Yesterday the Women’s Professional Baseball League held it’s first ever game as the Los Angeles Queens defeated the New York Heights 10 to 8
after a thrilling comeback in the rain.Today will bring the season opener for the remaining
two teams in the league, the San Francisco Firebells and the Boston Hunters.
As continued WPBL coverage is a little outside of Purple Row’s usual beat, the same note from yesterdays game thread bears repeating once more:
We realize that Purple Row is a Colorado Rockies site, and none of that will change. But we do want to provide a discussion space for those who want to follow this new league, so we’ll be pinning a discussion thread on our homepage to facilitate fan discussion and support this new league in its early days.
On to today’s game!
The Firebells have named Kelsie Whitmore — arguably the most well known US born player in the WPBL — as their team captain. The first overall pick in the WPBL draft, Whitmore is a two-way player.
Whitmore played for the United States in the 2014 and 2018 Women’s Baseball World Cup and college softball for the Cal State Fullerton Titans. She won the Big West Conference’s softball player of the year in 2021. In recent years Whitmore has played for a mixture of independent league teams and was the first woman to be in a starting lineup for an Atlantic League game. Most recently she has been playing Banana Ball for the Savannah Bananas since August of last year.
The Hunters will be led on the field by their own team captain, Alli Schroder. Selected fifth overall in the WPBL draft, Schroder won bronze medals in the 2018 and 2024 Women’s Baseball World Cup as a pitcher for Canada. Just this past June, Schroder became the first woman to play in the Grand Forks International baseball tournament. Outside baseball, Schroder has worked as a firefighter with the BC Wildfire Service since 2021.
The game is set to begin at 5:30 pm.
Those in the United States can watch on either ESPN Select or the Scripps Sports Network and international viewers can find the game on the WPBL Youtube page.
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