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My 2004 Interview with Jim Bouton
Perhaps it’s a bit macabre, but the thing that motivates me to dig out my old notes and interview transcripts from 2000-2005 is when a player or coach I interviewed dies. I suppose it is inevitable that a bunch of middle-aged and older men I talked to ~20 years ago would be reaching the ends…
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New baseball science fiction short story (free to read)
I have a new short story, free to read online at SABR.org! It’s a piece of near future science fiction told from the point of view of a female baseball pitcher making her debut on the mound at Fenway Park. It’s one of the few times I’ve gotten a chance to mix my baseball writing…
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Playin’ the Blues: Umpiring, MLB Public Relations, and QuesTec
Today I’m re-posting an old relic, mostly because I know you will all find it hilarious to see how antiquated the state of baseball technology was 20 years ago. I wrote this piece for Mudville Magazine (now defunct), after attending a session on umpires and technology at the SABR convention in 2002, when the QuesTec…
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The Karma Series
The Washington Nationals have won the World Series and the nation could not be happier.
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2019 ALCS Games 4 and 5: Tale of Two Nights
I’m writing this in the car on the way back to Massachusetts after the Yankees slayed the dragon known as Justin Verlander. It’s 2:30 in the morning, and this dark drive would be very different if they had lost the game. We did this drive the night Joe Torre’s career as a Yankee ended, with…
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The Women in Baseball Panel at #SABR49
The Women in Baseball Panel at #SABR49 Wow, has this panel has grown in stature as the field of women in baseball has grown. I was on this panel myself at a SABR convention back in the 2000s… over ten years ago. (I retired from playing women’s baseball when I turned 40, so it had…
Why I Like Baseball
AN ONLINE JOURNAL OF BASEBALL ENTHUSIASM, by CECILIA TAN
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.
Cecilia Tan
Writer