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If I Voted for Manager of the Year
As a member of the Baseball Bloggers Alliance, I am putting in votes for season awards. You’ve already seen my vote for AL Cy Young Award (Zack Greinke), but for me the end votes are sometimes not as important to me as people’s reasons for voting, or not voting, for various candidates. When it comes…
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Classic Red Sox
Well, so much for my postseason prediction that the Red Sox would manhandle the Angels. The Red Sox strengths and Angels weaknesses should have matched up entirely in Boston’s favor. But ultimately it was necessary for several key Sox to perform up to expectations for it to work. David Ortiz’s oh-fer and Papelbon’s blown save…
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ALDS Game 2: Twins at Yankees
There were so many twists and turns in this game that the only reasonable way for me to recap it is to tell it chronologically. Let us begin with the weather, which was balmy and humid for October. With possible rain showers forecast, the fans had jackets but most were carrying them. The intense wind…
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2009 ALDS Game One: Twins at Yankees
Everything went according to the Yankees’ script tonight at The Stadium. Derek Jeter added to his postseason resume, CC Sabathia was dominant, the Twins were a plucky but not overly troublesome opponent, the bullpen was a well-oiled machine, and Alex Rodriguez got off the schneid. I drove to New York today from Boston to make…
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If I Voted for the Cy Young Award
Going into the final week of the season, I began to think about the major season awards. I’m a member of the recently formed Baseball Bloggers Alliance, and each member blog will be opining our picks for awards like MVP and so on, so I’ve been thinking about this more than usual. As of a…
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Dodging a Rocky Road
Oh, this time of year is fun. I’ve been getting vicarious thrills by rooting for the Rockies to win the NL Wild Card, and all of a sudden they are in Los Angeles playing the Dodgers with a chance to actually grab the NL West crown. Cool, eh? I like the Rockies for a number…
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