Why I Like Baseball

AN ONLINE JOURNAL OF BASEBALL ENTHUSIASM, by CECILIA TAN

  • Why Baseball is Better than the Movies

    (Originally posted on February 14, 2000, reposted to at new site on December 6, 2008) There are a lot of reasons why I like baseball. I’ve already talked about formative experiences of youth, bonding with my father, and so on. But I think there’s more to it than that, and this has to do with…

  • Born Again in Baseball: Part Three: The Comeback

    (Originally posted February 13, 2000, reposted to new site December 3, 2008) In 1999, corwin and I had been together eight years. Eight years! And now that we’re both in our thirties, we’ve gotten on to a kind of second-childhood kick. (We also took a vacation to Disney World this year.) I decided that, with…

  • November 3, 2008: Not So Risky Business

    To be fair, we recently mentioned a Derek Jeter interview in SI.com which featured much talk about him playing in an EA Sports Video Game Tournament with Tiger Woods. Well, now Alex Rodriguez is in a commercial for Guitar Hero, with Kobe Bryant, Michael Phelps, and Tony Hawk. Ripping off Tom Cruise, no less. This…

  • Born Again in Baseball: Rookie

    (Originally posted February 13, 2000, reposted to new site November 1, 2008) So, how did a young fan of Reggie Jackson, the Year of the Comeback, Bucky Dent, Ron Guidry, and Thurman Munson, a woman who still counts among one of the best days of her life witnessing Dave Righetti’s Fourth of July No-Hitter live…

  • Offseason Blues

    (Originally posted February 13, 2000, reposted to new site November 1, 2008) I never anticipated how difficult the offseason was going to be this year. It’s my first offseason since my return to baseball fanaticism, and I just had no idea it would be this hard to get through the dark months. Oh, sure, in…

  • October 31, 2008: News and Notes

    Baseball season is really over, and the pickings become slim for us information junkies. I’ll be dong my part this offseason to keep things interesting as I migrate my old posts from ceciliatan.com to the new URL here at Why I Like Baseball. So look for a new posting here every day from the old…

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