The Red Sox home opener is scheduled for Friday.
It may be way too early to gloat, but the Sox are ahead of the Yankees by a half game.
When that first pitch is thrown against Toronto, writer Lois Shea plans to be there.
She'll be attending with members of her own club.
I met Karen in a workplace scuffle over the sports section.
It was late March, hard on the cusp of baseball season.
We were both hungry for news of our Red Sox.
Karen and I shared a history - and spoke a language - that most of our co-workers did not.
RBIs, perfect games. 1978. 1986. Buckner. Dent.
We imitated Fisk's home-run wave.
Our co-workers thought we'd gone mad.
A week or so later, when the Sox opened at home, Karen and I played hooky and headed for the pub.
They had a TV so big you could smell the infield grass.
It was April, that season of joy and possibilities, and we didn?t leave until the last player left the field.
The Chicks who Dig Baseball Club was born.
That was 1990. This year, we will hold our fourteenth annual meeting on Friday, April 9 -- Opening Day in Fenway Park.
We don't play hooky anymore. We have boldly declared Opening Day a quasi-religious holiday that justifies work stoppage.
And we meet, by tradition, inside the hallowed walls of Fenway.
We saw Nomar's Boston debut in 1997.
In '98, the Sox went into the bottom of the ninth down by five.
They rallied.
And when Mo Vaughn hit a grand slam to win it, it was "Joy to the World" and this could be the year!? It wasn't.
Two years ago, we watched with growing panic (Red Sox fans are big on growing panic, even in April) as Pedro gave up a ghastly eight runs in three innings. They ended up losing, 12-11.
Over the years, The Chicks who Dig Baseball Club has expanded.
We've enrolled my 91-year-old Aunt Mary.
She can recite Sox batting averages from the 1930s. The waitress at our local diner, who loves the poem "Casey at the Bat." My eight year old daughter has joined, so has Karen's sister.
Women make up a decent percentage of baseball fans. But Chicks who Dig Baseball are still viewed as a charming anomaly. A lovely curiosity.
Guys in New England are expected to have Ted Williams' lifetime batting average encoded in their genetic material.
But women, well, if you understand that a 6-4-3 double play means that the ball was fielded by the shortstop, dished to the second baseman and then thrown to first - you earn instantaneous respect.
In Fenway, men will propose to you for knowing how to calculate an earned run average. Really guys, this is way too easy.
I fell in love with baseball - just like the boys in my neighborhood did - in the year of Carlton Fisk's 12th-inning miracle.
I leapt off the couch screaming - and woke up my father, who understood the value and magic in letting a nine-year-old stay up to watch the game.
I grew up playing baseball (okay, the modified version called softball, but basically the same game.)
I still play. I've thrown thousands of pitches, fielded hundreds of ground balls, wear scars that recall collisions at home plate.
I understand baseball's nuances, its beauty, its poetry.
Understanding knowing
But there's an almost-reflexive assumption that Chicks don't Dig Baseball. That we're just not interested.
The day Joe DiMaggio died, I was watching ESPN with my daughter, when the announcer said something like: "Tonight, fathers tell their sons, and grandfathers tell their grandsons about the Yankee Clipper . . ." I know I wasn't the only person in America telling a daughter about Joe DiMaggio.
One home opener not too many years ago, Karen and I invoked the "recent childbirth exemption" clause of the Chicks who Dig Baseball bylaws.
We convened the annual meeting in Karen's living room instead of at Fenway.
Her five-month-old son napped on the floor in a tiny Red Sox uniform. We settled in for the team introductions.
And then this happened: A woman's voice came over the P.A. system at Fenway Park. Her name was Leslie Sterling. She was the Red Sox' new public-address announcer.
The mighty and echoing voice of Baseball in Fenway was... a Chick.
In a way, her voice made us part of baseball. We might not be on the field, or in the dugout.. But that was a woman introducing our Red Sox to the opening day crowd. Now batting, number 42?
Karen pointed at the television, speechless. There were tears in her eyes.
