Why I Like Baseball

AN ONLINE JOURNAL OF BASEBALL ENTHUSIASM, by CECILIA TAN

  • September 15 2005: Revival Meeting

    The pinstripe faithful rose up at Tropicana Field on Thursday night at a revival meeting led by newly ordained minister Robinson Cano. The bigtop known as Tropicana Field was thoroughly taken over by the hordes in blue and white who came to have their faith renewed. The first to testify to the miracle of rebirth…

  • August 29 2005: Season’s End (Slaterettes Baseball)

    My league’s season is over now, as kids go back to school and the evenings get shorter. The final two games of the season bookended my vacation, so corwin and I drove together down to Rhode Island for one game, left right from there for New York, made stops at Yankee Stadium and Citizen’s Bank…

  • August 16, 2005: Touching Base (My baseball travels in August)

    My baseball travels have been extensive of late — so extensive that I have not had time to pause and write about all the things I’ve seen and done. Here are some snapshots from the past month in my baseball life. August 1 I went to Cooperstown for the Hall of Fame inductions, which was…

  • July 13 2005: Hit or Miss (More on playing baseball)

    I’m batting .400 on the season. Granted, the season hasn’t been going on very long, but it’s a nice number to have, ain’t it? It probably doesn’t look as good if you see that every out I’ve made, though, has been a strike out. Yes, folks, I feel Mark Bellhorn’s pain. Like Bellhorn, I tend…

  • June 18 2005: Brand New Shoes (Buying spikes)

    I splurged today on a new pair of spikes. Sorry to break your heart, Jeter dear, but I am leaving your sponsor Nike behind, and jumping ship to Adidas. My actual preferred brand would be Reebok. My every day sneakers are Reeboks, after all, and have been since–gulp–1983 or so. Yes, I’ve been wearing the…

  • August 18 2004: Sweet Swings

    It has been a hectic summer for this baseball-loving geek, with far too much going on and not enough time to write about it all. There was the SABR convention in Cincinnati. There was Old Timer’s Day at Yankee Stadium. There was running into Byung-Hyun Kim in a restaurant by chance, the same weekend we…

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