SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — Welcome to a special Baseball Insider, presented by The BIG EAST Conference. It had been 72 years since the All American Girls Professional Baseball League disbanded in 1954. So once the umpires ruled it was time on Saturday night to begin playing the Women’s Pro Baseball League opening game, San Francisco Firebells first baseman Andreanne LeBlanc did not hesitate to head out onto the field and assist the grounds crew in removing the tarp from the infield.
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(Editor’s note: We’ll be back to hoops next week, though we will also continue to cover the Women’s Pro Baseball League. Bookmark here for all our WPBL stories.)
“It’s not just me,” LeBlanc said when I asked her about the decision. “We’re all female athletes, trying to vie for a spot in this world. We were built this way, we were trained this way. If you want to play, you’ve got to get the field ready. You’ve got to pull out the tarp, you’ve got to pull out the scraper … that’s part of our game.”
There were many signposts from the opening weekend of the WPBL that suggest the brainchild of Justine Siegal and Keith Stein has a chance to be a massive success. There are notes of caution, too, and some of the early developments are both at once.
But there may not be a greater indication of the league’s potential than the extent to which every women’s baseball player on hand — and the WPBL has collected an almost unfathomable group of the best players in the world — has been willing to do anything to assure the success and viability of the venture.
That they are doing so within a league run by executives that have made no secret of the sacrifices required, but are prioritizing the player experience and bringing a level of respect to the entire women’s baseball ecosphere, past and present, serves as a bulwark against what we have so often seen in women’s sports: asking the players alone to do too much.
Plant yourself in the hallway of the small pavilion beyond the right field line at Robin Roberts Stadium on Saturday evening, the game’s ability to be played thrown into doubt by an uncooperative weather system, and a century of women’s baseball pulled together to make sure this long road to a pro league wouldn’t veer off course just ahead of the final exit.
The scheduled contest between the New York Heights and the Los Angeles Queens was delayed, but a collective hope for a window in the weather spurred continued activity. Stein and Siegal wore a path between the field and a makeshift back office in the pavilion, and so did players from the Boston Hunters and San Francisco Firebells, assembled media, dignitaries and WPBL Advisory Board members, including, of course, 99-year-old Maybelle Blair.
First overall pick Kelsie Whitmore wandered in, looking for Blair. They, too, huddled in a back room, bobbleheads watching over their conversation as Whitmore leaned close to Blair in her wheelchair, while across the same room, strategic advisor Dave Stewart spoke with his old Major League Baseball manager, Tony La Russa, who was on hand to witness the proceedings.
One league executive confidently declared, after hearing the latest forecast around 5 p.m. CT: “Later tonight, there’s a 0% chance of rain. We’ve waited 80 damn years for this, we can wait another couple of hours.”
The window opened. The game was delayed, but not denied. The sold out crowd didn’t thin a bit, though they did part, Red Sea-style, as Blair was wheeled around the corridors of the ballpark and into position for opening ceremonies. The merch tent simply didn’t have enough inventory for the appetite of fans, a real-life replication of the WPBL’s online merchandise shortages. The very day the league unveiled their uniforms, virtually all of their inventory sold out, and the replenished stock has still not arrived.
A pessimist would focus on the revenue lost. An optimist would focus instead on the demonstrated demand. It was impossible to witness the in-person dedication of fans and players alike and conclude the latter was going anywhere.
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Simultaneously, it was a night where elite baseball players showed off their skills in front of the largest crowds many of them ever played for, and a night where families of those players saw a long held professional dream come true. Imagine if your chosen career simply didn’t exist? Every player in the WPBL honed her skills for years, aided by Baseball For All (it is easier to list WPBL players who hadn’t played in Siegal’s creation than to catalog all who had) and a support structure at home, without anything like certainty that a pro league would permit them to earn a living at their craft. Every single player in the WPBL took off in an airplane they built themselves, not knowing there’d be a place to land.
