On Saturday night, the first women’s professional baseball game was played in over thirty years, marking a significant milestone for women’s sports and equality in baseball.
According to Huffpost, the Los Angeles Queens faced off against the New York Heights for the inaugural game of the Women’s Pro Baseball League. The league features four teams in total, including teams in Boston and San Francisco as well as New York and Los Angeles. There will be 15 games and a playoff series.
The last time women took the mound for a professional game in the U.S. was in the mid-1990s for the short-lived Ladies Professional Baseball League. And of course, the classic film ‘A League of Their Own’ captured the magic of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, which ran from 1943 to 1954.
Women’s baseball has come a long way from the skirted uniforms and etiquette classes that marked 1940s competition. Over the weekend, the women played through a rainstorm to a crowd of over 4,000 spectators but they still paid tribute to those who came before them.
The WPBL kicked off the action with a pre-game ceremony, including a standing ovation for Maybelle Blair who played on the AAGPBL and serves on the WPBL advisory board.
“I think that’s pretty incredible,” Denae Benites said. “Maybelle’s been sticking with us since the beginning of this journey. She’s paved a path for us, really. ... She’s a special person and I’m so happy that she got to make it out here and do that today.”
Los Angeles captured the victory on Saturday, and the following day San Francisco beat Boston, giving the Californian contingent the leading edge as the WPBL season begins.
“Women have always been part of this game,” Kat Williams, the chief executive officer of the International Women’s Baseball Center, told AP News. “We’ve always played, we’ve always umpired, we’ve always coached. And in some of the earliest references in the 17th century, the earliest references to something like a game of baseball, it was women that were playing it.”
