WPBL Opening Game

Rain delayed and complicated the game, making it a scrappy, sloppy, hard-fought effort, but really, could there be a more apt metaphor for the struggle to launch a women’s sports league in the midst of These Times?

Today, August 1, was Opening Day for the WPBL, the Women’s Pro Baseball League. I watched the game from SABR 54 in Cleveland, this year’s national convention of the Society for American Baseball Research.¹ I haven’t written about the WPBL yet, so this seems like an apt time to start.

According to the WPBL instagram, watch parties were happening in sports bars all over the country.² To say people are hyped for this league is an understatement. A few weeks ago I attended a WPBL preseason event at Campanelli Stadium in Brockton, Massachusetts, and several hundred fans turned out to watch players work out and get autographs. Some of them had made signs. One had already crocheted a full-size shawl with the WPBL logo in the Boston team’s signature green. The Boston team didn’t even have a name yet at that point and they already had fans. Only an hour into the event, the merch table was picked clean. (I got there just in time to snag the last T-shirt.)

Before even a single pitch was thrown tonight, though, the WPBL has been having an impact. Here at the SABR convention, I lost count of the times I heard a speaker say something along the lines of “when little boys…and little girls, I should say, too!…dream of playing professional baseball…” Tom Hamilton, the longtime Cleveland play-by-play man, was one. David Ward, the screenwriter of the film Major League, too. As a person who usually has to bite her tongue not to yell out “and girls!” “and women!” I can tell you it was notable that I didn’t have to this year. Everyone was like “oh, and now women, too.”

The opening game itself was a microcosm of the rollout of the league: driven by good intentions, but not always smooth. Earlier this week it looked like every game would be on YouTube, but a few days ago the news broke of a streaming deal with “ESPN Select,” which puts the content behind a $12.99/month paywall. Personally I would be happy to pay $26 for two months to see it, but I’ve already seen much grumbling that this is no way to grow the popularity of a new league.

The bigger problem with the streaming deal, though, isn’t the WPBL’s fault. It’s ESPN’s. Several of us at the meeting broke out our laptops to try to sign up for ESPN Select. The only streaming options I could find were “ESPN Unlimited” for twice that price, and a package with Hulu/Disney/ESPN for $35/month. Where’s the supposed $13 “ESPN Select”?

Two folks gave up and decided to try searching again at home. I persisted only to figure out that “ESPN Select” might basically just be ESPN.com. Nowhere does it say “ESPN Select,” but that’s where I found the game. Turns out once I logged in to ESPN.com with my Disney account (which I have from a stay at Disney World)… I could see the game just fine without paying anyone anything extra…? (No, I don’t understand it, either. Maybe I bought Disney+ and don’t remember?) Meanwhile if you search “WPBL” from the search bar, nothing comes up, but if you scroll through the list of Leagues, you’ll see it there.

Another rookie mistake: all the WPBL graphics and social media posts touting the game advertised a 5pm start. Turns out they meant 5pm Central Time. It’s like they’ve never seen graphics for a nationally televised sporting event before. Time zones, folks. Time zones.

And did I mention league merch is completely sold out online, too? The WPBL doesn’t even seem to be taking orders. This makes no sense. People at our watch party were trying to buy hats and shirts, and the only items left in the official WPBL store are some hoodies. Why aren’t they taking back orders? No idea. I will merely note that many minor league teams make bank on their merch. Recall that the Rocket City Trash Pandas sold over $2 million in merch sales in just 13 months.

My assumption is that the league’s biggest priority has been “baseball operations,” getting the game on the field, and that the game itself is their most important “product.” Perhaps merch sales seemed like a nice-to-have rather than a must? Or maybe they really underestimated demand? Or both? Whatever the reason, having no merch available seems a huge missed opportunity to serve fans and lock them in, as well as lost revenue. (Meanwhile, if you Google “buy WPBL merch” you will already find a bunch of pirate knock-off sites coming up at the top of the search results. Sigh.) I count myself fortunate to have scored a WPBL hat for Christmas.

Yes, of course I wore that hat today, as well as my Val Perez name jersey, not from the WPBL but from the Firefighters, the Banana Ball team she plays for and is head coach of. I got her autograph before the Bananas game at Yankee Stadium last year. Imagine my excitement when I saw she was leading off for the New York Heights…? It felt surreal, like a parallel universe has crossed over into this one.

