news-record.com

GREENSBORO -- Most of Greensboro Grasshoppers manager Edwin Rodriguez's life has involved either baseball or Puerto Rico.

Most of the time, both.

Born in Ponce, he was signed out of Puerto Rico by the New York Yankees in 1980, and spent seven seasons as a minor-league infielder -- including most of the 1982 season with the Greensboro Hornets.

He later became a big-league scout in Latin America, a minor-league manager across the South and a coach/general manager/do-it-all-man for the Puerto Rican winter league. This is his second season with the Hoppers.

With so much experience in baseball, Rodriguez knew he had lots of information for people who cared about the game in his homeland. But how could he share it with them from so far away?

What about a Web site?

In 2000, Rodriguez asked a team of Web developers to turn his dream into a reality.

Sure, they said. For $7,000.

"So I bought a $35 book at Borders," Rodriguez said, "and two months later, I had a Web site."

Eight years later, 47-year-old Rodriguez is still the one-man crew behind www.hitboricua.com, which has become the definitive online source for Puerto Rican baseball. He does the design and maintenance himself, using books and the Internet to become fluent in programs such as Flash, Dreamweaver and ActionScript.

A half dozen volunteers submit articles -- everything's in Spanish -- on player movement, rising prospects in the country and tales of those who have moved on to play in bigger ponds. There are even instructional videos for aspiring players.

Rodriguez spends hours on it every day, reading up on who's in the news, making sure everything looks right. His site is the official page of the Puerto Rican winter league, so he posts its statistics every day of the three-month season.

His profit on all this? Nothing. There's not an ad to be seen on the site. His wife and two children are still back in Puerto Rico, as are all the rest of his family and many of his closest friends. He spends every offseason there.

This is the closest he can get in the meantime.

"It's a hobby for me," he says, a smile creeping across his face. "It keeps me connected to what's going on back there."