He also has begun enjoying his new city of Cincinnati and agreed to take me on a guided tour of some of his favorite clubs and restaurants, plus a visit to the Reds' state-of-the-art ballpark nestled against the Ohio River.
"I'm having a good time. I understand that baseball is a business and I miss Fenway , but I'm liking Cincinnati," says Arroyo. "I still think if we had kept the Red Sox together -- if we kept Pedro Martinez and Derek Lowe in 2005 -- we would have won another World Series, but I've learned there are no guarantees in baseball."
Despite his change of uniform, Arroyo remains a fun-loving, irrepressible character who also performs as a rock singer on the side. He headlined The Roxy nightclub in Boston this winter, and his modern, two-bedroom, window-filled townhouse here boasts posters of AC/DC, Green Day, Kurt Cobain, and Led Zeppelin on the walls. "They make me feel at home," he says.
His home is up the winding streets of Mount Adams, a hip section of town that was recommended by his friend Kevin Youkilis, the Red Sox first baseman who grew up in Cincinnati. Arroyo picks me up at my downtown hotel -- he wears a hooded sweatshirt that serves as a perfect disguise when he stops by the front entrance in his Ford Explorer -- and then drives us up to his neighborhood filled with cool watering holes and dining spots that remind him of Key West, Fla., where he was born and lived until he was 10.
"It's nice and chill up here. It is its own community, and I'm still right near the park," Arroyo says, pointing down the hill to the shiny, four-year-old Great American Ball Park by the river's edge. The lights of Kentucky shine across the water. The view is similar to peering into the valleys of Los Angeles, on a smaller, though still impressive, scale.
