Each of his eight sons eventually juggled shifts in the local brass factories with school work because that was just the way of it then for immigrants. Nobody complained. Everyone knew their place in the struggle to get by. Well, except the eldest boy. The troublesome one.

"At eight years old, " wrote Bernard Crowley in Baseball's First Stars, "Roger began to sneak off his family chores to play baseball. His parents, who believed in only hard work, were appalled."

Roger Connor was a strapping 15 stone, six foot three behemoth by the time he hit adolescence, and the lad had a head full of crazy notions to boot. All the Connor children liked to play sandlot baseball in the neighbourhood but Roger's problem was he preferred the sport to everything else. The crazy kid even began thinking he could make a career out of this hitting and catching malarkey. Two Irish parents working every hour God sent couldn't quite handle a wilful child neglecting his responsibilities to constantly play this curious American game.

At 14, he departed the family home acrimoniously to go and try to find a spot on a professional team. The fanciful dreamer ended up becoming the greatest home run hitter of his generation.

When San Francisco Giants' outfielder Barry Bonds hits his 756th home run early next month and surpasses Hank Aaron's record for most long balls in a career, he will be taking a title that Connor once held for quarter of a century. That it was the great Babe Ruth who eventually slugged his way past left-handed Connor's then immense tally of 138 back in 1921 summed up his standing in the annals of the American pastime. Even in an era when one third of all players were either Irish-born or of Irish descent, and the nationality's dominance led some to believe they had some sort of genetic advantage for the sport, Connor's achievement marks him out.

"Connor was a monstrous first baseman for that era, yet with impressive speed and mobility for a big man, " wrote Mike Attiyeh, a baseball historian.

"He stole 244 bases since they began counting them in 1886, his seventh major league season. Connor's power became a serious topic of conversation and awareness after he became the first player to belt a pitch out of the original (New York) Polo Grounds located on 110th street and Fifth Avenue on September 11, 1886.

The prodigious blast came against fellow Hall of Famer "Old Hoss" Radbourn, and it was belted well over the rightfield fence and onto 112th Street."

The length of that home run gave rise to the most oft-told anecdote about the Connor legend. A group of wealthy businessmen sitting in the stadium that day was so taken by his brilliance they passed a hat around and held an impromptu collection to reward the New York Giant for the show.

At that point, he was taking home the then enormous sum of $2100 a year and he splurged on a $500 gold watch with the bonus. That kind of money was far removed from the factory floors where his parents had wanted him to spend his life.

The funny thing is he had to make his peace with home before his pro career ever took off. Not long after he first left the family, his father Patrick had died. Roger returned to Waterbury, took a job in a factory in order to help his mother and kept his eye in playing amateur baseball. He only returned to playing for pay when his mother gave him permission to do so.

His initial claim to a place in the sport's record books came with one swing of the bat in 1881. Playing for the Troy Trojans in upstate New York, he hit the National League's first-ever grand slam home run. It was in Troy too that he met his wife Angeline. He'd grown too big for his uniform and she was a seamstress at the factory where he went to be measured up for a new one. They were together 45 years. After leaving the majors in 1897 with a superb career batting average of .317, he bought a minor league team in his native Waterbury that his wife helped him run.

Having hit more home runs than any other player over the course of his 17 years as a pro, the amazing thing is Connor's feat was almost immediately forgotten once he disappeared from the national scene. When Ruth overtook his tally in 1921, the newspapers of the time incorrectly credited Gavvy Cravath as the previous title-holder. Connor died in 1931 and remained hidden in the margins of the game's history until Hank Aaron deposed Ruth in 1974. The brouhaha surrounding that changing of the guard led journalists to properly revisit the decades before Ruth.

Somewhere along the way Connor's reputation was redeemed and within two years, he was posthumously voted into the baseball Hall of Fame.

In recent weeks, the quest for less contentious ways for journalists to cover the looming apocalypse of Bonds cementing his controversial place in the record books has brought Connor's name back into the spotlight. From the son of a Kerryman to Ruth to Aaron to Bonds, the line will soon be drawn.