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O’Connor hit her homer in a 7-5 win over Carpentry Unlimited, blasting a pitch over the fence in right-center. Junie DeLeo, who has been affiliated with the league for nearly 50 years, said it’s the first time a girl has hit one over the fence in the field at Springdale School. “There was no doubt about it,’’ said DeLeo, who coaches Clairol in the league. “It was a legitimate home run.”
O’Connor, 12, is in her fourth season playing in Springdale. She started when her younger brother, Matt, joined the league.
“She said she wanted to play baseball, too,’’ said her father, Sean. “I said OK, we’ll sign you up for softball. She said no, she wants to play baseball. She’s never played softball. Coaches keep telling her to come over, but she just wants to play baseball. That’s her thing and she’s been doing it for a while.”
“I never really liked softball,’’ Andrea said. “The ball is just too big. It doesn’t feel comfortable, the ball is too big in my glove. All of my friends say that I should switch over and we could be on the same team. It’s not what I want to do.”
She said her home run came on a “plain old fastball,’’ and she was surprised that it went over the fence. “It was a goal of mine to hit one this year, but you don’t expect it,’’ Andrea said. “You swing, and you get lucky.”
O’Connor’s success is hardly luck.The Dolan Middle School seventh-grader won the Stamford Middle School cross country championship last fall, and finished second as a sixth-grader. She also plays volleyball and is one of her team's best pitchers.
“Ever since she was a little kid, she’s been very athletic,’’ Sean O’Connor said. “She’s tall, and she throws hard.”
Her teammates and the entire Springdale league has accepted O’Connor, who is the only girl in the league. “When I first started playing, they looked at me like ‘You’re playing baseball? As I got older, they accepted it,'' she said.
Andrea and Matt, a catcher, give Abercrombie the unusual sister-brother baseball battery. She hopes to play Babe Ruth when she ages out of Little League next year and maybe even stick with baseball beyond that if she can.
“I just want her to be happy,’’ Sean said. “Every time I mention to her that she may have to shift to softball, she tells me no. She keeps telling me she’s going to be the first girl to play in the Major Leagues.”
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