In a League of Her Own

Hector Segovia had never paid attention to baseball. His daughter's infatuation is exposing him to it more and more. After she spent an afternoon at RFK Stadium, watching the Mets beat the Nationals, Rosalina came home and turned on the New York Yankees vs. Boston Red Sox. She studies how the second basemen perform, she says.

Hector has begun watching over her shoulder. He has learned to appreciate "how Sammy Sosa played in Chicago," he says, and now that the Dominican player has come to Baltimore, he expects to start tuning in to the Orioles.

Soccer is in their blood. But his 10-year-old daughter is bringing baseball into their living room.

"Rosi," Cynthia Reyes calls to the team captain. Cynthia is behind the bench, practicing her batting swing, and she needs a quick refresher. "Rosi!"

Rosalina watches the Powell Panthers bat, her small fingers curled through the dugout's chain-link fence. After one last glance, she walks toward her friend and starts coaching in the quiet, confident voice that Coach B admires as true leadership. "She's not loud. She's not bossy," he says. "The kids respect that."

"You put all the weight -- where?" Rosalina asks, and Cynthia looks confused. Rosalina reminds her about bending her knees and feeling the weight concentrate in her thighs. She reminds her how to check the bat for plate coverage and how to line up her knuckles.

"Level swing," Rosalina says, kicking out her foot and circling an imaginary bat all the way around her body. "Remember," she admonishes, "don't hit down. You want to swing level."

The two girls are close friends who pretend sometimes to be cousins. Together they joined Scholastic's Spy Five Club and received a package with a detective book, edible paper, edible ink and a juice-box camera. "We spy on people," Rosalina explains.

Last year, when the girls were in fourth grade, Cynthia played soccer, but after watching Rosalina on the diamond, Cynthia switched, too. This is her first year playing baseball.

Cynthia takes another practice swing.

"And hit from here to here," Rosalina reaches out and defines the strike zone. "Don't go for the ones down here."

Sometimes the girls on the team get bored and distracted and start chanting cheers, boogieing along with a dance they invented. "I said-a, Brrrr," they yell. "It's cold in here. There must be some Panthers in the atmosphere." Immediately their teacher, Jennifer Geoffroy, will call out their names, shake her head and scold, "You're a baseball player right now. You're not a cheerleader."

Rosalina's gaze never wavers. Her fingers curled through the fence, she ignores the dance and concentrates on the game.

If it's true that marriage is inevitable -- and Rosalina is not convinced -- she will wed SpongeBob SquarePants. More certain is her plan to become a dog groomer, she says, "or the first short person to be a professional baseball player."

(Listening in, Rosalina's mother, a dental assistant still wearing her blue scrubs, shakes her head and groans, "Hmmm," but says nothing more. Respectfully, Rosalina ignores her.)

That gender, not stature, may prevent her from someday taking Jose Vidro's spot in the Nationals lineup has never occurred to Rosalina. She has watched, again and again, the 1992 movie "A League of Their Own," about the all-female baseball team, even though each viewing requires her to battle for control of the remote with her foot-taller seventh-grade sister.

Rosalina wins every time and then revels, as though watching for the first time, when the women start hitting home runs.