• April 7, 2009: No Bailout Needed

    Today’s post in our week of special piece Welcoming Back Baseball is a guest post by my good friend Patrick Hughes, who is a devoted Giants fan living in San Francisco. Today the Giants are having their own Opening Day and Patrick has been texting me updates from the ballpark. But here’s a piece he…

  • April 6, 2009: Baby Photos

    Welcome back baseball! Here at Why I LIke Baseball, this week will feature new content every day in our special welcome back baseball week! Herewith, post #2 of the celebration! I promised photos of the New Yankee Stadium, and so I’ve uploaded them to my Flickr account. Here are some of the highlights: Click on…

  • April 5, 2009: New Digs

    Welcome back baseball! Here at Why I Like Baseball, this week will feature new content every day in our special welcome back baseball week! Starting with: NEW DIGS Today I set foot for the first time in the New Yankee Stadium. The first thing I did, though was park in one of the old parking…

  • Tuesday at George M. Steinbrenner Field

    It’s the first sign of bad weather we’ve had so far on the trip. Gray clouds and a bare sprinkle of rain. It being St. Patrick’s Day, lots of folks are wearing green. The opponent tonight is the Pirates. This means I just saw a guy dressed as a pirate leprechaun.

  • Web site weirdness

    Apologies for the duplicate posts. Also, my intention was to post live from the games and then after the game consolidate all the posts into one large readable post and delete all the small one liners. For some reason, my web site is not allowing me to DELETE anything. Strange, no? I won’t be able…

  • Web site weirdness

    Apologies for the duplicate posts. Also, my intention was to post live from the games and then after the game consolidate all the posts into one large readable post and delete all the small one liners. For some reason, my web site is not allowing me to DELETE anything. Strange, no? I won’t be able…

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