Though the rain resumed shortly after play began, fans did not take cover, and were treated to a remarkable opener. Ayami Sato, the Japanese ace and a pitcher who could make a claim to be the best pitcher in the world, started for Los Angeles and was uncharacteristically ineffective, allowing seven runs, four earned, over three high-stress innings. Her protege, Rakyung Kim, pitched for New York, and kept Los Angeles largely at bay, though the Queens cut the New York lead to 7-4 by the time Kim exited after the fourth inning.
By then, plenty of history had been logged, hits and misses alike. The first strikeout, yes, and the first error. But the first hit, and two RBIs to show for it, from Maggie Foxx (the first of her three hits on the night) reduced her mother, Jennifer, to what the baseball ubermom described to me later as a fierce bout of “ugly crying”. New York’s Denae Benites delivered a laser beam of a home run over the center field fence. The ageless Meggie Meidlinger threw strikes out of the bullpen, like always, and earned the win for Los Angeles.
It was a night of hits and misses off the field as well, the natural consequence of a league playing its first game. The same night Maybelle the Mascot debuted to raves, the league’s anthem singer, Martha Reeves, left something to be desired. Fans online complained both about the league games appearing behind the ESPN Select paywall, and about the quality of sound and video for those who watched.
From my perspective, I’d note that while the WPBL entered its very first season with multiple national media partners — Scripps, too — leagues like the PWHL and NWSL took far longer to reach that point. For comparison: the NWSL, in its third season, announced a media rights deal with Fox Sports for three games, total — and halfway through the season!
Success will not be measured by perfection, but rather by how quickly the WPBL learns from its mistakes and corrects them. To its credit, the league did not run away from the Reeves viral moment, and announced Sunday that the fifth-inning stretch music will continue to be Reeves’ signature hit from 1964, Dancing in the Street. (The original version, fortunately, not the one she sang live at the opener.)
The rain worsened and no one left, no players complained, the Queens rallied and Foxx, after keeping her team in the game with three solid innings on the mound, tied the game with a lined single to center field. A delirious Jennifer celebrated with the families of fellow Queens Mo’ne Davis and Amira Hondras in the stands high above home plate.
That brought Bella Villareal to the plate for her first at-bat. She was a late addition to the Los Angeles roster this past week, getting the call to come to Springfield the same week she turned 20 years old. Her manager, Eric Young Jr., told her, simply: “This is your moment.”
She took advantage, looked fastball, then crushed a two-run double over the center fielder’s head to win the game. Reflecting on it afterwards in a makeshift interview space that doubled as the same hallway from pregame, just adjacent to the media room and with league officials and stadium personnel rushing back and forth, Villareal looked almost shocked where her week had led her. I asked if she’d processed that in the very first game in WPBL history, she’d driven in the game-winning runs.
“I don’t think so,” she said with a big smile. “Not yet.”
Foxx is also just 20 years old, but she understood how the collective world of women’s baseball, improbably represented in-person on the occasion of the WPBL opener, brought her to this place.
“It honestly feels surreal,” Foxx said during the postgame press conference, another first in WPBL history. “This is something that we’ve all been working towards, culminating with this event, and while it feels like another baseball game, it also feels like something that we’ve been putting in the work for for 70 years now.”
Again, in ways that compressed the time and space of it all, Jennifer rushed to the table in front of the media room which served as the postgame podium, giving Maggie a long hug to celebrate her accomplishment.
As for the winning pitcher? Well, Meidlinger’s parents, Rick and Terri, had arrived at the ballpark at 2:30 p.m. and didn’t eat a thing so as to not miss a moment of the proceedings. So the trio went back to the AirBnB they’ve rented for the duration of the season, Rick’s retirement allowing him to see every moment, and ate a belated dinner, finally in dry clothes.
“I don’t think I got to bed until 2 in the morning,” Rick told me the next day. “We just sat and relived every moment.”
Sunday’s weather was a reward for all who’d lived through Saturday, a perfect breeze through golden hour, balls flying deep into the outfield as the San Francisco Firebells took batting practice prior to the game.
