AG24's last post before the big weekend!!!!

This will be my last post before I make my big Oakland debut. My goals for the weekend are simple: I want to wave a flag, bang a drum, and meet Stomper. Stomper is the Shit! I've dreamed of this trip for years!!
  This afternoon I heard a poem written and read by Jack Buck on the Cardinals rain delay It was probably the 1st thing I ever heard that summed up exactly what baseball means to me. My grandfather and my dad were both hugely instrumental in my life as a baseball fan. My grandpa would send me A's clippings from the news papers and my dad would take me out every weekend to practice hitting and throwing. I knew I'd be the 1st professional female baseball player. I lost my grandfather when I was 16 and my dad died when I was 18, so this poem really hit home for me I'd like to share it here because I think everyone should read it:
  "It's the great American past time; baseball.
It's not just a game invented for athletes who can run from home to 1st in 4 seconds,
or throw a ball 90 miles an hour,
or hit a ball over the fence
It's a game made for kids and played by kids and those who still have a lot of little kid inside them,
and it's more than just a game.
More than anything else baseball is memories,
Memories pressed between the pages of my mind.
It's every kid who ever went to bed with a transistor radio tucked beneath their pillow listening to the game and pretending to be asleep when their parents came in to check on them before the parents whent to their own bedroom to finish listening to the game.
Even more than all that, it's our own "Field of Dreams,"
We are all Kevin Costner playing catch again with his departed father.
That's why to me, or any other baseball fan, the story isn't about baseball, or corn fields, or a wish come true, it's about family.
The real pull is father/child.
Through out this century, baseball has grown into a painless means of brining a brace of generations together smoothly.
Remember how much fun it was to hit your dad's pitching and watch while he chased the ball?
What made all these memories was the sum of all those baseball sensations,
divided by 2,
a father and his child.
There is still nothing anywhere to beat.
I don't know about you
But I'd give anything to play catch
Just 1 more time
With my dad.