In a League of Her Own
Rosalina Segovia Doesn't Just Swing at Stereotypes. She Knocks Them Out of the Park.

By Darragh Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 25, 2005

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.

Approaching the diamond, Rosalina, four teammates and their teacher pause behind the Nationals dugout. Welders are still spraying blue sparks over left field, and construction debris still lines the concourses. Along the third-base line, Mayor Tony Williams practices throwing out the first ball.

Rosalina stares. He's doing everything wrong: pushing at the ball, starting in front of his ear, performing no follow-through or flick of his wrist. "He throws like this !" cries the team's left fielder, Paris Nicks, who is 11. Both girls -- who have been well taught and hurl the ball with an impressive, Pedro-Martinez elbow-hinge and wrist-whip -- begin mocking Williams's form.

"Does he play baseball?" asks a stunned shortstop Angelo Mark.

"We're gonna work on turning double plays," Byron Ewing says at practice one afternoon.

His infielders have gathered around the pitcher's mound, and Ewing -- they call him "Coach B" -- explains the situation: There's a runner on first. The next batter hits a grounder to second, and the baseman scoops it up, tags the bag and throws to first. "What's that called?" Coach B asks.

Except for Rosalina, the infielders look perplexed.

"Force-out," she answers.

Coach B nods, and they start practicing, with Rosalina at second, Angelo at shortstop. The two field, tag and hustle the double play to first. Rosalina is the only girl playing a competitive infield position.

Soon, a white moon rises in the darkening sky, and the air turns chilly enough for goose bumps. Still the kids practice -- cheating the afternoon, going till twilight, playing baseball until it's almost too dark to see.

Last year, when she was in fourth grade, Rosalina brought home a paper for her parents to sign. She wanted to play soccer.

Her father said no. A Salvadoran electrician who has lived for 22 years in Washington and who has been, along with Rosalina's uncles, a serious soccer player, Hector Segovia recalls thinking, "She was too little and skinny."

"They'll hit you," he told his daughter, one of the tiniest children in her grade, "and you won't be around for it to happen again."

Undeterred, when her school announced it was forming a coed baseball team, Rosalina brought home another paper for her dad to sign, even though she had never picked up a bat, never known anyone who played baseball. Salvadorans, as her father notes, are not infielders or outfielders or cleanup hitters. "We play soccer," he says. "Baseball is not in our blood."

But determination is. In his Petworth living room, the couches slipcovered in green, the walls a deep yellow and the floor tiled a glossy moss, he speaks in Spanish about his youngest child. Rosalina listens, wide-eyed and dwarfed, like Lily Tomlin in an old comedy skit, in the oversize chair next to him.

"I couldn't talk her out of being interested in this sport," he says, still in the boots and sweatshirt he wore to work 14 hours ago, at 6 a.m. "What was I going to do?"

So he signed.

The children go to William B. Powell Elementary School, at 14th and Upshur NW, in the changing Petworth neighborhood. Ninety percent of the school's families make $10,000 to $20,000 less than Washington's $45,000 median household income. Eighty percent speak a language other than English at home. Their playground is asphalt, and many of the students' elbows sport bright red gashes and scars from falls taken at recess.

In the summer of 2003, Rosalina's principal, Lucia Vega, arrived from a school in San Jose and was horrified by the graffiti shellacking Powell's swing sets and slide. She was furious with the gang members who hung out on the hill across the street, just above the grassy baseball field that doubles as a neighborhood dog park, waiting for nightfall.

Vega organized a cleanup of the playground and locked its gate at night, and then was "shocked," she says, to discover that "some of our children did not know how to bounce a ball and how to catch it." So she got Field of Dreams, the organization sponsoring Powell's baseball team, to donate 100 red kickballs and 50 jump-ropes last year. Within weeks, nearly every ball and rope had disappeared, secreted home by children bewitched by the exotic equipment.

Rosalina lives a few blocks from school, in a brick rowhouse she shares with her mom, dad, grandmother, grandfather, three older siblings and a blue-and-yellow parrot named Saroya who drinks coffee and snores when she sleeps. Two German shepherds, Rocky and Chacal, guard the front and side yards.

Neither of her older brothers plays sports: The oldest, Ruben, is 16 and looks constantly alert and thoughtful. If he's near the ballfield when practice ends, he swings by to escort Rosalina home. (She's never allowed to walk home alone.) He carries a heavy chemistry text under his arm and talks about the Frederick Douglass memoir he is reading for school.

"He studies all the time," their father says. "He doesn't want to be like me, dirty, going to work at 6 a.m. until 4 in the afternoon. He wants to become a lawyer, or a teacher."

The second-oldest, Luis, is 14 and more amenable to working with their dad -- because it earns him money to buy video games, the only games he plays.

Rosalina shares a room with her sister, Graciela, a seventh-grader who plays basketball and dreams of becoming an artist. On their door hangs a sign: "GIRLS ROOM. NO BOYS/CHICOS ALLOWED. ONLY FATHER ALLOWED."

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.