New York Times reporter Kirk Semple writes a story
that shows how much progress has been made in Iraq since Saddam’s
statue fell. It’s about a national baseball league with 26 teams in 18
provinces. The organizer of the league had been fascinated by baseball
as a youngster but he felt it might be impolitic to try to start a
league under Saddam.

After the fall of Mr. Hussein’s government, Mr. Ismael felt free to
start the baseball league. In visits to sports clubs and college
campuses, he mustered interest in the new sport, and held his first
practice in November 2003.

Seeing Kirk’s byline on a New York Times story with a Baghdad
dateline made me feel, a little too painfully, the passage of time. For
it was in 1988 that I gave Kirk his first newspaper job when I hired
the then-ponytailed youngster from Yale as an intern at The Herald-Sun in Durham.