Why I Like Baseball

AN ONLINE JOURNAL OF BASEBALL ENTHUSIASM, by CECILIA TAN

  • And now, Baseball Gift GETTING…

    The group of folks I have Christmas Eve dinner with aren’t the types to say grace, so I said it to myself while I was filling wontons by hand. My personal “grace” went something like this: Dear God, Creator, Universe, thank you for this winter holiday that brings all friends and family together every year…

  • Baseball Gift Giving: Your Suggestions

    So, I find myself with three baseball-loving people to buy gifts for in particular this year, my father, my brother, and my nephew (my brother’s 4-year-old son). Since the Yankees have just won the World Series, there’s NO END of World Series tchotchke I can buy them. Or at least, for my dad and brother,…

  • Talking Baseball with Baseballisms

    Joe over at Baseballisms interviewed me recently about The 50 Greatest Yankee Games, a book I really would like to revise now that there is another championship to add to the tally… He recaps the interview in text here: http://baseballisms.com/podcast-author-cecilia-tan.html and then you can listen to the podcast of it, which runs about an hour…

  • World Series Victory recap video

    There’s a lot of great postseason footage and coverage out there to look at. But I really liked this short video from the Star-Ledger. Let’s see if I can get embedding to work:

  • 2009 Champions

    The Yankees’ road to their 27th World Championship was a little like what I went through today to finally witness their crowning, requiring all the resources of technology and media at my disposal in order to follow the game. When the first pitch was thrown, I was somewhere above 30,000 feet, probably over the Washington…

  • 2009 World Series: Game 5 Recap, sort of

    So, I’ve been sitting here for more than half an hour staring at the computer screen instead of writing my game recap. It isn’t that the Yankees lost tonight, it’s… well, yeah, okay, it is. They lost. No, I’m not having flashbacks to them losing four in row to the Red Sox in 2004. No,…

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