Still, the tasks of the league were never-ending. Siegal, trailed by a handful of young players from Baseball For All, carefully instructed them on the roles they’d play in the pregame ceremonies. “You’ll be the ball girl tonight, I promise,” she said to one of her charges, who beamed.
Maybelle Blair, too, addressed the crowd. She overcame four broken ribs just to be at the park.
“I watched so many of these girls, when they were little girls, and all they wanted to do was play baseball,” she said into the microphone, parked in her wheelchair at home plate. “They’re playing it … one of your coaches almost lost her opportunity. One of the managers, Rocky [Henley], can you believe it didn’t pass her by? She got to make it.”
Henley, who pilots the Heights, could scarcely believe it herself. And the league is filled with players who are still coming to terms with this reality, including Foxx’s mentor, catcher Beth Greenwood of the Boston Hunters, who likes to call Foxx “Beth 2.0”. She finished warming up Boston pitcher Raine Padgham on the on-field bullpen down the right field line, then marched toward her dugout on the first-base side, but without breaking stride, took a moment to look up into the stands, her eyes shining.
“I’m thinking, ‘oh my god, I’m actually going to play a professional game’,” Greenwood told me afterwards, still basking in the glow of it all in the media room. “And I’m looking up there, at people who I’ve known for years, supporting us, seeing people from my entire baseball life.”
That was her level of enthusiasm after a loss. Don’t mistake that for accepting defeat — you won’t meet a fiercer competitor than Beth Greenwood. Instead, it was an appreciation for what she and her fellow players had built.
There is no shame in losing to the San Francisco Firebells, who have a frighteningly deep lineup and a pitching staff led by Whitmore, the two-way superstar of a league with many players who both hit and pitch. Boston manager Keith Foulke expressed a realistic view about facing Whitmore after the game.
“Well, she’s she’s literally one of the best players in the world,” Foulke said of Whitmore. “… And there’s going to be some athletes out here that are better than the other ones. So it’s going to be up to the rest of us to try and catch up to athletes like her to try and raise the bar.”
Every team was one game in, but the realities of the league were already creeping into the postgame conversation. San Francisco manager Matt Williams declined to name his starting pitcher for the Firebells’ next game, but pointed out that he only pushed Whitmore to 52 pitches to keep her fresh for the three games ahead this week. Whitmore said she’d be happy to come out of the bullpen on days she isn’t starting. Foulke, knowing we’d be able to deduce that his top starter, Alli Schroder, would be the logical choice to take the ball on Wednesday night, responded playfully to the starting pitcher query, “I don’t want to give anything away, but I’ll tell you: she is in this room.”
The press conference ended, and Whitmore lingered for a moment to chat. “We’re here now,” she said to me. “We made it.”
The commissioner herself, Justine Siegal, was one of the last people to leave on Sunday night. For her, the work is never done, and her even keel has powered her through decades in a game that has rejected her repeatedly. I asked how it felt to see her life’s work come to fruition.
“I’m so tired, I need to get something to eat and get some sleep,” she said, unwilling even after the success of the weekend to take a victory lap. I pressed further. I’ve long argued that someday, I will cover Siegal when she is inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. I’ve told her that, and she waves me off each time. But I reiterated this on Sunday night as the two of us walked toward her car, Siegal still in her WPBL uniform top. I asked her if she realized that when they induct her someday, this will be the first thing they talk about.
Finally, even Siegal was willing to acknowledge the enormity of her own success, however reluctantly. With a half-smile, she answered: “I do.”
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Five at The IX: Andreanne LeBlanc, San Francisco Firebells
Soccer: Annie Peterson, @AnnieMPeterson, AP Women’s Soccer
Tennis: Joey Dillon, @JoeyDillon, Freelance Tennis Writer
Basketball: Howard Megdal, @HowardMegdal, The IX Sports
Softball: Maren Angus-Coombs, @Maren-Angus, The IX Sports
Golf: Marin Dremock, @MDremock, The IX Sports
Hockey: @TheIceGarden, The Ice Garden
Gymnastics: Jessica Taylor Price, @jesstaylorprice, Freelance Writer
