BY JOAN WALSH | My daughter, Nora, is a fifth-generation girl baseball fan. In my family baseball fever is inherited matrilineally: My mother and her mother and her mother before that were crazy Brooklyn Dodgers fans. I was born the season the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles, conceived the very month Walter O'Malley announced his betrayal, as though my mother needed a surrogate to replace her beloved team. I grew up rooting with her and my grandmother for their hapless New York Mets and loathing my father's indomitable Yankees. Growing up to be a writer, I took their fanatacism to its logical conclusion, and I write about baseball every chance I get.

Nora went to her first game at 3, on Mother's Day. Since then we've averaged more than a dozen games a season. When she was 6, my best friend and I took her to Arizona for San Francisco Giants spring training. We loved it: the intimacy of red-brick Scottsdale Stadium, the players' proximity and friendliness, the instant camaraderie with everyone, this great tribe of die-hard baseball fans. But it was expensive, and I couldn't afford to make it a tradition.

It turned out I didn't have any choice. As March approached the next year, Nora watched longingly as pitchers and catchers reported to Scottsdale, and wondered why we weren't going. On TV we saw the blue sky over Scottsdale Stadium, the gray-green cacti standing alert in the clear Arizona spring. Nora began to pester me. "Why aren't we going to spring training, Mom?" The next thing I knew I was making reservations, paying too much for plane tickets and hotels and taking time off work I couldn't afford.

The problem with a tradition is it becomes what you do, whether you want to or not. And this year, when spring training came, I didn't entirely want to go. The week before we left, work was hectic and money felt tight. Plus, I was still hungover from the previous season, when I went on a baseball bender, going to 45 games. No less a Giants booster than the team's manager, Dusty Baker, had to tell me to get a life. When I told him at the season's end that I was thinking of cutting short a trip to Italy because the Giants might go to the World Series, he scolded me: "There'll be other World Series! You can't plan your life around what the Giants do!"

But tradition is tradition, and I had an 8-year-old I couldn't disappoint. "We go to spring training every year," she told a schoolmate proudly the day before we left. There was a hint of a boast in her voice, and I began to worry about her sense of entitlement to this pricey spring ritual: the nice hotels, the time away from school and the good seats that go with my press credentials. I left for spring training wondering if all that privilege was creating a spoiled child -- not teaching her the lessons about life that baseball had taught me.

Certainly Nora's childhood baseball experience has been very different from my own. I didn't even go to a game until I was 9 or 10, when I saw the Mets play the Pittsburgh Pirates. It happened to be Roberto Clemente night, in honor of the great Puerto Rican right fielder. Sitting high up in the cheap seats, where my mother and grandmother always sat, we were the only white people for miles. The stands were full of Puerto Rican fans, most of them men, and it was strange but thrilling. Within a few innings my mother was practicing her frayed high-school Spanish, the men were feeding us peanuts and we were all shouting, "Viva Roberto Clemente" when he came to bat. When my mom took a courtesy nip from a flask of rum, our assimilation was complete. I was crazy about my mother that night; even then I knew she handled the culture clash in a way most white suburban women wouldn't have, an openness she instilled in me.

N E X T+P A G E: Baseball's big lessons on race