Why I Like Baseball

AN ONLINE JOURNAL OF BASEBALL ENTHUSIASM, by CECILIA TAN

  • July 15 2001: I Got Called Up Today (!)

    I picked the wrong morning to sleep through my alarm. The reason I slept through it today is because after corwin got into bed, at around 6 AM, he snored. Elbowing him and rolling him over didn’t solve the problem, so I moved to the bed in the guest room for the duration of the…

  • July 7 2001: Sky’s The Limit

    There are any number of pleasures unique to summer for those of us in the northeast–fresh corn bought from a roadside stand and eaten uncooked, sweet and messy in the car, searching for shells on an Atlantic beach with bubbly seawater seeping warm through our toes, nighttime concerts in the public square, block parties, yard…

  • June 9 2001: Have Glove, Will Travel

    I just realized something that makes me very happy. My arm doesn’t hurt. Over the past three weeks I’ve spent a grand total of 14 out of the last seventeen days on the road, which (as my ear infection and thrown-out back can attest) can be tough on a body. Lucky for me, two of…

  • May 20 2001: Another Baseball Day

    So I have what is probably one of the stupidest baseball-related injuries one can get. This whole week has been cold and rainy and having us wonder if summer is ever really going to arrive in New England. But Saturday was sunny and warm, and I got together with some friends who have been bitten…

  • May 1 2001: Scorecards, Part Two

    Before my trip to spring training this year, I decided to improve my old scorecard design. Although the old one was good for most regular season games, I wanted another line or two for pitchers names, and space to write up to four batters for each line in the lineup. So now there is room…

  • April 27 2001: Comings & Goings

    I parked my car at Yankee Stadium recently, when I wasn’t going to a game. Why? Well, where else can you park your car in New York for eight hours for only eight dollars? I had driven down to the city from Boston to do a reading for the New York Review of Science Fiction…

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