Cecilia M. Tan

Cecilia M. Tan established herself as a science fiction/fantasy writer and editor in the 1990s, but found her passion for baseball kept bringing her back to that subject. She began writing about baseball in her mid-thirties, and started the blog Why I Like Baseball in 1999-2000, making it one of the oldest baseball blogs (the term “blog” hadn’t even been coined yet!). Many freelance gigs as writer and editor followed, including writing for both Yankees Magazine and an early (pre-MLB.com) website owned by the Yankees, YankeesXtreme. In 2005 she became the Yankees beat writer for Gotham Baseball Magazine, served as a staff writer for the Baseball Early Bird newsletter, and edited the Baseball Prospectus Annual (twice). She also edited the annual spring training preview magazine Yankees Annual under three different publishers. Since 2011, she has served as Publications Director for SABR (Society for American Baseball Research), where her duties include editing the Baseball Research Journal and The National Pastime and SABR’s publishing program which includes BioProject books and other publications.

She also played baseball, first as a reserve player for the New England Women’s Baseball League (NEWBL), and then for several years with the Pawtucket Slaterettes, the oldest continuously operating all-female baseball league in the country. Her experiences as a player also led her to such opportunities as serving as a baseball hitting instructor at the AAU/Girl Scouts sports camp in Orlando, Florida, and playing in the starting lineup of the Women’s Baseball Marathon in Tucson, AZ. Her presentation on the Women’s Baseball Marathon won a SABR-McFarland research award at the 2004 SABR national convention in Cincinnati.