We got the stream up on the big TV in the “SABR Clubhouse,” the social area of the convention where they put tables and chairs (ringed by exhibitors and vendors) and saw the rain delay was coming to an end. Uniformed players themselves were dragging the tarp. This felt emblematic of women’s baseball to me: we are used to making things happen ourselves. It’s also what one might expect in independent baseball, or summer stock theater, which feel much more like the WPBL than “The Show.”

There are touches of MLB in the WPBL. Three of the four team managers are former MLB players of some repute. (The fourth, Rocky Henley, was a woman who played for the Colorado Silver Bullets, an all-woman barnstorming baseball team of the early 1990s.) Tony LaRussa threw out one of the ceremonial first pitches. Some major league teams (Red Sox, Yankees…) have hosted WPBL players for practices or ceremonial first pitches this season. But it generally feels to me like MLB is striking a cautious note of support, holding the WPBL at arm’s length and making it clear they would prefer their “sister sport” was women’s pro softball, which they’ve touted in various forms for decades.³

Overall, though, women’s pro baseball at this stage has much more in common with other forms of independent baseball than with MLB. We are at a moment in which the baseball ecosystem is still evolving after MLB’s 2020 reaping of the minor leagues in which they eliminated 42 minor league teams and overhauled the whole minor league structure, leaving some stadiums empty, some leagues out of business, and hundreds of baseball players outside affiliated baseball. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this is the environment in which Banana Ball, which shares five players with the WPBL, has flourished, and Cosmic Baseball has risen.

What remains to be seen is whether the WPBL can also flourish. One of the research posters at SABR 54 was the work of Allison Levin, a scholar in fandom studies and longtime SABR member, talking about how younger generations of fans are more likely to consume and interact with a sport and its fandom by participating in social media, following players, interacting with their content, and creating their own content, versus the traditional passive forms of consuming, which include just plain watching the games on TV or attending in person. The WPBL has to be counting on that, since the supposed New York, San Francisco, Boston, and Los Angeles teams are spending the season playing at a central, neutral site in Springfield, Illinois. None of their “home fans” are likely to be on site after this weekend.

In the case of Banana Ball of course most fans literally can’t see them in person because the tickets are in such high demand, with millions more people entering the annual lottery than can actually score tickets. But the Bananas have employed a very effective social media strategy, creating viral moments out of walk-up music, in-game dance celebrations, trick plays, and more. Fans follow them through multiple channels, and as previously mentioned, every Banana Ball game is shown for free on YouTube. Yes, even the ones that are also shown on ESPN nationally, because the Bananas have the clout to insist on it. (And of course their merch sales hit such a large volume that they had to move to a bigger warehouse, twice.)

Banana Ball’s philosophy is “fans first.” It feels to me like the WPBL’s philosophy is more like “athletes first,” which I cannot quibble with given the history of women’s baseball, but it does mean that it sometimes feels like fans are an afterthought. I know because of sexism the WPBL feels it has to work very hard to be “taken seriously” and that might mean distancing themselves from the very entertainment-forward Cosmic and Banana and zany indie ball world (look up the St. Paul Saints sometime, though note the “anti-establishment” Saints joined the establishment in the 2020 re-org). But like it or not, the WPBL is swimming in that same sea and comparisons are inevitable.

Frankly, the entertainment production values of the WPBL could use some work. It appeared no one was prepared for a rain delay, so the broadcast just left the cameras on livestream with no commentary for over an hour, which seemed strange. There was no shortage of eminences in the stadium they could have had into the booth to chit chat radio-style, and I feel like it was a missed opportunity. Rather than annoy people who are actually trying to watch the game by sticking interviews in the midst of innings, all those interviews could have been part of a rain delay show. As a former radio person, I feel like filling 1-2 hours with relevant chatter would not have been difficult. Unless perhaps the announcers were having to do something else during the delay, like help pull the tarp.

(No shade: The announcers and the sideline reporter did a good job with the actual broadcast, even if I would prefer not to see interviews in the middle of the game.)

Remember what I said about the WPBL being driven by good intentions, but falling short on execution? They had some kind of smoke machine trying to add atmosphere and drama to the pregame ceremony, but most of what it did was block one of the main broadcast cameras. They had the legendary Motown singer Martha Reeves, of Martha and the Vandellas, aged 85, sing the National Anthem, and she struggled mightily. As my old theater troupe used to say back in the day, “NTDW.” (“Nice thought, didn’t work.”)

