In a League of Her Own

Rosalina Segovia Doesn't Just Swing at Stereotypes. She Knocks Them Out of the Park.

The team captain bats second, squaring her feet, lifting her elbows and focusing on the pitch. She has learned to ignore opponents who, in this elementary-school baseball league of mostly boys, mock her and her teammates. "Everybody move in," they'll say. "She sucks."

She swings at the second pitch, thwacking it to the mound and sprinting to first while the pitcher bobbles the ball. "Safe!" shouts the ump. In her next at-bat, she wallops the ball over the second baseman's head.

Rosalina Segovia is a Washington-born girl who wears a bracelet braided the blue and yellow of her family's Salvadoran flag. She is called "the little slugger," and this spring, as captain of the District's coed Powell Panthers, she is mastering America's two great pastimes -- baseball and the art of self-invention.

Salvadorans don't play baseball? Undersized Latinas can't dominate sports?

She smiles with one corner of her mouth and steps back into the batter's box.

"She's tough," says her coach, Byron Ewing, who played professionally for a few years in the Cleveland Indians' farm clubs. "I've seen her take a couple line drives in the chest and not even cry. She shuts the boys up pretty regularly."

In her last at-bat against bigger and stronger Malcolm X Elementary, she smacks it toward the shortstop and, once again, beats the throw to first.

If Rosalina's league had baseball cards, hers would show a grass blade of a girl with long brown hair and a serious, watchful stare. (Her fifth-grade teacher calls Rosalina "a sponge. She soaks up everything .")

She'd be kneeling in her blue-and-gray baseball uniform, with the long pants and belted waist -- just like the major-leaguers wear -- so you wouldn't see her everyday uniform of Tweety Bird socks, SpongeBob jacket and LeBron James II black high-tops. Even her good pair of pink cargo pants sports green grass stains on the knees.

But you would see, across the bottom, these stats:

Team captain. Second base. 10 years old. 4-feet-4. 65 pounds. Bats right. Throws right.

Follow her on a tour of RFK Stadium organized for young players at the beginning of their season, which ends this week. You'll see how seriously she takes those basics of baseball.