Why I Like Baseball

AN ONLINE JOURNAL OF BASEBALL ENTHUSIASM, by CECILIA TAN

  • April 4 2000: A Battle of Heroes, Old Versus New

    So, last night the Yanks opened their season with a night game against the Anaheim Angels. The national anthem featured a giant American flag that covered the outfield, red rockets shot their glare out of center, and a bald eagle flew down into the stadium to a trainer on the pitchers mound. A friend (whose…

  • April 3 2000: Opening Day Thoughts

    Here it is, my first Opening Day in years and years. Maybe it’s that baseball itself is so much more popular this year than it was during some of the doldrum years (the strike, etc…) or maybe it’s that I’m just so much more aware of it… or maybe it is both… but Baseball Is…

  • Mar 28 2000: Comeback Dreams

    Tom Pagnozzi announced his retirement today. About a week ago Tim Raines did the same. You may not know who both these guys are, but their stories are similar. Both were players who were sidelined by injury or illness last year (Raines by the immune system disease lupus, Pagnozzi by a shoulder injury that required…

  • Mar 26 2000: Thoughts of Spring: Little League

    Spring has come to Boston, and I don’t just mean the temperature got warm. We’ve had some 65 degree days here and there since February, but this weekend people really started taking it seriously. Or, maybe seriously isn’t the right word, because damn it looked like people were having fun. The first thing I noticed…

  • March 22: Right Place, Right Time (Blue Jays at Yankees)

    Another day, another trip to Legends Field, right? Wrong. Because this time the weather finally turned clear! It was still chilly for Florida, but the sun was bright and the breeze snappy as we pulled into the parking lot a good three hours before game time. Surely there was no excuse for the Yankees to…

  • Mar 24 2000: Autograph Hounding 101

    Well, there’s one surefire way to get an autograph, and that’s to buy something pre-signed. But where’s the fun in that? The point is not to have the autograph, so much as to have the record of having been there, in the same place at the same time, as the player himself. That’s why people…

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