The stands of Robin Roberts Stadium came alive this weekend as the stars of the Women’s Pro Baseball League took the field.
Rain couldn't dampen the festivities as the league held the first two games of its inaugural season on Saturday and Sunday in Springfield. On Saturday, the New York Heights took on the Los Angeles Queens, while on Sunday, the San Francisco Firebells played against the Boston Hunters.
All games of the league’s first season will be played in Springfield, with the season concluding in early September. The league was established two years earlier when co-owner Keith Stein tapped Commissioner Justine Siegal to help found it.
Siegal was the first woman to coach a Major League Baseball team when she was hired by the Oakland Athletics for a two-week stint in 2015. She said she helped found the league because there wasn’t a reason for it not to exist.
“Women play baseball,” Siegal said. “Why wouldn’t we have a professional league, too?”
The WPBL is the fifth league for women’s professional baseball in U.S. history. Its inaugural season is getting underway nearly 72 years after the closure of the first, the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. 99-year-old Maybelle Blair, a pitcher for that league, threw out one of the three ceremonial first pitches during Saturday’s game.
Themes of the past and future featured heavily into that game’s opening ceremony.
“Tonight, we honor the women who carried this dream forward,” the ceremony’s announcer said. “We celebrate the future as they take the field for the first time.”
L.A. Queens captain and third base Ashton Lansdell said she hopes that the sport’s latest league is also its last.
“We want to make this thing last forever and ever,” she said. “We want this to become the MLB of women’s baseball.”
The Heights and Queens played to a sold-out crowd on Saturday, with fans from near and far braving the rain to watch. Some, like California residents Allison Fuligni and Rita Ledesma, crossed the country to be at Robin Roberts Stadium.
Fuligini says she remembers exactly where she was when she and her friends first learned of the league’s existence.
“I was at a brunch with a bunch of dear friends and one of our friends was going and she told us all about it,” she said. “So, we made plans from Los Angeles to come out here for the inaugural game.”
Others, like Springfield resident Kelsey Atkinson, came from closer to home. She booked tickets for the first game a month in advance. For her, any chance for women’s sports to get the spotlight is good in her book.
“To have any women’s sports have a highlight, especially here in Springfield, it’s just really awesome and feels awesome to be a part of history,” Atkinson said.
Ledesma shared that excitement, saying part of it came from the diversity on display amongst the league’s players.
“You have young women that look like this nation and everybody is celebrating them today,” she said. “Everybody’s joyful for them.”
Past opening weekend, Siegal says her focus is on getting the first season of the league in the books. Once it’s over, though, the league does have plans to keep growing, with some cities having gotten in touch with her.
“We have an idea of where we want to be next year, but first, we need to get done with our first,” she said. “But expansion is definitely in our future.”
As for players the league is a chance for them to represent both where the sport has been and where it hopes to go.
“We want to make this last,” Firebells captain and pitcher Kelsie Whitmore said. “We want to make it last for a long time for generations after us to have a place where they feel like they belong and they can compete and follow their dreams.”
