It's scary to think that I've been living and dying by the White Sox about as long as some of the younger guys on the team have been alive, but it's true. I have lived in Seattle since December 2005, but I was born and raised in the Near West Chicago suburbs. I've been a Sox fan since birth, but I could take or leave baseball until the summer I was 12 - 1983. The more the Sox won, the more I watched, and by the end of the season I was hooked. I've been following them more or less religiously since that time. I was there when Harry Caray was still in the broadcast booth with net in hand, and when the Sox were winning ugly. I was in the stands chanting "Save our Sox" when they nearly left the South Side because the ownership wanted a new stadium. I was lying in bed, wearing headphones, listening to the radio coverage from Springfield at midnight, and woke the house up when I shouted in joy because the Sox were staying. I was there during the years when the team's best hitters were batting .225, and each time they've made the playoffs since 1983. I watched Ozzie Guillen be a rookie player and a rookie manager, and I was watching when he managed them to the World Series Championship in 2005. All that having been said, why am I writing this when there are other blogs out there? Because there are things female fans have to deal with that male fans don't, and I think it's a good idea to have a woman's opinions represented. Woman aren't generally supposed to like baseball so if you, as a woman, do like baseball, people usually believe it's because you just like looking at the cute guys in the tight pants, or that you must have a crush on one of the players, or something else along those lines. If you deny that, you're accused of lying or of being in denial. If you try to be fair, and point out that since you are a woman you'd be rather worried about yourself if you didn't notice good looking men when you see them, it's the same as an admission of guilt. Therefore, as a female fan, your opinions aren't generally taken seriously, even if they are based on facts and logic. Well, here I can state my opinions and the reasoning behind them and hopefully people will realize that women can be baseball fans because they love the game of baseball rather than because they are infatuated with the players. In addition, my first college major was Journalism. I originally wanted to be a member of the sports media, either in broadcasting or in print. This is my opportunity to get to do something along those lines. By the way, I changed my major to computer programming for a variety of reasons. One of the biggest reasons was because I didn't want to be sent into the locker room to interview players. After all, I may be a woman, but I am also a lady. Also, I've come to the realization that most of the sports radio and television broadcast content you hear is just the broadcasters stating their opinions. Now, the broadcasters do have sources that the average fan doesn't, but in this day and age, the average fan has access to more information than ever before. Let's face it, there are only so many times you can repeat the scores and highlights. If you want people to stay tuned, you need to have something new to tell them. Finally, in my family baseball isn't passed on father to son. It's passed on mother to daughter. My maternal grandmother liked both the Sox and the Cubs, and she passed away in March 2006, about a week shy of her eighty-second birthday. Because my grandfather passed away about 6 years before she did, she watched quite a bit of baseball in her last few years. She got to see only one World Series Championship in her life, and it was the Sox in 2005. Because of that, I am deeply grateful to the White Sox organization for 2005. My mother is a Sox fan, I am a Sox fan, and my daughter is a Sox fan. So what does this lady Sox fan believe? First of all, I believe: Ozzie Guillen has forgotten 10 times more information about baseball than I'll ever know. Jerry Reinsdorf must be a good guy if he was willing to give Ozzie Guillen a team capable of winning a World Series, just because Ozzie asked for it. Ken Williams is a shrewd businessman who knows what he's doing. Even if I disagree with them, I am willing to trust the baseball judgment of all of the above, because they know more than I. Why do I love baseball? Because you could take a player in uniform from 100 years ago and put him next to a player in uniform from last year, and they'd look almost identical. The rules also haven't changed very much since the game was first conceived. In short, baseball is timeless. I also love the physics of baseball. How can a pitcher take two steps and accelerate a baseball to 95 MPH? How can a hitter take a round bat and hit that round ball 420 feet in the opposite direction? How can a pitcher make the ball go straight just far enough and then drop like it rolled off the edge of a table? There's science involved here: rotation, overcoming inertia, velocity, aerodynamics. That's cool, people. That's where this lady is coming from.

Music in general, choral singing, cartoons of any kind, Shakespeare, J.K. Rowling, Peter David, Jim Butcher, anything Sci-Fi