In a game that could have clinched second place in the first WPBL regular season for the Los Angeles Queens, the New York Heights exploded for a league-record 18 runs Thursday night, setting or tying several other league records along the way, to pull into a tie with LA for second place and claim the head-to-head-series tiebreaker with the Queens.
In doing so, the Heights locked the Boston Hunters into fourth place, thus setting the matchups for next week’s best-of-three semifinals. The San Francisco Firebells, who clinched first place on Wednesday night, will play, and have homefield advantage against, the Hunters in a series set to begin next Wednesday, Sept. 9. The Heights and Queens, who wrapped their regular season series Thursday night, will face off again in the semifinal set to begin next Thursday, Sept. 10, with homefield advantage yet to be determined. The team with homefield advantage in the semifinals will host Game 1 and, if necessary, Game 3, per the updated schedule on the league’s website.
After the game, Queens manager Eric Young, whose team surrendered not only a league-record 18 runs and a league-record 18 hits in a game with playoff implications but also made a league-record six errors, told reporters the Queens had been “embarrassed.” However, when asked if he thought that homefield advantage was important in a postseason series that would be played in a single ballpark, Young told The IX Sports, “I don’t think it’s much of an advantage. I think we’re all used to the ballpark. I think from the standpoint of locker rooms, I think we’d prefer the home side, but I don’t think that has anything to do with [the game on the field].”
The Heights were only slightly less dismissive, with captain Denae Benites telling The IX Sports that homefield advantage is “good to have just in case you need it … to score runs later in the game, but with an offense like this, I don’t think it matters.”
However, after losing their last two games in their opponent’s final at-bat, including a loss to the Queens on Aug. 29, the Heights were determined to make a statement Thursday night. After the game, infielder Val Perez — who made her first start at third base in this game, ceding shortstop to Emi Saiki — told reporters that the team knew its task against the Queens was winning the season series with the goal of ultimately claiming the second seed heading into the playoffs, but the Heights also wanted to get hot heading into the postseason. “We didn’t just want to win,” Perez said. “We wanted to make a statement. … Our intent was very different today.”
Per Perez, the team held a players-only meeting in advance of Thursday’s game in which they “talked about how we’re a hell of a lot better than our record shows, and we’ve been not really losing games but giving them away.”
There was certainly a difference sense of urgency between the two teams Thursday night — a tone set, in part, by the managers’ choices of starting pitcher. For the Heights, manager Rocky Henley sent Rakyung Kim, New York’s opening day starter and the team leader in innings and starts, to the mound on just three day’s rest. For the Queens, Young went with two-way slugger Jamie Mackay, who last pitched nearly two weeks earlier, had not started a game on the mound all year, and brought an 11.88 ERA into Thursday night.
Young explained after the game that, realizing that the Heights were his team’s most likely postseason opponent, he didn’t want to give New York extra looks at his top starters in this game. Instead, he used the game to get extra looks at, and give extra reps to, pitchers he hadn’t used in a while: Mackay, Amira Hondras (who had made just one prior appearance on the mound, a week earlier) and Isabella Villarreal (whose only prior pitching appearance had come a day before Hondras’s).
Young said he will give his projected playoff starters — Ayami Sato, Ayuri Shimano and Michelle Roche — “dress rehearsal” appearances in LA’s final regular season game on Saturday against the Hunters. Henley, meanwhile, said that Kim, who threw 77 pitches over 3 1/3 innings in this game, said she was “good to go” on short rest and will now have at least six days off before the semifinals.
Kim retired the first five batters she faced and kept the Queens off the board for the first two innings, which was enough time for the Heights to jump out to an 8-0 lead on Mackay, who pitched better than her final line suggests.
Queens catcher Maggie Foxx told The IX Sports after the game, “I thought Jamie had a really good firm fastball with some good movement on it and I thought her curveball and her changeup looked good, as well. Her changeup was some of the best I’ve seen from her. I think she was hitting her spots. … Ton of weak contact. Lot of good groundballs, and that’s what we want out of our pitchers.”
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Unfortunately for the Queens, many of those groundballs were well-placed. Mackay started the night by striking out the Heights’ top two hitters, Natsuki Yonetani and Denae Benites, but 10 of the next 12 batters singled. Mixed in among those was a fielding error by Queens third baseman Caitlin Eynon, who cut in front of shortstop Ayuri Shimano on a groundball by Heights designated hitter Kylee Lahners with two out and one on the first only to boot the ball and set up RBI singles by Perez and Saiki. In the second, a wild pitch and throwing errors by Shimano (on a relay home) and Mackay (on an attempted pickoff at second base), contributed to New York’s six-run inning.
By the middle of the second inning, all but one of the Heights’ hitters had either singled, scored, or both, with first baseman Claire O’Sullivan having gone 2-for-2 with a run scored and an RBI, and Perez having gone 2-for-2 with two RBI and a run scored.
In the third, Mackay issued her only walk of the night to open the inning, then three batters later was finally, mercifully, driven from the game when Denae Benites crushed a 72 mile per hour fastball in her wheelhouse 375 feet out to left field for a three-run home run. That home run, Benites’s 10th, once again tied the Heights captain with Kelsie Whitmore in their ongoing home run race. It also pushed the score to 11-0 Heights before the Queens’ ninth-place hitter, center fielder Mo’ne Davis, had even made her first plate appearance of the night.
