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ALCS Game 2 Recap: Lucky Thirteen
Well, I jinxed myself when in my recap of Game 1 of the ALCS I mentioned that a low-scoring pitchers’ duel is so easy to summarize. So of course Game 2 had to be a crazy extra-innings classic full of missed opportunities and twists of fate. It began with A. J. Burnett and lefty Joe…
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ALCS Game 1: Angels at Yankees
The Yankees rode their big horse all the way to the ninth inning, and then handed the ball to the best postseason reliever of all time, while the Angels handed them two gift runs that would be all the ballclub from the Bronx would need to go up 1-0 in the ALCS. The rain stayed…
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Bottom of the Ninth
You could start a club this winter for elite closers whose blown saves sent their teams to early ends. Jonathan Papelbon, Huston Street, and Joe Nathan can start a therapy group. Or maybe they just need one more to make a golf foursome. What people are forgetting is that Mariano Rivera could join that group….
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ALDS Game 3: Yankees @ Twins Sweep
It’s over in Minnesota. The grounds crew is digging up home plate at the Metrodome to carry it over to Target Field, which will be the Twins’ new home come spring. But tonight it was Yankee cleats that crossed it most often. In the end the only real surprise in the Yankees/Twins division series was…
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If I Voted for Manager of the Year
As a member of the Baseball Bloggers Alliance, I am putting in votes for season awards. You’ve already seen my vote for AL Cy Young Award (Zack Greinke), but for me the end votes are sometimes not as important to me as people’s reasons for voting, or not voting, for various candidates. When it comes…
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Classic Red Sox
Well, so much for my postseason prediction that the Red Sox would manhandle the Angels. The Red Sox strengths and Angels weaknesses should have matched up entirely in Boston’s favor. But ultimately it was necessary for several key Sox to perform up to expectations for it to work. David Ortiz’s oh-fer and Papelbon’s blown save…
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