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SABR 54: Nine Things I Learned
One of the highlights of my baseball year every year is the annual SABR national convention, which is held in a different city every summer. Not only are there dozens of presentations of research on every conceivable topic from Tommy John surgery to stadium design to the life of Japanese beer sellers, SABR usually pulls…
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WPBL Opening Game
Rain delayed and complicated the game, making it a scrappy, sloppy, hard-fought effort, but really, could there be a more apt metaphor for the struggle to launch a women’s sports league in the midst of These Times? Today, August 1, was Opening Day for the WPBL, the Women’s Pro Baseball League. I watched the game…
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Flag Day (2024 World Series Game 3)
Well, the Yankees often provide us thrills on the field, but this is about how they provided me and 80-ish other folks a thrill that was literally on the field. I was one of the flag handlers for the National Anthem on the field yesterday. I don’t know when the “giant flag in the outfield”…
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Adios El Tiante
I was lucky to meet Luis Tiant many times, because he was so easy to meet if you were around the Red Sox. He was not shy of the public, and was one of most outgoing and friendly people I’ve met in professional baseball. The first time I met him was when I took a…
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Book Review: Why We Love Baseball by Joe Posnanski
I have not had the time to do a lot of book reviews here on the blog in the past ten years or so, but when I saw Joe Posnanski was titling his latest book Why We Love Baseball, I knew it would be a moral imperative for Why I Like Baseball to review it.…
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SABR 51: Chicago
It’s been a few years since I had the time and brainpower to write up one of these recaps of a SABR convention! Of course there were no conventions for a few years in the pandemic, so last year’s one in Baltimore had been delayed twice. This year was Chicago, where we returned to the…
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