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Traveling the Bambino Road: Day Five
Day Five: March 10, 2003 Today was a day of extremes, from the high tech luxury suites of Ted Turner to the splintered simplicity of Thomas Bell, from the eight lane madness of the Atlanta interstate “connector” to the backroads of pecan and peach country. Turner Field is one of those snazzy new baseball palaces,…
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Traveling the Bambino Road: Day Four
Day Four: March 9, 2003 And on Sunday, she rested. Well, not really, but I did relatively little. I only drove about two hours today, from Macon to Atlanta, and who knows, maybe tonight I’ll actually get eight hours sleep, since I’m not driving to another distant locale. My day started when I woke before…
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Traveling the Bambino Road: Day Three
Day Three: March 8, 2003 I cried at Joe Jackson’s gravesite today. But I didn’t figure out why until I was at Ty Cobb’s. But I’ll get to that later. The day dawned frigid and gray. Thirty nine degrees again. By the time I wended my way across Greenville to Joe Jackson Memorial Park, a…
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Traveling the Bambino Road: Day Two
Day Two: March 7, 2003 I woke to steel gray skies and 39 degree air temperature today. Brrr. My first stop of the day was the Baseball America offices in Durham. There I met up with fellow SABRite Cliff Gardner who accompanied me to see the Durham ballparks. The two parks are a study in…
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Traveling the Bambino Road: Day One
Day One: March 6, 2003 When I arrived at Boston’s Logan airport this morning, the roads were crackling with fresh ice and the forecast was for snow. When I stepped onto the tarmac three hours later at Raleigh-Durham International Airport, the air was moist with balmy rain. Folks here tell me it’s unusually cold for…
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Looking Back on the ALDS and 2002
This is the story of how I went to New York for Games 1 and 2 of the ALDS in 2002, and spent most of the time in my car. As you all know, the Yankees won the first game and lost the second (though they had their chances), and no miracle occurred for them…
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