The New York Heights upset the first-place San Francisco Firebells 11-8 Wednesday night behind a strong relief outing by right-hander Clare O’Sullivan and a game-winning three-run home run by star catcher Denae Benites in the first weather-shortened game in WPBL history.
As has been the pattern in the Heights’ games this year, New York jumped out to an early lead, but their pitching couldn’t hold it. The difference Wednesday night was O’Sullivan’s strong four innings of relief and Benites’s well-timed, league-leading eighth home run in the top of the fifth, which proved to be the difference when the game was called after a 47-minute weather delay with one out in the bottom of the sixth.
For the second consecutive game, Benites hit second in the Heights’ order, behind right fielder Natsuki Yonetani, and for the second time that combination resulted in an immediate run when Yonetani drew a leadoff walk and Benites drove her home. This time, Yonetani got to second on a passed ball by Firebells catcher Alexia Jorge, then scored on a Benites single.
The Heights piled on San Francisco starter Liz Gilder from there, as the first five batters in the order hit safely and designated hitter and fifth-place hitter Kylee Lahners’s double made it 4-0 New York. After a mound visit from Firebells assistant coach Sam Unger, however, Gilder settled down, though Heights second baseman Elodie Ciamarro singled home Lahners with two outs to make it 5-0 New York.
“Liz has been working mechanically in her bullpens just to make sure she feels solid over the rubber,” Firebells manager Matt Williams said to reporters after the game. “Tonight it was a question of not feeling that in the first inning but settling in and being able to . . . keep us in the game.”
In the bottom of the first, San Francisco fired right back against New York righty Keira Izumi, making her first mound start of the season. The Firebells have had their star slugger, Kelsie Whitmore, hitting second all season, and on this occasion Whitmore followed a leadoff walk to second baseman Amanda Gianelloni with a two-run home run, a monster blast to dead center that left the ballpark entirely and tied Benites for the league lead at seven.
After a walk to third baseman Jill Albayati and a single by first baseman Andréanne Leblanc, Firebells right fielder Skylar Kaplan, who has been heating up at the plate of late, added her first home run of the season to tie the game. Shortstop Joely Leguizamon followed with a double, moved to second on a wild pitch, and scored on a groundout by left fielder Jua Park, making it 6-5 Firebells after a single inning. Both teams sent nine batters to the plate in the first.
Leading off a second consecutive inning, Yonetani manufactured a run on her own to break the tie in the top of the second, drawing another walk, moving to second on a groundout, stealing third, and scoring when Jorge’s throw to third got by Albayati (an error charged to the catcher that should have gone to the third baseman).
However, Gilder retired the next three batters in order and continued to pitch scoreless ball into the fourth, retiring 11 of 15 in the wake of Unger’s mound visit. After two Heights reached with two out in the top of the fourth, righty Ela Day-Bédard came on to get Lahners to ground into a fielder’s choice to end the threat.
Meanwhile, the Firebells took the lead back with two in the bottom of the first. After Gianelloni flew out to right, Whitmore singled, and Albayati walked. Heights manager Rocky Henley then called on O’Sullvian, who got three ground balls that should have stranded both runners. However the second, by Jorge, was perfectly placed between third base and shortstop for a seeing-eye single that plated Whitmore. On the third, third baseman Alyssa Zettlemoyer turned her left ankle when making the throw to first, causing the ball to sail high and allowing Albayati to score.
O’Sullivan would strand those two runners, however, and proceed to pitch scoreless ball into the bottom of the sixth as the game radically shifted gears into a pitcher’s duel between O’Sullivan and Gilder.
The Heights finally broke through when Day-Bédard returned for her first full inning of work in the top of the fifth. With one out, first baseman Rakyung Kim singled and moved to second on a wild pitch. After Ciamarro flew out to center, center fielder Claire Eccles doubled down the right-field line to bring Kim home and cut San Francisco’s lead to one. Then came the Yonetani/Benites combination. Again, Yonetani walked. Again, Benites delivered, this time serving an outside pitch over the right-field fence for a three-run, opposite-field home run, Benites’s eighth round-tripper of the season, breaking the leaderboard tie with Whitmore and giving New York a 10-8 lead.
The Heights added another run in the top of the sixth off Firebells relief ace Peyton Coria when singles by Ciamarro and Eccles plated a two-out walk to Kim, and O’Sullivan returned to the mound and record another out in the bottom of the sixth. However, a lightning strike forced the players off the field and the fans out of the stands, and rain extended the delay. The game was called with one out in the bottom of the sixth, Whitmore on first via a single, and Leblanc due up at the plate. (Because the WPBL plays seven-inning games, its games become official after four innings.)
The win snapped the Heights’ three-game losing streak and the Firebells’ four-game winning streak. However, Whitmore extended her home run streak to four straight games, while Benites has now homered in her last three contests (and seven of eight on the season).
Benites went 2-for-4 with that home run, four RBI, and two runs scored on the game, while Yonetani drew three walks, stole a base, and scored three runs. However, given the Heights’ pitching difficulties this season, the star of the game, for me, was O’Sullivan, who pitched four scoreless innings, allowing just two singles and two walks while striking out three. That outing dropped her team-leading ERA to 2.61 (in a league averaging 7 2/3 runs per team per game), and she’s just a third of an inning shy of Kim for the team lead in innings. (She has also been credited with two of the team’s three wins, for those who still care about that statistic.)
In addition to her excellence on the mound, O’Sullivan plays both corner infield positions and is 5-for-10 at the plate with a home run and no strikeouts on the season. Despite all of that, the tall 31-year-old Australian has started just two of the Heights’ eight games.
