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March 21: Bombs Away (Tampa Bay at Yankees)
Oh no, rain again? I got up the next morning and it was nice out. But as the day went on, the day got grayer and colder. Brrr. Isn’t this Florida? We had definitely been in little danger of sunburn since that one day at Wide World of Sports. The weather was as unsettled as…
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March 18-19-20: Rain=Baseball Drought
Three days in a row of dissatisfaction with baseball followed. First, on Sunday March 18 the Yankees played the Red Sox in Fort Myers, a game I could not get tickets to no matter how I tried. Last year’s game I tried to buy phone, and they told me the Yankee game was the one…
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March 17: Fencing (Yanks at Blue Jays)
After seeing the Braves in Disney, we drove to a little Cuban restaurant we knew of in Kissimmee, stuffed ourselves with black beans, rice, shredded beef, and the like, and then drove to the Tampa area. We were staying in my parents’ retirement house in Crystal Beach, like we did last year. They still aren’t…
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March 16: Old Friends Yankees at Braves
Green as I may be in the world of baseball, I’m not a rookie anymore. This is my second trip to spring training, so I knew a little of what to expect. And even though I had never been to see the Atlanta Braves play before, I found myself on familiar ground. The Disney Wide…
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March 26: Spring Training 2001
One of the great things about being a baseball writer is that you never lack for a metaphor, a symbolic hook, or an irony. I just sat down at my computer, having gotten off an airplane from Florida an hour ago, and what do I see outside my window here in Boston? Yes, my friends,…
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March 4 2001 : Mythic Proportions (The A-Rod-Jeter Thing)
I must be cranky today, because I’ve decided I’ve heard more than I want to hear about the supposed friendship and/or feud between Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez. Normally I eat this kind of stuff up. Not tabloid-ish gossip about players’ private lives, no. I don’t care if David Justice’s ex-fiancee is a gold-digger or…
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