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March 15, 2008: Duncan Donuts, and other Tampa tales
Shelley Duncan, the player who landed at the center of the controversy after his slide into Rays 2B Akinori Iwamura, had the following to say after the game. “It was a normal baseball game. We could just play baseball.” When asked if conversations at first base were any different than usual, he said no, there…
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March 13 2008: Live from Tampa
It’s a gorgeous day in Tampa, Florida, today. Sunny and warm and dry, not humid or hot, nor chilly or rainy. And with Spring Training games about half done with, it was a perfect day for some diversion. CRYSTAL CLEAR Much of today’s hullabaloo revolved around Billy Crystal, who lived a dream for his 60th…
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March 8, 2008: Spring Rolls
It is raining, freezing and cold here in the North, but I am heartened as I spend this Saturday afternoon listening to Spring Training broadcasts from Florida. As it turns out, it’s chilly and rainy in Florida, too, which is not really what I want to hear, but, well, there are many things about the…
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February 21 2008: Blood Portents
As I was looking at the rather hematic smudge in the sky last night, it occurred to me that the last time I’d seen the “blood moon” eclipse was in 2004. Curt Schilling’s bloody sock, too. And the Sox themselves won the World Series. And, as it turns out, they won the most recent World…
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February 18 2008: Taking One for the Team
It seems like Roger Clemens, and baseball as a whole are just going to continue to “take it in the nuts” so to speak as a result of the Mitchell report, so former major league pitcher Mark Littell is right on time with his new product, The Nutty Buddy. Now, I thought a Nutty Buddy…
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December 23, 2007: Goodbye, Lefty
I just heard the news that Tommy “The Wild Man” Byrne passed away. I visited him in March of 2003 and spent a couple of hours at his home talking baseball and in particular recapping that hreatbreaking Game Seven he pitched against Johnny Podres in the World Series. Since Phil Rizzuto died, I’ve been thinking…
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