The New York Heights enjoyed arguably their best win of the season Thursday night as the Women’s Pro Baseball League surpassed the midway point of its inaugural season. With errorless defense, a seven-run outburst in the middle innings, six stolen bases, and a dominant relief outing from talented 20-year-old righty Jaida Lee, the Heights beat the Boston Hunters 9-4 to climb out of last place in the standings in the 16th game of the WPBL’s 30-game regular season.
In a rarity for the high-scoring league, the game started as a pitcher’s duel, in this case between Hunters captain Alli Schroder and the Heights’ lefty knuckleballer Claire Eccles, the latter of whom pitched around two singles, four walks, and a hit batter over three innings. Each team managed just one run through the first three frames, just the second time this season that no more than two runs were scored in the first three innings of a WPBL game (the other coming in another meeting between these two teams exactly a week earlier).
In the top of the second, the Heights opened the scoring by bringing around a one-out walk to designated hitter Kylee Lahners. In the bottom of that inning, Hunters first baseman Maïka Dumais led off with a single, advanced on a walk and a double-play, and scored on a wild pitch by Eccles that went over the head of Boston DH Denver Bryant, one of the few misplays by the Heights on the night.
The Heights broke through against Schroder with three runs in the top of the fourth, two of them scoring on a two-out, opposite-field double by right fielder Natsuki Yonetani, who was 3-for-5 on the night and is now hitting .471 on the season. After lefty reliever London Studer, who started the game in left field, worked around a couple of Boston singles in the bottom of the fourth, the Heights added four more in the top of the fifth against relievers Olivia Bricker and Denver Bryant, the latter making her first pitching appearance of the season.
New York greeted the lefty Bricker with five consecutive singles — by first baseman Claire O’Sullivan, Studer, Katherine Murphy (who replaced Studer in left field), third baseman Alyssa Zettlemoyer, and second baseman Elodie Ciamarro — the last three each driving in a single run.
The only two outs Bricker recorded came subsequently on the bases, when catcher Beth Greenwood threw out Ciamarro attempting to steal second, and third baseman Kate Blunt, drawn in after eighth-place hitter Madison Willan showed bunt, caught Zettlemoyer off third base and threw her out at home.
Willan reached on a fielder’s choice on the latter play and went to third on a subsequent single by Eccles (who had moved from the mound to center field). That single took a crazy hop over Hunters’ first baseman Dumais and bounced Bricker from the game in favor of Bryant, whom Yonetani greeted with a slow-rolling infield single that plated Willan to make it 8-1 New York.
The Hunters got three of those runs back in the bottom of the fifth after Studer momentarily lost the plate, walking three of the first four batters in that inning and moving the first of those baserunners up with a wild pitch. Yamamoto and Greenwood cashed in those three walks with a double and a single, cutting the Heights’ lead to 8-4, but Studer escaped further damage.
The top of the sixth yielded the first ejection in WPBL history, though both it and the play that prompted it proved irrelevant to the outcome of the game. With one out and O’Sullivan on third via a walk, a stolen base, and a groundout, Murphy hit a sinking liner to shortstop that Boston infielder Raine Padgham appeared to catch on the fly then fire to third to try to double off O’Sullivan for an inning-ending double play. O’Sullivan was called safe, but Heights manager Rocky Henley, coaching third, protested that Padgham trapped Murphy’s hit. The umpires conferred and overruled what had appeared to be the correct call by base umpire Joelyn Pullano, allowing Murphy to reach safely with what was ruled a single.
The WPBL only uses two umpires, one behind the plate, and one in the field. Rewatching the play, Pullano was stationed in on the infield grass, behind the mound and a bit toward the third-base side of the infield. Murphy’s hit went to her right, but Pullano turned to her left to track it toward the outfield, and it appears her back was to the catch when it happened. Indeed, it’s unclear if she made a call at all on the initial play, which may have been why Henley spoke up. It seems likely, then, that Pullano deferred to home plate umpire Emilie Herpick in their conference, resulting in the change in call, despite the fact that Herpick was much farther away from the play than Pullano when it happened.
When Murphy was ruled safe, Hunters manager Jemile Weeks came out to protest. While he was clearly upset, he appeared to make every effort to plead his case to Herpick calmly, speaking in slow, measured tones. He then returned to the dugout only to have Pullano follow him over, after which some words were exchanged that both apparently found objectionable. As Pullano walked away, Weeks could be seen saying, a little more intensely, “Watch your mouth. Watch your mouth when you talk to me.” Then Pullano ejected him.
It was all for naught, however, as Greenwood threw out Murphy stealing, and center fielder Lexi Hastings made a nice running catch on a deep drive by Zettlemoyer to end the inning.
The Heights added a run in the top of the seventh when Bryant hit O’Sullivan with a pitch with the bases loaded. Meanwhile, New York’s 20-year-old fireballer, Jaida Lee, came on in the sixth and turned in one of the best relief outings of the season for any team.
