Why I Like Baseball

AN ONLINE JOURNAL OF BASEBALL ENTHUSIASM, by CECILIA TAN

  • SABR 40: Seymour Medal Panel

    The Research Process: Seymour Medal Winners Panel Dorothy Seymour Mills, David Block, Tom Swift Official description(s): Magnolia Chapter member Ken Fenster moderates a discussion with Dorothy Seymour Mills, David Block and Tom Swift about the ups and downs of the research process, from the formulation of original ideas all the way through to publication. The…

  • Today’s Baseball in Tweets

    Nghh. Got in at 1am last night thanks to rain delay & extra innings and just could not get up for the Black Sox panel this morning. #sabr40 # Supposedly some nifty new revelations about the Black Sox and Joe Jackson were revealed today, but I needed sleep. Fill me in #sabr40 # Why does…

  • SABR 40: New Technologies in Baseball Panel

    New Technologies in Baseball Panel Measuring ball flight using Sportvision’s PITCHf/x, HITf/x, and FIELDf/x Trackman’s Doppler Radar Technology Official description: Alan Nathan moderates a discussion of the latest developments in Sportsvision’s PITCHf/x, HITf/x and FIELDf/x, and TrackMan’s radar technology used to measure ball flight.

  • SABR 40: awards and John Schuerholz speech

    Here we are at the SABR Awards Banquet. The eating is mostly over with, and now president Andy McCue is reading off the results of various awards that were given earlier this year, including some to high school students for historical society prizes and the like, and working up to the Seymour Medal. We’ve just…

  • SABR 40: day two wrap up (Braves game)

    Yesterday before dashing for the bus to the ballpark, I actually managed to see a little more than half of Robert Fitts’s presentation on Babe Ruth and Eiji Sawamura, the 17 year old pitcher who struck the Babe out and became a national hero. The young pitcher had forfeited his future in academia by taking…

  • Today’s Baseball in Tweets

    One of the best pro panels ever. Bobby Cox, Phil Niekro, Marke Lemke, Ron Gant, spoke at #sabr40 Recap: http://ow.ly/2m1DJ # Did Mantle's famous homer travel 565 feet? Alan Nathan says it *might* have: http://ow.ly/2m39C # More analysis: are outs on the bases worse than others? Is hitting with RISP random or a skill? Today…

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