When I was ten years old, I was a baseball FANATIC. I played ball every minute I could from the time I was eight. If there wasn't anyone to play with, I threw the ball up and hit it, or I threw it onto the roof of our house to practice catching it.
When I was eight, I wanted more than anything to be a baseball player. When I was eight and a half, I found out that I had the wrong genitalia to be a baseball player (okay, I didn't even know what genitalia were, but I knew I couldn't be a major league baseball player because I was a girl.) Perspective alert: if I had been a boy, it would probably have taken another year or so before I figured out I wasn't going to be Mickey Mantle.
The spring of my tenth year, 1969, my family moved to Chicago. And the most amazing collection of wonderful baseball players were playing in Chicago that season.
