When I entered this business, I had one goal and one goal only.

To write.

I never imagined being on television. I certainly never imagined breaking stories in 140 characters or less. The internet, Twitter, even 24-7 sports-talk radio . . . none of those possibilities existed when I graduated from college in 1984.

Over the years the business has changed. I had to change with it. But one thing remained constant, even as I benefited from more good fortune than I deserved by working on TV for Fox Sports and MLB Network. Writing and reporting are still the foundation of everything I do. I believe in the craft, believe in it to my bones. And now, as the business continues to evolve, I’m moving on to the next phase.

Today, I am incredibly excited to embrace another opportunity that I never imagined, a sports web site devoted to the written word.

The Athletic.

My work at Fox Sports and MLB Network, on both television and video, will continue. I’ll be as active as ever on Twitter. The only difference now is that my written articles will appear exclusively on The Athletic, and you will need a subscription to read them.

Some of you probably have not heard of The Athletic. The company launched in Chicago in 2016, covering the city’s local teams as if it were a newspaper in town. It has since expanded the concept to Toronto, Cleveland, Detroit, and the San Francisco Bay Area, with more local outlets on the way. The site’s founders, Alex Mather and Adam Hansmann, have also decided to begin national coverage, too.

Stewart Mandel, formerly of Sports Illustrated and Foxsports.com, will head up the college football coverage, beginning next week. Seth Davis, also a former senior writer for Sports Illustrated, will be in charge of the college basketball team, starting next month. My title will be senior writer for baseball, and I’ll be a lead voice on a national storytelling venture called The Athletic Ink. It will be a mix of features, enterprise and longform, as well as news. And believe me, this is only the start, the first step in The Athletic’s plan to attract the best and brightest in our industry.

Alex, Adam and our chief content officer, Paul Fichtenbaum, the former editor-in-chief of Sports Illustrated, see an opening, a growing opportunity created by many of the major sports sites pivoting away from writing. They believe, as all of us at The Athletic do, that people want to read. Their goal is to create a one-stop shop for sports fans who share a passion for good stories—well-reported, well-written and well-told.

So many of you were kind in reaching out to me on Twitter after Foxsports.com went all-video last month, offering advice, support and, in some cases, jobs. A number of you urged me to start my own web site, an idea that I seriously considered. I also spoke with other baseball writers about joining forces and building something bigger.

Here’s the thing, though: The Athletic is what I would have wanted to build.

Yes, readers must pay to subscribe, a concept that I know many of you are not accustomed to, at least when it comes to sports writing. But beyond stellar coverage on both a local and national level, The Athletic offers something else that I crave, and I suspect many of you do, too.

A clean reading experience.

No ads cluttering stories. No auto play videos popping up out of nowhere. No surveys to unlock written content or all of the other clunky things many web sites bolt on to build revenue.

I cannot say for certain that we will succeed; journalists are never too confident about anything, knowing this business will humble you, one way or another, every day. But more than anything The Athletic offers a new vision. As I reviewed my options, this was the one that excited me most.

From the very beginning of my career, the print outlets I worked for have been underdogs; I almost prefer it that way. But at a time when other outlets are cutting back their sports coverage, I don’t suspect The Athletic will be an underdog for long. We are daring to be great, and that is a heck of a place to start.

The last time I had this feeling as a writer, I was coming out of college, full of fire, ready to take on the world. The Athletic, for me, is like starting over. Like coming home.

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(Top photo: Getty Images; Rosenthal portrait: Jordan Murph Photography)