-
August 2 2000: I Can’t Believe It’s August
Well, if you’ve read the journal entries before this one, you know that for me the off season seemed to take forever. Unfortunately, the opposite is true for the season itself, which is whizzing past me in a blur. Oh, I kept up pretty good in April and May, was glued to the radio/Internet many…
-
July 29 2000: The Quintessential Yankee Stadium Experience
(This column originally appeared at www.yankeesxtreme.com, Yankees Xtreme. Reproduced here by permission of Ultrastar.) I have a dream sometimes. In this dream, a genie gives me the power to transport myself instantly to one place on Earth, any time I want. You know where I’d choose? Not my house or my job. I’d choose Yankee…
-
July 1 2000: Cinema In The Rain
(This column originally appeared at www.yankeesxtreme.com, Yankees Xtreme. Reproduced here by permission of Ultrastar.) I looked at my boyfriend. “You know, the video store closes in five minutes,” I said. “What did you have in mind?” he asked. “We could rent a baseball movie…” He tossed a five dollar bill to me, and I ran…
-
June 21 2000: Tough Night At Fenway For The Yanks AND Me
Man, Red Sox fans can be obnoxious. I always thought it would be worse for Yankee fans if the Sox lost. But no, the average Sox fan greets a humiliating loss like Monday’s 22-1 rout, or the surprising three-home-run wallop of Pedro yesterday, with a kind of morose resignation. It takes all the energy right…
-
June 19 2000: It Worked! Yanks Wallop Red Sox 22-1
Well, last night my team was down, and all kinds of drama, humiliation and heartbreak loomed potentially on the horizon. We were out of first place, suffered an unbelievable loss 17-4 in which our ace got shelled for 9 runs in the top of the first inning and came out of the game after only…
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