Lee, who is from all available evidence the hardest-throwing pitcher in the league, retired all six batters she faced, striking out three, spotting her breaking pitches and blowing her fastball by the Hunters’ hitters. In doing so, she became just the third pitcher in WPBL history to turn in a perfect multi-inning pitching performance, joining the Firebells’ Jill Albayati (2 IP, 1 K on Aug. 2) and Queens relief ace Meggie Meidlinger (also 2 IP, 3 K on Aug. 15).
Lee — who had struggled with her command in previous outings, posting a 7.36 ERA, walking six, hitting five, and throwing four wild pitches in 11 innings — credited a new pair of spikes with her improvement. Lee told ESPN’s AJ Andrews after the game, “I got new cleats, so I finally had some grip on the mound.” If those new shoes have solved Lee’s issues on the bump, it would be a huge boost to Heights, whose run prevention has been their primary shortcoming this season. The Hunters’ four runs in this game were the fewest the Heights have allowed to any team all season.
Remarkably, this game was the last of the regular season between the Heights and the Hunters. Though it pushed New York above Boston in the overall standings, the Hunters won the head-to-head season series 3-2. Whether or not that’s relevant to playoff seeding or homefield advantage remains to be seen.
Both teams will return to action on Saturday, with the Hunters hosting the Firebells at 2 p.m. Eastern, and the Heights taking on the Queens at 7:30 p.m. Heights manager Rocky Henley told reporters that righty Rakyung Kim will start Saturday’s game for New York. Jill Albayati will start for San Francisco in the nightcap.
Tonight, the Los Angeles Queens host the Firebells at 7:30 p.m., with Kelsie Whitmore taking the hill for San Francisco.
Injury Update:
Jacqui Reynolds, RHP, Heights: Manager Rocky Henley told reporters after the game that “Jacqui is feeling good. She threw a bullpen [on Thursday] and she’s ready go to on Saturday.” Reynolds, who left her previous outing with shoulder tightness, will pitch in relief of Rakyung Kim on Saturday, per Henley.
Henley also noted that “my sneaky little Jaida” Lee “might be our closer on Saturday.”
Notes:
- Heights slugging star Denae Benites took her first 0-fer of the season in this game, going 0-for-4 with a seventh-inning walk. For the third straight game, Yonetani reached base to lead off the game, but this time, instead of driving her in, Benites hit into a 6-4-3 double play. Schroder then struck Benites out in the third inning with a two-seamer up and away that broke back toward the plate. That was just Benites’s third strikeout in nine games. Benites appeared to barrel the ball in her next two at-bats, sending deep drives toward the outfield wall, but the wind was blowing in, and both held up for the Hunters’ outfielders. The game thus dropped Benites’s league-leading slash stats to .647/.667/1.382 (2.049 OPS).
- For the second time in as many games, a Hunters pitcher ran afoul of the disengagement rule, failing on their third attempt to pick off a runner and thus balking the runners up a base. Kate Blunt was the guilty party on Sunday, also against the Heights. In this game, it was Bricker, who failed to pick O’Sullivan off second in the fifth and thus turned a first-and-second situation into a second-and-third situation.
- The prevalence of two-way players in the WPBL has resulted in some unusual situations involving the designated hitter, one of which came in the fourth inning of Thursday’s game. The designated hitter is optional in this league, giving teams the option of letting their pitcher hit, which, to use a prominent example, the Firebells do when Kelsie Whitmore starts on the mound. However, there is no Ohtani rule allowing a starting pitcher to remain in the game as the DH after being replaced on the mound, so to keep a Whitmore in the lineup when she’s done pitching, her manager has to move her into the field and give up the DH.
In this game, the Hunters put their DH, Denver Bryant, in to pitch in the late innings, losing the DH without having to take that hitter out of the lineup. We’ve seen that before in this league. What I haven’t seen before, however, is what Heights manager Rocky Henley did in the fourth inning.
The Heights opened the game with Claire Eccles on the mound and Kylee Lahners at DH. In the top of the fourth, however, Henley effectively used Eccles as a pinch-hitter for center fielder Diana Ibarra by moving Eccles, who was not in the lineup, to center field prior to Ibarra’s at-bat and, in turn, moving left fielder London Studer to the mound and inserting Katherine Murphy in left field in place of the DH Lahners. I can’t recall seeing a manager replace their DH in the lineup with anyone other than the pitcher, let alone use their active pitcher as a pinch-hitter. The Heights did give up the DH in that move, however, as Studer, who was hitting cleanup, remained in the lineup as the pitcher. - Maïka Dumais’s trip around the bases in the second inning included a moment of levity when she took off to steal second and Hunter’s second baseman Suzuka Yamamoto took ball four to draw a walk. Realizing a moment too late that she didn’t need to slide, the 18-year-old Québécois Dumais, who seems like a bit of a goofball, took an awkward flop onto second base, nearly skidding past the bag, then sat up in the infield dirt, legs straight out and over the bag, with a huge laugh.
- Queens catcher Maggie Foxx guested in the ESPN booth for four innings of this game, and she was a natural. I’ve never heard a guest commenter so seamlessly integrate play-by-play into their conversation. Foxx’s nervous energy on the field has made her a favorite. I hope the 20-year-old Brown University undergrad has a long playing career in the WPBL, but when the time comes for her to find another gig, she should be able to find one calling games.
