• Coming soon…

    My photos and write-up of opening day at the new Yankee Stadium. Heading back to Massachusetts, will get the pics uploaded when I get there!

  • April 15, 2009: Moving the Fences In

    So today was the day that MLB honored Jackie Robinson, an annual event on April 15th that has been growing bigger every year since the retirement of Robinson’s #42 throughout all of baseball (except for those players who were still wearing it, like Mariano Rivera). Today every player in the majors (and even the umpires)…

  • April 13, 2009: Bash Brother, Interview with Dale Tafoya

    Dale Tafoya is the author of “Bash Brothers: A Legacy Subpoenaed” — which I reviewed here on “Why I Like Baseball” back on December 14th, 2008. The book reminds readers of a lot of very significant facts about the early days of the Steroid Era which are being quickly forgotten in the onrush of debate…

  • Breaking news… sort of…

    We interrupt our regularly scheduled broadcast of Welcome Back Baseball with this announcement. My fiction writing and my baseball writing don’t often coincide, but they did recently when I wrote an erotic baseball novel for a company called Ravenous Romance. They are an ebook publisher, and … voila! It’s not yet live on Fictionwise or…

  • April 7, 2009: No Bailout Needed

    Today’s post in our week of special piece Welcoming Back Baseball is a guest post by my good friend Patrick Hughes, who is a devoted Giants fan living in San Francisco. Today the Giants are having their own Opening Day and Patrick has been texting me updates from the ballpark. But here’s a piece he…

  • April 6, 2009: Baby Photos

    Welcome back baseball! Here at Why I LIke Baseball, this week will feature new content every day in our special welcome back baseball week! Herewith, post #2 of the celebration! I promised photos of the New Yankee Stadium, and so I’ve uploaded them to my Flickr account. Here are some of the highlights: Click on…

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