The San Francisco Firebells became the first team to reach the WPBL’s championship series Friday night, beating the Boston Hunters 9-6. They completed a two-game sweep of their semifinal series and a seven-game sweep of Boston in the regular season and postseason combined.
San Francisco now has four days off and will enter the championship series as a heavy favorite, regardless of who its opponent might be. The Hunters, meanwhile, became the first of the WPBL’s four teams to see their season end.
Though the final score was relatively close, this was the top-seeded Firebells’ game from the start. They took a 1-0 lead in the top of the first inning, scored in each of the first four innings and never allowed the fourth-seeded Hunters to catch up.
To start the game, Hunters manager Jemile Weeks called on lefty Paloma Benach rather than righty Alli Schroder. He told reporters afterward that he wanted to show the Firebells “a little something different than the harder pitchers, a little less velo[city], [and] make them wait on a few things.”
Benach didn’t pitch poorly, quickly getting to two outs in each of the first two innings, but a pair of home runs ended her outing ahead of schedule.
In the first, Benach loaded the bases with two outs by walking Firebells catcher Alexia Jorge after allowing a pair of singles. The next batter, shortstop Joely Leguizamon, hit a groundball to shortstop. Hunters shortstop Raine Padgham fielded the ball cleanly to her right but appeared not to notice that her best chance to record an out was to force slow-footed San Francisco first baseman Andréanne Leblanc out at third base.
Instead, Padgham made the long throw to first, which the speedy Leguizamon beat out. Of course, had Padgham looked to third, she would have seen that Boston third baseman Denver Bryant made no effort to cover the bag. Ruled a single by Leguizamon, that drove in the Firebells’ first run.
In the second, San Francisco second baseman Amanda Gianelloni, who had led off the game with a single and scored the lone run in the previous inning, pulled a two-out double down the left field line. With two outs and first base empty, Weeks ordered an intentional walk of co–home run queen Kelsie Whitmore for the third time in the semifinal series. In Game 1, Firebells right fielder Skylar Kaplan followed each of the first two of those intentional walks with an RBI single. This time, Kaplan jumped on a curveball up in the zone from Benach and sent it over the fence in right-center field for a three-run home run.
When Benach came back out in the third, the first batter she faced, Jorge, did exactly the same thing, pulling a 1-0 curveball over the fence for a home run. With his team down 5-1 before recording an out in the third, Weeks went to his bullpen.
Meanwhile, Firebells manager Matt Williams, with the luxury of a 1-0 lead in the series, gave the start to righty Jill Albayati, who hadn’t appeared in a game in any capacity in three weeks, primarily due to a hamstring strain. Williams told reporters after the game that it was important to play Albayati before the championship series, as his team would need the added pitching depth in a series that could start with four games in five days. (WPBL teams have been playing a maximum of three games per week this season.)
Williams chose to start Albayati rather than use her in relief because, in the wake of her injury, it was “important” that she had time to warm up properly and fully, which isn’t always guaranteed for relievers.
Albayati didn’t show any obvious signs of her injury Friday night. She retired the first four batters she faced, striking out Bryant to start the bottom of the second, and her catcher, Jorge, complimented her velocity after the game.
Albayati gave up a run in the second following a walk, a throwing error by Leguizamon, and a seeing-eye single by Hunters designated hitter Edith De Leija. She ran into more serious trouble in the third inning, walking the leadoff hitter and getting her only outs on a failed sacrifice bunt attempt by Hunters center fielder Lexi Hastings and a scorched sacrifice fly to deep center by first baseman Alli Schroder. After left fielder Ticara Geldenhuis drove in a second run and Albayati hit Boston catcher Beth Greenwood with her 44th pitch of the night to load the bases, Williams went to his bullpen.
After the game, Jorge told reporters that Albayati might have been “a little tired, but she was still hitting her spots and executing her pitches” in that final frame. Williams added that the initial report on how Albayati’s hamstring felt after that outing was a “thumbs up,” so the plan appears to have worked.
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In relief of Albayati, lefty Niki Eckert gave up an opposite-field single to De Leija to allow one run to score but stranded the other two Hunters. That made it 6-4 Firebells, which was not only the final score of Game 1 of this series but also as close as the Boston would get all night.
That sixth San Francisco run came off reliever Gigi Schiano in the top of the third, and with Schiano still on the mound in the top of the fourth, the Firebells got back all three of the runs the Hunters had scored in the previous frame.
