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April 17 2001: Tonight I Love Baseball
If you’ve been reading “Why I LIke Baseball” for a while, you know where my team allegiance lies. If you haven’t, it’s no secret I’m a lifelong Yankees fan, born in New York City, raised in the Nettles-Reggie-Munson era, and avidly following the recent championship dynasty in the Bronx. But what I’m discovering this season…
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April 2 2001 – Opening Day: Part Two: The Game
Kudos to whoever wrote the script for today’s Opening Day show, because it couldn’t have been better. If I were a theater critic, I’d say it had equal parts poignancy, laughter, drama, action, and a bang of an ending! It was the first time I’d ever been to Opening Day, and I must say it…
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April 2 2001 – Opening Day: Part One: The Day Of The Fan
For those of you who had to miss Opening Day at Yankee Stadium, I decided to bring you a minute by minute recap of the entire day. It’s in two parts, one that’s just about the actual game, and then this one… 9:05 am — I woke up to the smell of bacon cooking in…
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March 24: Close Enough to Touch (Yanks At Phillies)
Our last game of the trip, right in nearby Clearwater. This was the field where, last year, I almost blacked out when Derek Jeter walked by. Well, having had my close encounter with Jeter for the year already, I figured my health was in no danger this time around. The weather was perfect, sunny, clear,…
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March 23: All The Way To/From Texas (Yanks at Rangers)
It’s a two hour drive from Crystal Beach to Port Charlotte, which meant we had to get up quite a bit earlier than we were used to in order to arrive in time for BP at 10am. Yawn! My parents had to be on a plane back to Jersey that day, and Heather and Julian…
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