Why I Like Baseball

AN ONLINE JOURNAL OF BASEBALL ENTHUSIASM, by CECILIA TAN

  • June 25, 2008: At SABR in Cleveland

    Well, here I am in Cleveland! Apologies in advance for typos in this report. My trusty Macintosh laptop, which has, shall we say, high mileage on it, finally went kaput on the way here. I am forced to post this via he wacky WebTV thing in my room. I’s keyboard is horrible, I can barely…

  • June 8, 2008: “Making Of” A Game Story

    These days every movie or TV show has a “making of” documentary to accompany it. And every sport is analyzed up and down, from the drafting of talent to the construction of the roster, from the strategy employed on the field to examination of each and every play that happens. So I thought it was…

  • June 7, 2008: Comeback Kids

    I was in the house for a wild, wild win in the Bronx today. Um, by “in the house” of course I mean “at Yankee Stadium.” The scoreboard counting down the number of games left by increments went from 51 to 50 today, and at various points in the game we were treated to video…

  • June 1, 2008: For the Birds

    I have now initiated my friend Brian (let’s call him Brian…) to the fun and wonder of Major League fandom. I took a trip to Baltimore to take him to his first major league game, a tilt of Orioles versus Yankees. The reason I went all the way to Baltimore for this is that the…

  • April 6, 2008: ‘Fantasy’ Baseball

    I recently found my notes from a panel discussion I did a few years ago on the subject of baseball at a science fiction convention. Why, you may wonder, were they having a panel at a science fiction convention about baseball? Well, first of all, have you ever noticed how many of the great baseball…

  • April 1, 2008: Being There

    I cried a lot yesterday. There are a lot of reasons why, and they all come back to baseball. I drove to New York City Sunday night, had a lovely dinner with my good friend Lori in the Bronx, who shares the same birthday with me. We have a tradition of going to Opening Day…

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