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May 31, 2006; Walking Wounded
“If you haven’t been paying much attention lately, you can be forgiven for looking at the standings this morning and finding the New York Yankees tied for first place with the Boston Red Sox. After all, the Yankees are the walking wounded, aren’t they? And they are playing the best-record-in-baseball Detroit Tigers, no? While the…
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May 17 2006: Tall Cold One (Randy Johnson Interview)
“Randy Johnson has struggled of late, so I thought it would be worth revisiting a conversation that he and I had at the end of spring training. Given Johnson’s toughness as a competitor, the problem is more likely mechanical than mental… (interview follows)”
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April 27, 2006: MVP! MVP!
“Tonight, Alex Rodriguez will be handed his 2006 Most Valuable Player Award in a pre-game ceremony. He was previously the first MVP to ever be traded during his reign. The words “best player in the game” can be placed in a sentence with his name without hyperbole or exaggeration. So why is he still in…
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April 11, 2006: Inauguration
“And thus was the high holy day of The Home Opener celebrated. With sunshine and cheers and an earsplitting flyover. With elder statesman Yogi Berra throwing out the first pitch and the sacrificial lamb of Ambiorix Burgos served up to appease the gods of Yankee superiority. We clamored in the ritual fashion, and our prayers…
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March 30 2006: Yearbook Entry (Last day of spring training)
“Carl Pavano has a sore ass. Boo boo on the bum, sustained when he tripped and fell trying to field a ground ball and made a play at first base the other night. That is the final tidbit of news from Yankee camp this year. As I write this, the Yankee bus is visible from…
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