It started when Whitmore validated Weeks’ repeated intentional walks by golfing a pitch over the wall in left center for a leadoff home run to make it 7-4. After one-out singles by Leblanc and Jorge, left fielder Jua Park pulled a ball down the left-field line that one-hopped the wall. Her double plated them both to make it 9-4 Firebells.
Schiano settled down from there, and Maïka Dumas worked a scoreless top of the seventh. Dumas rewarded Weeks’ decision not to walk Whitmore with two on and two out in that inning by striking out the Firebells’ captain on three pitches. The damage was done, however.
Eckert’s control wavered in the fifth, filling the bases and plating a run on a wild pitch. However, with the help of sliding catches from outfielders Kaplan and Whitmore, Eckert recovered to leave the potential tying runs on base.
Boston got another run against lefty Liz Gilder in the sixth. With one out, Schroder singled to left to plate Hastings, who had led off the inning with a single and moved to second on the first out. However, Schroder almost immediately ran her team out of the inning by attempting to take second on the throw home, only to be thrown out by several feet on a 7-5-2-4 putout.
The Hunters never lost their fight. Leading off the bottom of the seventh down three, left fielder Ticara Geldenhuis, one of three Boston hitters to go 2-for-3 on the night (along with Schroder and De Leija), dove into first base to beat out a slow grounder to shortstop. However, she was erased on a double play off the bat of Greenwood, and De Leija, who hadn’t made an out all night to that point, grounded out to second to end the Hunters’ season.
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The Hunters finished the season with seven straight losses. It’s small consolation that four of those losses, including both playoff defeats, were by three runs or fewer. What next season has in store for the Hunters, individually or collectively, is unclear because everything about the anticipated second season of the WPBL is unclear right now.
Yet, talking to reporters after the game, Hastings, Suzuka Yamamoto and Weeks all expressed a desire to return and excitement about what the 2027 WPBL season might bring. I know I’m not alone in being eager to see the how the players from the youngest team in the league might mature as baseball players with this season under their belts.
As for the Firebells, they remain on a mission. Their postgame celebration was minimal, just a few extra smiles and skips among the usual lineup of handshakes and high-fives. Ever since it became clear that they had the potential to run the table on this league, that has become their lone goal. They how have four days to rest their bodies, ease various aches and pains, and prepare for next week’s championship series.
Who will they play? The New York Heights, down 1-0 to the Los Angeles Queens in the other semifinal, hope San Francisco won’t find out until Monday. That will require New York to win Saturday. Game 2 starts at 7 p.m. Eastern time.
Injury updates
Firebells two-way outfielder Ela Day-Bédard was in manager Matt Williams’ original lineup for Friday’s game but, per Williams, “her neck locked up on her about 15 minutes prior to going out.” Williams shuffled his lineup to put Rosi del Castillo in at designated hitter and push Jua Park from DH to left field in place of Day-Bédard.
After the game, Williams told reporters the team will “work on” Day-Bédard’s “neck issue … the next few days and see how she is.”
Williams also said after the game that Jill Albayati’s maximum pitch count was “about 50” (she threw 44). He added that Albayati “felt good afterwards. We’ll monitor her tomorrow and see how her hamstring is, but … when she came out of the game it was a thumbs up, so we’re happy about that.”
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Notes
Williams told reporters that his team would have Saturday off, then have an intense practice on Sunday. He noted that it has been “challenging the whole season because there’s a lot of days off in between games, so it’s really easy to be flat. So we’ll do some work,” in the days leading up to Wednesday’s Game 1 of the championship series.
Boston’s Lexi Hastings had played professional softball but very little baseball prior to this season, and she rebuilt her swing for baseball in-season with the help of her coaches and teammates. She told reporters after the game, “There’s a lot that I’ve learned, and I’m going to probably spend the next couple weeks really sitting down and reflecting. … They are two different sports, and they need to be trained and studied and played in that way. So that’s what I plan to do in the offseason.”
Asked what surprised them most about the season, Hastings, Yamamoto and Weeks all mentioned the fans’ support and enthusiasm. Yamamoto, speaking through an interpreter, said she “definitely want[s] to come back to this league and play and … keep growing” and that she plans to work on her English in the offseason.
She added, “It was such a great atmosphere of everyone coming together to enjoy baseball. It really felt like a community of people who truly loved the game. And, of course, in Japan we do have women’s baseball as well, but I was really surprised to see even more fans coming out to watch the game here than in Japan. I really feel like the fans came to enjoy [the game] together with the players, and that was my favorite part and also most surprising part of my experience this season.”
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