The Queens almost got back in the game as Kim began to tire and her control began to waver the second time through the order. LA scored three in the bottom of the third with the help of a walk and a hit by pitch and Eynon making amends for her earlier error with a two-run single. They then picked up three more more in the bottom of the fourth, loading the bases against Kim, then plating all three runners against reliever Alyssa Zettlemoyer, with relief pitcher Hondras delivering a two-RBI base knock to close the gap to 11-6.
But the Heights got three back in the top of the fifth against Hondras and Villarreal, batting around for the second time in the game. Benites started things off with a double and went to second on a pickoff throw by Hondras that got past Shimano, the second time that had happened in as many innings. After a walk and a hit-by-pitch earned Hondras the hook, Perez greeted Villarreal with a two-RBI single, pushing her total to four RBI on the night. Villarreal later walked in another run to make it 14-6 New York.
The Queens got one more when catcher Maggie Foxx led off the bottom of the fifth with her first WPBL home run (then nearly missed first base when her helmet fell off as she approached the bag). After the next two batters reached base, however, Henley called Claire Eccles in from center field to relieve Zettlemoyer, and it was all Heights the rest of the way.
With Heights closer Jaida Lee sidelined by an ankle injury (see below), Eccles, the soft-tossing lefty knuckleballer, turned in perhaps the most dominant outing by any pitcher this season. She faced the minimum over three hitless innings, stranding the two runners she inherited and erasing the only one she allowed, a leadoff walk in the seventh, via a game-ending double play. With one exception, a groundout by Eynon, she struck everyone else out, tying, in three innings, the single-game WPBL record of six strikeouts set by Lee over 3 2/3 innings on Aug. 22 and tied by Kelsie Whitmore over five innings on Aug. 28.
Benites told reporters after the game that, when Eccles took the mound, she told her catcher that her knuckleball was “feeling good” and that she wanted to use it more. So the two of them “mixed it in there as much as we could,” drawing comments from the hitters in the box about Eccles’s “disgusting” stuff.
Meanwhile, the Heights, on their mission to “finish” the game, added four more runs in the top of the seventh against Villarreal on singles by Saiki (3-for-4 with a walk on the night) and second baseman Madison Willan (3-for-3 with two walks), and home runs by Yonetani (3-for-6), her second, and Benites, an opposite-field shot for her 11th, setting the final score at 18-7.
That second home run put Benites back atop the home run leaderboard alone for the first time since Aug. 22. After the game, Benites told reporters she “reset” her approach after striking out on a fastball way above the strike zone in her first at-bat. She didn’t make another out the rest of the night.
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On the game, the Heights captain went 4-for-5 with two home runs, a double, a hit-by-pitch, a stolen base, and six RBI, the last tying the WPBL single-game record for RBI set and tied by Whitmore in consecutive games three weeks ago. Benites twice came to the plate needing only a triple for the cycle, but had to settle for a second home run instead. After the game, she told The IX Sports that the elusive triple was not on her mind in those at-bats (there has not been a triple in the WPBL this season).
In addition to the Heights’ 18 runs and 18 hits setting WPBL records, the combined 25 runs scored by the two teams in Thursday night’s game shattered the existing record of 21 set in the Heights’ 13-8 win over the Firebells on Aug. 6.
The Heights and Queens, now tied for second place with identical 7-7 records, each have one game left in the regular season, but the Heights hold the tiebreaker (which is indeed head-to-head record, as Heights manager Henley confirmed to The IX Sports after the game). Thus the Heights’ magic number to clinch second place in the regular season, the second seed in the postseason, and thus homefield advantage in their semifinal against the Queens, is one. The only scenario in which the Queens can take second place is if the Heights lose to the Firebells tonight and the Queens beat the Hunters on Saturday. However, that combination is far from unlikely.
Injury and roster news
Heights relief ace Jaida Lee rolled her right ankle in a collision with a teammate in practice earlier this week and was seen in a walking boot and on crutches on Thursday night. Manager Rocky Henley said Lee won’t pitch tonight but will be day-to-day going forward. Henley seemed optimistic that, with roughly a week to heal, Lee could be available in the postseason.
Queens two-way outfielder Thaima Maximiliana has left the team to join the Curaçaoan national team, a prior commitment that the Queens knew about, manager Eric Young told The IX Sports. Maximiliana has been replaced on the roster by 18-year-old outfielder Addisyn Baird, who joined the team in practice “about a week ago,” per Young, started in left field Thursday night, and went 1-for-3 with a walk and a run scored.
Maximiliana will not return this season. The 19-year-old opened the season as the Queens’ primary left fielder, starting six of LA’s first nine game at the position (plus one in center field and one at designated hitter), but served primarily as a pitcher over her final four games with the team, making three pitching appearances, her only start during that stretch coming on the mound. On the season, she hit .240/.321/.400 in 28 plate appearances with one home run and five strikeouts. On the mound, she posted a 7.88 ERA (against a league average of 7.40) in eight innings with seven walks and three strikeouts.
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Notes
Liz Benn, a former baseball operations and development executive for the Mets and Major League Baseball who had a prominent role in the WPBL’s draft, served as the color commentator on Thursday night’s ESPN broadcast and will do so again Friday. Benn, who also has extensive experience as a pitcher, has tremendous insight into the game and familiarity with the players in the WPBL.
Thursday was Pride Night at Robin Roberts Stadium, which makes it particularly timely that journalist Frankie de la Cretaz published a story in Xtra* on Wednesday about the WPBL’s relationship with sponsor Olivia Travel, which bills itself as “the travel company for LGBTQ+ women.” Per de la Cretaz, that relationship exists in the long tradition of LGBTQ+ companies supporting women’s sports.
