Why I Like Baseball

AN ONLINE JOURNAL OF BASEBALL ENTHUSIASM, by CECILIA TAN

  • June 26 2006: Dodging Raindrops

    “I had an experience yesterday that I have never had before in my life: seeing a game at Yankee Stadium with empty stands. Oh sure, when I was a kid we often went to games that were half-full. Even Dave Righetti’s no-hitter on a sweltering July 4th had ten thousand seats empty. But these days,…

  • June 11, 2006: Clean-Up Spot (That Time Me & Larry Lucchino Picked up the Garbage at Fenway)

    “Bill Nowlin and I were at Fenway today to pass out flyers for SABR (Society for American Baseball Research) and recruit new members. (If you are into baseball history or love stats, you should join at www.sabr.org.) We had credentials for both games, so after the first game ended we were just supposed to wait…

  • May 31, 2006; Walking Wounded

    “If you haven’t been paying much attention lately, you can be forgiven for looking at the standings this morning and finding the New York Yankees tied for first place with the Boston Red Sox. After all, the Yankees are the walking wounded, aren’t they? And they are playing the best-record-in-baseball Detroit Tigers, no? While the…

  • May 27 2006: Now I Remember

    “Just in time for Memorial Day, summer is here with a vengeance. We had huge thunderstorms yesterday, the humidity went through the roof, and today it hit eighty degrees. Just in time for my first baseball practice. I had forgotten what it was like to stand in the outfield, with not a hint of a…

  • May 17 2006: Tall Cold One (Randy Johnson Interview)

    “Randy Johnson has struggled of late, so I thought it would be worth revisiting a conversation that he and I had at the end of spring training. Given Johnson’s toughness as a competitor, the problem is more likely mechanical than mental… (interview follows)”

  • April 27, 2006: MVP! MVP!

    “Tonight, Alex Rodriguez will be handed his 2006 Most Valuable Player Award in a pre-game ceremony. He was previously the first MVP to ever be traded during his reign. The words “best player in the game” can be placed in a sentence with his name without hyperbole or exaggeration. So why is he still in…

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