of the same over here.

And for the masses who have no clue who I am, I'll include here a snippet from my first blog entry last fall, by way of introduction:

I am gay, and I am a baseball fan. I like guys, and I like the Cubs. These things are not mutually exclusive, but it is rare indeed when my worlds intersect. Games 2-4 of the NLCS was such an instance. Vacationing in southern Maine, I went out to the boy bars in Ogunquit each night. While most patrons were busy ogling the soft porn on the TV monitors (or the live soft porn on the dance floor), I was glued to the one monitor in the room tuned to the Cubs-Marlins series.

I must've been quite a site, my celebratory screams drowning out the thumpety-thumps. I like to think the locals were slightly charmed by my antics -- probably thinking a wayward straight guy had wandered in, desperate for a sports bar.

The Cubs greeted my return to Brooklyn with three straight losses. I should have stayed in Maine.

As I emphasized at ball talk, my writing is rarely about being gay, or about gay baseball players, or about who I think is a hottie. It's about baseball and, specifically, my Cubbies. That'll probably be even more true at The Cub Reporter, where my focus will be blue and pinstriped. That said, I will continue to discuss issues of sexuality in sports when relevant and when interesting, though it is to-be-determined where in the All-Baseball network those pieces will fit.

ball talk will cease to be updated, but some of my longer or more popular pieces will be moved over to TCR, if for no other reason than ease of reference. Old links to stuff on ball talk will still work indefinitely, and the home page will stand as is for a little while, eventually automatically redirecting viewers to this site.

We're making it up here as we go along. There will be some collaborative bits between Christian and me, but mostly we'll be doing a lot of random, wild posting on all things Cub. Enjoy the ride, and keep the comments and feedback flowing. I know I'm going to have fun.