Why I Like Baseball

AN ONLINE JOURNAL OF BASEBALL ENTHUSIASM, by CECILIA TAN

  • June 28, 2007: Out Standing In a Field (again)

    “Oh, I ache everywhere, but especially in my forty-year-old legs. Slaterettes Baseball season has begun and I feel like I put the “senior” in the “Senior Division.” I played right field two days in a row. (Who the heck put two games in a row on the schedule? Oh, my aching muscles…)”

  • June 3, 2007: Community Values (Dinner on Arthur Ave. in the Bronx)

    “I had dinner last night at Dominck’s on Arthur Avenue, a Bronx Italian-food institution where there is no menu, they only take cash, and there’s an hour wait for a table for dinner on Saturday night. Last night as we climbed the steps up to the waiting room, Doug Mientkiewicz was on the ground being…

  • May 22, 2007: Warming Up

    “Who knew that winning two games in a row would feel so darn good? Maybe it’s like hot and cold. They say if you put one hand in cold water and one hand in hot water, and then put them both in the same bowl of lukewarm water, the cold hand will think it’s hot…

  • April 29, 2007: Odds on Evens

    “One of the baseball adages oft-repeated by grizzled third-base coaches and Little League parents alike is ‘it all evens out.’ Those screaming liners that were caught, robbing a hit, even out by those soft dribblers that the infield can’t get to. Well, Yankees fans and Red Sox fans alike know that the disparity between the…

  • March 10, 2007: Simple Pleasures

    “It was a tidy little game at Legends Field tonight. The Yankees scored four runs in the second, in a nine-man inning kicked off by Alex Rodriguez. Alex had a much better day than Wednesday, tonight playing flawlessly in every respect both offensively and defensively. Also, everyone in the audience–in my section anyway–noticed that tonight…

  • March 7, 2007: Sprung!

    “At Legends Field tonight, people were complaining of the cold. The temperatures were in the mid-sixties, the wind on the cool side. Speaking as someone who left Boston yesterday where it was eight–yes (8)–degrees with a wind chill of minus-thirty, all I can say is: hah! It’s lovely here in Tampa and don’t you forget…

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