Why I Like Baseball

AN ONLINE JOURNAL OF BASEBALL ENTHUSIASM, by CECILIA TAN

  • Sept 2 2000: What I Did On My Summer Vacation

    (This column originally appeared at www.yankeesxtreme.com, Yankees Xtreme. Reproduced here by permission of Ultrastar.) For our summer vacation this year, after taking in a few games at Yankee Stadium, my boyfriend and I loaded up our car and headed for The Jersey Shore. We figured there was the baseball part of the trip, and then…

  • August 29 2000: A Night With The Baby Bombers

    I think I have met the Yankees’ biggest fan. He’s not a Bleacher Creature, not an ANSKY guy, and not the fella in the upper deck who bangs the frying pan for good luck. He’s ten years old, his name is Andrew, and he loves the Staten Island Yankees. Yeah, Staten Island. I finally got…

  • August 13 2000: Why Don’t I Like Junior?

    Seattle played the Yankees recently, and beat the Bombers pretty bad. I, like a lot of people in baseball, was thinking, gee, this team actually seems better this year, despite the loss of marquee star Ken Griffey, Jr. What’s up with that? It was this time last year that I was sitting in the stands…

  • August 12 2000: When Your Friends Aren’t Yankee Fans

    (This column originally appeared at www.yankeesxtreme.com, Yankees Xtreme. Reproduced here by permission of Ultrastar.) It’s hard to be humble when you like the Yankees, isn’t it? We’ve got bragging rights for being the current World Champs, and there’s also the fact that the Bombers are “the most storied franchise in sports history.” As such, even…

  • August 7 2000: More Time on the Diamond

    Well, my boyfriend and I and a large group of friends have been playing wiffle ball every weekend. And man, is it fun. I think it’s especially fun for the baseball fans in the group. I think for us, playing wiffle ball is sort of akin to those guys who go out and play those…

  • August 3 2000: Diamonds & Plastic Wiffle Ball Takes Over

    If you’ve been reading my column on Yankees Xtreme, you already know about corwin’s wiffle ball obsession. Well, actually, when I wrote about it on Xtreme (read it HERE), it was only an interest, a curiousity. But now I can definitely say it’s an obsession. He imagines himself pitching while he’s trying to go to…

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