About Cecilia Tan
Cecilia Tan has been writing professionally since she was a teenager in the mid-1980s, when she sold articles, interviews, and photographs to teen magazines like Teen Machine and wrote a monthly column for Superteen.
She established herself as a science fiction/fantasy writer and editor in the 1990s, but found her passion for baseball kept bringing her back to that subject. Cecilia began writing about baseball in her mid-thirties, when the McGwire/Sosa home run race and the Joe Torre Yankees rekindled her childhood interest in the sport. She started this blog in 1999, making “Why I Like Baseball” one of the oldest baseball blogs in existence (the term “blog” hadn’t even been coined yet!). Many freelance gigs as writer and editor followed, including writing for both Yankees Magazine and an early (pre-MLB.com) website owned by the Yankees, YankeesXtreme. Since 2011, she has served as Publications Director for SABR (Society for American Baseball Research), where her duties include editing the Baseball Research Journal and The National Pastime and SABR’s publishing program which includes BioProject books and other publications.
In more detail:
Her experience of writing about baseball has taken her on a winding path through the changing field of sportswriting, publishing, and the Internet. Shortly after founding the blog “Why I Like Baseball” in 1999, by the 2000 season she had begun writing weekly column for YankeesXtreme.com (the subscription website of the New York Yankees before the creation of MLB.com). She eventually wrote a number of features for Yankees Magazine. In 2005 she became the Yankees beat writer for Gotham Baseball Magazine, and as a senior writer provided a weekly team report and a column of Yankees observations for www.GothamBaseball.com called “Good Eye.”
During this period of time she was also playing baseball, first as a reserve player for the New England Women’s Baseball League (NEWBL), and then for several years with the Pawtucket Slaterettes, the oldest continuously operating all-female baseball league in the country. Her experiences as a player also led her to such opportunities as serving as a baseball hitting instructor at the AAU/Girl Scouts sports camp in Orlando, Florida, and playing in the starting lineup of the Women’s Baseball Marathon in Tucson, AZ. Her presentation on the Women’s Baseball Marathon won a SABR-McFarland research award at the 2004 SABR national convention in Cincinnati.
In 2005, her book on the history of the New York Yankees, The 50 Greatest Yankee Games was published by Wiley. The paperback followed in 2006, along with a followup book, The 50 Greatest Red Sox Games, co-authored with Bill Nowlin (since reissued by Riverdale Avenue Books).
In 2007, she became the editor of the Yankees Annual (previous titled Bombers Broadside, and later known as Yankees Yearly and In The Dugout: Yankees), for Maple Street Press/Lindy’s, and also wrote the annual roster previews and other features for the magazine until its demise in 2014. She also served as associate editor on MSP’s The Ultimate Yankees Companion, a team encyclopedia for which she wrote many player biographies.
In 2008-2009 she was a staff writer for the Baseball Early Bird, a daily morning email newsletter for baseball lovers that included recaps of the night’s previous games, historical trivia, a snippet of stats, and insightful pieces about International, minor/independent league, Little league, and other forms of baseball.
In 2012-2013 she co-edited the Baseball Prospectus annual tome (with King Kaufman) and also contributed some guest columns to the Baseball Prospectus website.
She has several Red Sox-related editing projects under her belt as well, having co-edited with Bill NowlinThe Fenway Project (Rounder Books, 2004, reissued by SABR) and ’75: The Red Sox Team That Saved Baseball. She contributed biographies of Elston Howard and Gary Bell to The 1967 Impossible Dream Red Sox (Rounder Books, 2006), and was also the book’s copyeditor.
She is or has been a member of the Association for Women in Sports Media (AWSM), the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), the National Writers Union (NWU), and the Baseball Bloggers Association.
Some Baseball-Related Publications:
- In Baseball’s Greatest Rivalry, ed. by Harvey Frommer and Frederick Frommer, “The Duel,” article on May 28, 2000 grudge match between Pedro/Clemens
- Mudville Magazine, Feburary 2003
“Playin’ the Blues,” article on MLB public relations, umpiring and the QuesTec system - Yankees Magazine, the official scorecard magazine sold in Yankee Stadium–various articles:
- Interview feature on 1962 W.S. MVP pitcher Ralph Terry
- Feature article on Luis Sojo career retrospective
- Special piece on “star” spring training instructors
- Baseball Ink magazine
“Baseball Time” September 2000, Vol. 2, No. 2
Other Positions Held
- Staff writer, Yankeebaseball.net–September 2001 to May 2003
Wrote game recaps, post-season previews, spring training reports, and other pieces for front page of this online team site. (Site now defunct.) - Columnist, Yankees Xtreme–June 2000 through October 2000
Provided a weekly column to the official pay-subscription site of the New York Yankees (prior to MLB.com closing the individual team sites.)