Why I Like Baseball

AN ONLINE JOURNAL OF BASEBALL ENTHUSIASM, by CECILIA TAN

Category: Baseball Musings

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • February 21 2008: Blood Portents

    As I was looking at the rather hematic smudge in the sky last night, it occurred to me that the last time I’d seen the “blood moon” eclipse was in 2004. Curt Schilling’s bloody sock, too. And the Sox themselves won the World Series. And, as it turns out, they won the most recent World…

  • February 18 2008: Taking One for the Team

    It seems like Roger Clemens, and baseball as a whole are just going to continue to “take it in the nuts” so to speak as a result of the Mitchell report, so former major league pitcher Mark Littell is right on time with his new product, The Nutty Buddy. Now, I thought a Nutty Buddy…

  • December 23, 2007: Goodbye, Lefty

    I just heard the news that Tommy “The Wild Man” Byrne passed away. I visited him in March of 2003 and spent a couple of hours at his home talking baseball and in particular recapping that hreatbreaking Game Seven he pitched against Johnny Podres in the World Series. Since Phil Rizzuto died, I’ve been thinking…

  • August 26, 2007: Family Feud (Interview with Dom DiMaggio)

    “I woke up this morning from a dream that Dominic DiMaggio had passed away. I’m certain this is my brain still working through the loss of The Scooter in recent weeks. I never had a chance to interview Phil Rizzuto, but I did interview Dom DiMaggio not that long ago. So I thought I’d share…

  • April 29, 2007: Odds on Evens

    “One of the baseball adages oft-repeated by grizzled third-base coaches and Little League parents alike is ‘it all evens out.’ Those screaming liners that were caught, robbing a hit, even out by those soft dribblers that the infield can’t get to. Well, Yankees fans and Red Sox fans alike know that the disparity between the…

  • October 12, 2006: Twisted Fate (Baseball, Plane Crashes, and NYC)

    “I saw the news about the plane crash while doing errands with a good friend yesterday. We were walking through Davis Square in Somerville, just as it was starting to drizzle, feeling good about ourselves for having visited the post office and farmer’s market before heavy rain started to fall. As we were passing Mike’s,…