When asked if we might see more of O’Sullivan going forward, New York manager Rocky Henley told The IX Sports that O’Sullivan was “a late add-on to our team. She’s only been here one week.”
O’Sullivan’s WPBL debut came on the mound in the Heights’ extra-inning win on Aug. 9. Henley also added that she had “a nice chat with her this afternoon” and that O’Sullivan “will see the field more and get more at-bats. . . . When she’s hot, we’ll find a spot in the lineup for her, but her pitching tremendously helps us.”
Henley said that she intended to take O’Sullivan out of the game before the weather delay, but the righty “didn’t want to come out, and when I told her that she was coming out, she kind of gave me a side-eye.” Henley credited catcher Benites with talking to O’Sullivan, while the Heights were at the plate and Henley was on the field coaching third base, and discovering that O’Sullivan was determined to keep pitching. Benites, in turn, credited shortstop Val Perez with the conversation, and Perez brought it back around and complemented Henley for being “humble enough” to listen to her players’ input on such decisions.
“It’s just huge. It’s a huge win for us,” said Henley, “and that means I have an extra [pitcher] going into [Thursday’s game].”
Having that extra pitcher has prompted Henley to “rethink” who will start tonight’s game against the Boston Hunters, but she did say that Rakyung Kim, who she said the team calls “Rami,” “is going to pitch Saturday, for sure.”
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Injury Updates:
Rosi del Castillo, RHP/OF, Firebells: Del Castillo hasn’t appeared since exiting a pitching appearance on Aug. 12 after aggravating an injury to her right knee. After Wednesday’s game, manager Matt Williams told reporters that del Castillo threw on flat ground on Tuesday, ran “a little bit” on Wednesday, and that the Firebells’ “trainers feel confident that she should be ready to go for us next week.” Adding, “We’ll get her a bullpen during the course of the week to make sure she’s stable in the knee and go from there, but so far so good.”
Jacqui Reynolds, RHP, Heights: Reynolds left Sunday’s game with tightness in her pitching shoulder. After Wednesday’s game, manager Rocky Henley told reporters that Reynolds was “able to play catch today with the trainer watching” and that she is “ready for her bullpen” on Thursday. Henley will confer with Reynolds after that bullpen session and said that “hopefully Saturday she’ll be good to go.” That suggests that Reynolds is in line to pitch in relief of Kim against the Queens on Saturday. Henley speculated that the tightness in Reynolds’s shoulder may have been an issue the righty just needed to work through in the process of building up this season.
After pitching for the Heights on Opening Day, Reynolds wrote on her Instagram on Aug. 3 that she had scheduled shoulder surgery:
“March of 2025, I was diagnosed with a 180 degrees of labrum tear, and a tear in both my distal supraspinatus tendon and distal infraspinatus tendon. The plan was to try to avoid surgery. Went to PT, where they said save your appointments you are going to need surgery. I scheduled that surgery knowing that if I had it, I would be done with baseball. With the surgery scheduled for 3 months away, I set a goal of doing PT on my own to see if I could avoid surgery so I could get back to being able to play again. At that point I couldn’t lift my shoulder above my head without pain. In my two weeks before surgery date appointment, I got cleared to throw. I spent that summer on my own throwing plan to get my shoulder in a strong enough position to be able to throw at the WPBL tryouts. I did just that at Nats Park. Just 4 pitches, struck out the batter, and I was officially back on the mound about 5 months after scheduling a surgery that was going to be career ending.”
Given that, her current shoulder woes are far more troubling. Here’s hoping Henley’s right about them.
Notes:
- WPBL teams are only allowed 15 active players for each game, but their rosters are slightly larger than that. The managers indicate which of those excess players are inactive when they fill out that game’s lineup card. On Wednesday, the Heights, who have 16 players listed on their roster, had right-handed pitcher Jaida Lee inactive, likely in anticipation of a pitching appearance in Thursday’s game, but Reynolds was on the active list.
For the Firebells, who have 17 listed, in addition to the injured del Castillo, lefty reliever Niki Eckert was inactive. I asked Williams about Eckert, who has been one of San Francisco’s better pitchers thus far, and he said that she is only with the team on weekends. “She has to go home during the week so she comes Friday, Saturday, and . . . Sunday,” said Williams.
I also asked Williams if the upcoming start of the school year will affect any of his college-age players. He noted that the team “is gonna lose” third baseman and rotation ace Jill Albayati when she has to “attend the first week of her classes” at Cal State San Marcos. - The Heights introduced two new on-field celebrations in this game to “tap into New York culture,” in the words of Benites, who went to high school in Las Vegas. The first is a Statue of Liberty pose after a base hit. The second is using a pair of Timberland boots tied together at the laces as a sort of home run chain, as seen in the photo at the top of this article. The boots are Benites’s, and she did her best to connect them to New York streetwear when talking to reporters after the game, but the Tims are clearly a shout-out to another culture, as well. Benites appears content to let that be an if-you-know-you-know situation for now.
- There was an interesting conversation in the postgame press conference about statistics, during which Heights manager Rocky Henley admitted that she hasn’t “really learned” how to use pitch and batted-ball data and instead relies on the traditional stats — “batting averages and on-base percentages and walks and strikeouts, for the most part” — posted on the league’s website when evaluating player performance. She did say that Trackman data was available to her and that she hoped that someone could “walk me through it so I can kind of learn a little bit more about it,” suggesting she might find time to do that on Sunday, which is an off-day for the Heights. In contrast, Firebells assistant coach Sam Unger used to work for both Trackman and Inside Edge and as an analyst with the San Francisco Giants and Washington Nationals organizations.
