Today, Kim Humphreys is relaunching the web site IwantmyRocky.com. After the Rocky closed, we temporarily used the site to post news — primarily from Kevin Flynn, the Rocky’s Spotlight staff and a group of copy editors who were dedicated to seeing something emerge from the wreckage. When the group became involved with INDenverTimes, we shut down the site. Now, Kim is picking up where we left off back in March. We may have lost our paper, but we still need to save the news. What happened in Denver, happened in Seattle and Tucson, and it will happen more places before the end of the year. IwantmyRocky.com was always about more than saving our jobs, it was about saving what our jobs meant.

There is much more to this story than we have time to tell today. But Rocky Mountain Independent is the start or restart of what friends and fellow journalists have wanted all along: a home for independent journalists to tell the stories that go unreported or underreported.

Like other great baseball movies few have seen — Pastime, Long Gone and, to a lesser extent because of its improbable ending, Talent for the Game — Sugar finds an aspect of the game few understand or possibly even know about, in this case the development of players in baseball academies owned by Major League Baseball in the Dominican Republic, a country where a disproportionate number of childhood dreams involve playing baseball in the United States. This is the story of what happens to those who either don’t make it all the way or decide along the way that the dream belongs to someone else.

The line between banned substances and approved substances is very thin. How a player bulks up or what he takes to recover more quickly after a game is less important than that he does it all. To put it another way: going back more than a decade, andro was OK until it wasn’t OK. But the net result was the same: Mark McGwire, once a skinny kid with a big hole in his swing and frequent knee injuries got big enough and stayed healthy long enough to break the single-season home run record and finish his career with 583 home runs, which at the time he retired that was a no-brainer number for the Hall of Fame. What if he had accomplished the same thing — bulking up and staying healthy — with totally approved and legal substances? Some players have actually done that. Even if the player remains untainted, the numbers for the era have been skewed.