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October 19 2000: Fireworks and the Postseason
I watched the Yankees clinch game 6 of the 2000 ALCS from the living room of a rental house in Orlando, Florida–a mere two blocks, actually, from the house where I watched Game 4 of the 1999 World Series last year (Roger Clemens’ dominant masterpiece that presaged his amazing 15 strike out win just a…
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October 14 2000: Radio Is The Lifeline
(This column originally appeared at www.yankeesxtreme.com, Yankees Xtreme. Reproduced here by permission of Ultrastar.) I’ve always loved the radio, ever since I was a kid. My mother always kept the radio on in the car when we went places. Back then, 77 WABC was a music station, and we’d sing along to popular tunes while…
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Sept 30 2000: No Fear
(This column originally appeared at www.yankeesxtreme.com, Yankees Xtreme. Reproduced here by permission of Ultrastar.) I was driving through Connecticut on a business trip last week and I almost pulled over at the side of the road and wept, as the Yankees were suffering another crushing loss. But then someone hit a home run and I…
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Sept 16 2000: Very Superstitious
(This column originally appeared at www.yankeesxtreme.com, Yankees Xtreme. Reproduced here by permission of Ultrastar.) So when some friends who were going to come with me to a game recently had a change of plans, I ended up with extra tickets. These happened to be tickets for a recent Yankees-Red Sox game at Fenway Park, and…
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Sept 9 2000: It’s All Because of My Dad
(This column originally appeared at www.yankeesxtreme.com, Yankees Xtreme. Reproduced here by permission of Ultrastar.) Major League Baseball released a poll recently showing that some large percentage of women consider going to baseball games an ideal family activity. I guess I would be one of them. My whole family is Yankee fans, and I love getting…
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September 8 2000: Anticipation
It’s been forever since I added an entry here, but this is not because I have stopped having baseball adventures. No, it’s that I’m now writing a weekly column for Yankees Xtreme, and a lot of my material is going there, and also I’ve just been busy as a knuckleball catcher lately. I’ve been to…
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