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October 20, 2008: The Improbable Dream
Baseball in 2008 as a haiku: “Devil” was struck out Thrown out of the Rays team name World Series here we come You can’t make this kind of thing up. The team that has been so bad for so long, the perennial butt of jokes, finally not only has a winning season, they win the…
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October 17, 2008: Goodnight, Tom Tresh
What follows is an edited transcript of my interview with Tom Tresh, done in Spring Training 2004. So who was Tom Tresh? He was the Derek Jeter of his generation of home-grown Yankees. In his rookie season, 1962, he won the shortstop starting job out of spring training as Tony Kubek had to leave for…
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October 9 2008: Pennant Eve
So, the Red Sox and Rays are getting ready to have a pennant showdown, and I find myself getting very antsy that there has been NO BASEBALL for the past several days. I know this new schedule is supposed to boost the TV ratings of the various playoff series’, but it going to be the…
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October 8, 2008: Hold that Tiger!
You can Save Tiger Stadium. This from the Old Tiger Stadium Convervancy: Reports of Tiger Stadium’s demise are greatly exaggerated. For over a year The Old Tiger Stadium Conservancy has been quietly working on a plan to preserve the entire playing field and a significant portion of the beloved old ballpark. (See what is still…
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October 2, 2008: Nine Questions about the 2008 Postseason
So, since the Yankees are out of it, and I find myself without a real rooting interest, I am looking at the postseason like if a daytime soap opera suddenly decided to wrap up its run with a prime-time mini-series. All questions will be answered! All the suspense hangs in the balance! Here are the…
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