But, the game. What it’s really all about is athletes doing their thing. The wind and rain made the game an adventure that probably did not make for the best showcase for baseball talent, but did showcase the grit and determination of these players. I had to cringe every time a popup was dropped or a ball was misplayed in the outfield. At the SABR reception at the Cleveland Public Library, I ended up chatting in the stacks with Erica Block and Liz Roscher, both of whom covered MLB for years, about how excited and yet anxious I am about this new league. All three of us feel this way! We want so much for this league to succeed, but we fear any little misstep (on or off the field) could sink the whole endeavor.

Maybe the players were feeling some of that pressure in the first inning. Both pitchers seemed more tentative than we expected. The matchup for the opening game was LA Queens at NY Heights, with Rahyung Kim on the mound for the Heights, and Ayami Sato for the Queens. Sato is already a legend, having bagged multiple MVP awards at the Women’s Baseball World Cup while playing for Team Japan and spending much of last summer pitching for a men’s pro team in Canada. And my gal, Val Perez, booted the first ball hit into play, letting leadoff batter Mo’ne Davis reach on the E6. Ashton Landsdell followed with a walk. Kim began to settle down a little and throw more strikes, getting a fly ball and a strikeout, but then Maggie Foxx laced a single to bring both runners in.

I thought handing Sato a two-run lead was going to make things rough on the Heights, but for whatever reason—the long day, the long inning in the dugout?—she was unable to get ahead of Heights batters. The first three batters, Perez, Natsuki Yonetani, and catcher Denae Benitez, all singled. For a moment it looked like cleanup hitter Kylee Lahners, the 33-year-old veteran of Team USA, was going to hit a grand slam, but with the wind blowing hard, she doubled off the wall. Jaida Lee had an RBI hit. Madison Willan followed with a sac fly. Diana Ibarra had an RBI hit. Sato finally retired the eighth batter in the lineup, London Studer, on a double play to escape the inning, with the Heights now leading, 5-2.

Yonetani, Benitez, and Lahners all had hits against in the second, making it 7-2. Kim tired in the fourth and walked both Sarah Edwards and Foxx to lead off the inning. Both would score on an Amira Hondras double. In the bottom of the fourth, Foxx moved from left field to pitching, but the Heights got another run off her, on a solo shot off the bat of Denae Benitez, the first home run in WPBL history.

At that point, Denae was 3-for-3 with 2 RBIs and 3 runs scored, and very much looking likely to be the MVP of the game. (The WPBL doesn’t award an MVP of every game, but I do.) And the thing is, if, when there were two outs in the final inning (the seventh: WPBL games are seven innings), Denae Benitez had been able to corral a foul pop for the final out, she absolutely would have been my MVP.

Alas, she did not corral that wind-blown foul pop, on a night when so many popups went astray. The Queens absolutely made the most of the new life they were given. They went on a rally that was capped off by a two-RBI-single from pinch hitter Isabella Villareal, making the score 10-8. (Word has it that Villareal had just joined the team earlier in the day.)

The Heights went down 1-2-3 in the bottom of the seventh, so 10-8 was the final score. A come-from-behind thriller! Ultimately, a great showing for women’s baseball, no matter how sloppy the weather got.

Box score: https://www.womensprobaseballleague.com/games/los-angeles-vs-new-york-aug-1-2026/

(By the way, I’ve started an Instagram dedicated to my baseball adventures, thoughts, and research: https://www.instagram.com/whyilikebaseball/)

NOTES:

1 When I realized the WPBL opening game was going to take place during the convention, I suggested SABR needed to livestream it, otherwise some of us might find ourselves having to leave and drive the eight hours to Springfield, Illinois, to be there in person…? (In fact, Perry Barber did just that.) Scott Bush, SABR’s head honcho and my boss, made a watch party happen. Thanks to him, and to Paul Z. for lending the big-screen TV!

2 Which is how I found out that an outlet of The Sports Bra, a women’s sports bar, will be coming to Boston. But I digress.

3Say it with me now, please: softball is not baseball, baseball is not softball, and softball is not a replacement for baseball nor a feminine form of baseball.