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May 15, 2008: Inside The Park
You never know what you’re going to see when you go out to the ballpark. Tonight I went out to the snazzy new Stadium in the Bronx to see the Yankees take on the Minnesota Twins. I did not expect to see Phil Hughes pitch a no-hitter. And he didn’t. I did not expect to…
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May 12 2009: Goodnight Professor
Given that Boston has just laid to rest one of its icons in Dominic DiMaggio, I thought I’d share with everyone some excerpts from an interview I did with him back in 2003, back when the Sox story was always one of heartbreak. We talked about a lot of heartbreakers in the interview, by necessity.…
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Tipping Points
There’s been much hoo-hah (that is a technical term, you know) in the media these days about the tipping of pitches. In particular, of course, it’s in response to Selena Roberts’ book on A-Rod, in which she posits a league-wide conspiracy among A-Rod and his sycophants and cronies on other teams, who would tip pitches…
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April 28, 2009: Truth in Advertising
So I was poking around on my Facebook account today, and an ad along the righthand side of the page caught my eye, as the graphic accompanying it was, shall we say, GRAPHIC! In fact, it really looked like Roger Clemens and Derek Jeter in a really compromising, or at least suggestive, position. This was…
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April 26, 2009: Monumental Look
At last, some of my photos of the Home Opener at Yankee Stadium from April 16th. They would have been up sooner, but things keep happening like, oh, the Yankees arriving in Boston and playing games that take five hours to finish… So we started with the line to Monument Park. The very very very…
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April 25, 2009: Slug fest
We were really looking forward to a tight pitching duel at Fenway today, as AJ Burnett and Josh Beckett faced off. As I write this, Jonathan Papelbon just walked Derek Jeter in the top of the ninth, in which Boston has a 16-11 lead. There have been 28 hits in the game so far, and…
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