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DVD Review: World Series 1945, 1946, 1947
Tonight corwin and I continued our time warp through history, watching the next three World Series films in order with 1945, 1946, and 1947. In my mind these three series’ were The Goat Curse Series, Slaughter’s Dash, and Jackie’s First. As the 1945 film begins there is no sound, presumably because the soundtrack was lost…
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DVD Review: the 1943 and 1944 World Series Films
Roll the Newsreels! I began watching the DVD collection from MLB, The Official World Series Film Collection, last night. My friends pooled their money together to purchase it for me as a Christmas gift and I’m finally getting the chance to watch it. As determined by WILBB reader suggestions, I started at the beginning. The…
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Yankees Lineup Predictions
Okay, fans, it’s time to play that Hot stove game we call “guess the lineup”? The Yankees lose two, probably three main starters from last year’s lineup. Matsui is gone, signed with the Angels, Melky Cabrera is gone, by trade, and likely Johnny Damon is gone, since the Yankees say they won’t meet his agent’s…
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So Long Lefty, So Very Long
In honor of Randy Johnson retiring today, I’m re-posting this interview I did with him during Spring Training 2006. He sat in a chair while I stood on my feet and he was still almost as tall as I was. He was one of the figures in that clubhouse you rarely saw the Yankees beat…
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This Moment in (Blogging) History
This has been an interesting decade to be a baseball writer. Once upon a time, in a storied era of American history, sportswriters were the creme de la creme of all writers. New York City had dozens of newspapers and even smaller cities boasted multiple papers, often with multiple editions per day. Newspapers were the…
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DVD Review: The 2009 World Series Film
Title: 2009 New York Yankees: The Official World Series Film Produced by: Major League Baseball The first thing I noticed about this DVD is that it’s really good to be the winner. The clips you see that cycle through in the menu while you wait for your boyfriend to finish folding his laundry so you…
Why I Like Baseball
AN ONLINE JOURNAL OF BASEBALL ENTHUSIASM, by CECILIA TAN
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.
Cecilia Tan
Writer