Meet Bobby Nightengale, your new Cincinnati Reds beat reporter.

I’m a baseball addict.

But I’m not looking for a cure.

I blame my parents, really, for this baseball disease. You see, I was in the San Diego Padres spring training camp when I was one week old. And that was just the start.

Baseball was in my blood, and never left, even when my family moved from San Diego to Minnesota, where baseball went from a year-round sport in the sunshine to a few months between snow storms.

I didn’t know a soul when we moved that summer. I didn’t even own a winter coat. But just a few days after our move, I saw a few kids in my age group playing a pickup Wiffle-Ball game in a neighbor’s backyard. A few rocks marked the bases and there were no fences so there was plenty of space to play. My brother and I introduced ourselves, joined the game and returned many times.

Baseball is how I first met some of my best friends and was always a big part of my life. It was the main sport I played through high school. I’m thrilled that I’ll have the chance to write about the game daily joining The Enquirer as a Reds beat writer alongside John Fay.

As a 7-year-old in Minnesota, I was told that I was too old to start playing hockey, unlike my younger siblings, because kids skate before they are potty-trained. Another passion is college basketball and I spent the last four years at the Lawrence (Kan.) Journal-World, a town that treats games at Allen Fieldhouse like Cincinnati treats Opening Day.

My dad is an MLB columnist for USA Today so I’ve always had the benefit of staying close to the game. We ran into Hall of Famer Harmon Killebrew in the airport once. I always thought it was cool when my dad talked on the phone regularly to Peter Gammons, who was the face of ESPN’s Baseball Tonight. Greg Anderson, famously known as Barry Bonds’ trainer, was actually the person who taught me how to lift weights when I was in the seventh or eighth grade. (Newspapers don’t test for performance-enhancing drugs, but I swear I’m clean.)

My first job in sports was interning in minor league baseball with the Peoria Chiefs, then a low-A affiliate of the Chicago Cubs. The first time I ever walked into a bar was when Greg Maddux, at the time a Cubs consultant, invited a few people to join him after a game one night (no ID is required when a Hall of Famer is around).

Baseball has a funny way of mixing the old with the new and bringing things full circle. In 2006, I attended the MLB All-Star game in Pittsburgh with a cousin and uncle. Sitting in the upper deck, Jim Leyland sat one row in front of us with his daughter. Less than a decade later, I covered the Detroit Tigers for MLB.com in Leyland’s final season (his last day was my last day) and watched a dominant pitching staff fall short of a World Series.

I was a 1-year-old in San Diego when Jim Riggleman earned his first Major League managerial job with the Padres. Here he is managing again as I start with the Enquirer. There are so many players and coaches at all levels in the sport, but it always feels like a small community because everyone knows each other.

I attended Bradley University in Peoria, Ill., because of its new sports communication program. Again, I put myself in an environment where I didn’t know anybody.

On the final night before classes started, a few days after my family dropped me off at my dorm (my mom thought she saw tears in my eyes), the sports communication program bused all of us freshmen to a Peoria Chiefs game. Again, baseball was the vehicle that helped me bond with more of my good friends for the first time and meet longtime scout Gary Hughes, who offered advice to a new college student in between pitches.

I’m new to Cincinnati but I’m excited to start another chapter of my life with the help of baseball.