Why I Like Baseball

AN ONLINE JOURNAL OF BASEBALL ENTHUSIASM, by CECILIA TAN

  • ALCS 2010 Game One Recap

    I’m trying to come up with a reasonable lede for tonight’s game recap. It was such a dramatic, feel-good team win that it’s hard to know what’s over the top. On the one hand, it might play out that this come-from-behind statement in the ALCS opener turns out to be just another leg of the…

  • ALDS Game Three: Wind Swept Evening

    What a lovely night in the Bronx. Beautiful weather, a festive atmosphere, and a fine ballgame that swept the taste of a lackluster September right out of our mouths. I arrived at the Stadium earlier than planned, as the traffic driving from Boston was not nearly as bad as we’d feared. Plenty of leaf peepers…

  • ALDS Games One and Two Wrap-Up: NYY vs Twins

    For the first time in a long time we didn’t have to drive to New York for the start of the postseason. Because the Yankees slipped out of the AL East division lead and “settled” for the Wild Card, they opened on the road. This was lucky since both corwin and I couldn’t get away…

  • Today’s Baseball in Tweets

    Is Jeter actually hurt and just hiding it? Hits .250 off righties this season. @YankeesWFAN @Ledger_Yankees @BloggingBombers @LoHudYankees # Powered by Twitter Tools

  • Zombies are hip

    Zombies are in these days. There are zombies in Jane Austen novels, in movie after movie, and even in romance novels now. Zombies are hip. That’s what I think every time I look back and see the Red Sox are still clinging on without completely fading this season. This is remarkable given the sheer number…

  • SABR 40: This year’s award winners!

    Announcement of the winners of this year’s award winners! Neal Traven, head of the judges, announces that unfortunately neither the poster winner nor the research presentation winner could be present. But he gives a recap of the winners and their topics. (And the poster, which was very beautifully done, was displayed in the back.)

Welcome to “Why I Like Baseball”

“Why I Like Baseball” is the one of the oldest baseball blogs on the Internet, dating back to before the word “blog” existed. (I think it’s slightly older than Jay Jaffe’s “Futility Infielder,” and was slightly preceded by Geoff Young’s “Ducksnorts.”) I first hand-coded the site in HTML 1.0 at some point in 1998-99. (Most of the pre-2000 content has been lost to bit rot.) I had been away from baseball for much of my adult life, but the McGwire-Sosa home run race caught my attention I was underemployed at the time, had just published my first book of short stories with a major publisher, and was taking freelance writing gigs as I could find them, but what I really wanted to write about was baseball. So I took it upon myself to create a website. Back then, the Internet was smaller and less populated, and I soon discovered my little passion project was being read by folks like the editors of ESPN: The Magazine, who published a surprise shout-out to me. My writings eventually led to me writing a book on the Yankees, editing the Yankees Annual, writing for Gotham Baseball, and at one point even creating online content directly for the Yankees themselves.

Author Cecilia Tan with Babe Ruth

Cecilia Tan

Writer