Why I Like Baseball

AN ONLINE JOURNAL OF BASEBALL ENTHUSIASM, by CECILIA TAN

  • Pride Project: LGBTQ Pride and Organized Baseball: History in the making?

    Those of you who’ve followed my career through my various gigs at writing and editing in the baseball sphere, from the early days of the New York Yankees’ attempt at a website, stints at Gotham Baseball and Baseball Prospectus, to my current position as Publications Director for SABR, may have heard me say this before:…

  • Nine Things About the Yankees 2018 Home Opener

    I couldn’t think of one single thematic thread to tie up the story of the 2018 home opener, so I’m going to fall back on that baseball blog trope of a nine-element list. Nine Things About the 2018 Home Opener: 1. SNOW & RAIN This isn’t the first time we’ve had snow for the home…

  • 2017 ALCS Games 3-4-5 at Yankee Stadium: Impressions

    Writing this in the car on the way back to Boston after three wins in a row at Yankee Stadium. Three raucous, amazing wins. I feel like we’re watching the “baby bombers” grow up before our eyes. At the end of September, I don’t think they were a better team than Cleveland or Houston. After…

  • A Series of Miracles (2017 ALDS Games 3 and 4)

    It struck me as we were walking from the parking lot to the Stadium today, for the second night in a row, that most successful postseason runs appear, in hindsight, to be a string of miracles. Sometimes they seem to be a series of small miracles, other times one or two big miracles come in…

  • The 2017 AL Wild Card Game

    It was very freeing, somehow, to go into a winner-take-all postseason game with low expectations. Or maybe no expectations would be a better way to put it? We were expecting a rebuilding year. We weren’t expecting Aaron Judge. We weren’t expecting Brett Gardner to have a career high in home runs. We got excited about…

  • Heartland of America Post #5, Busch Stadium

    “All the HOK stadiums have a ‘look,’” corwin said upon laying eyes on Busch Stadium. Then he thought for a second. “Well, except for Yankee Stadium. And I guess Kauffman Stadium is unique, too.” I reminded him that Miami had more similarities with the new Yankee Stadium than with Camden Yards, too. Perhaps it would…

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