three teams left, one game monday, and a championship nobody has ever won
via the WPBL and Just Women's Sports, with Xtra and Autostraddle.
Three teams are still alive, and on Monday that becomes two.
The San Francisco Firebells are already through, having swept the Boston Hunters and closed it out 9-6 on Saturday. The other spot comes down to a deciding game between the Los Angeles Queens and the New York Heights, who refused to go quietly and evened the series 9-7 on the back of consecutive home runs. Winner goes to San Francisco. Loser goes home and thinks about it all winter, same as anybody.
Then on Wednesday the Women's Pro Baseball League plays the first game of the first championship series it has ever had. Best of five, running to September 22 if it goes the distance. Nobody has ever won this thing. There is no defending champion, no dynasty, no franchise that always chokes in the fall. Whoever takes it is the first name on an empty trophy.
why we are covering baseball
Because this league is, by a comfortable margin, the queerest thing on the American sports calendar, and it did not happen by accident.
Autostraddle went through the rosters at the start of August and counted 18 out players among the 60 who suited up on opening weekend. That is their count rather than a league figure, but it puts roughly a third of a professional sports league on the record in its first season. The WNBA took the better part of two decades to get near that.
None of it reads as something the league is quietly tolerating. There is an advertisement for Olivia Travel, the lesbian travel company, on the outfield wall at Robin Roberts Stadium in Springfield, Illinois. "Olivia has supported women's athletics for decades, so it wasn't necessarily a new concept," Autumn Nazarian, Olivia's vice president of marketing, told Xtra. Natalie Mikolich, the league's director of public relations, put the fit in the flat language of a media kit: the WPBL's constituents "overlapped with Olivia's key demographics."
Reader, they overlapped. There is also a team called the Queens, and they might win the whole thing.
the mascot came out at 95
The clearest signal is the mascot, which is based on Maybelle Blair.
Blair played in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League in the 1940s, the wartime circuit that became A League of Their Own. Her nickname, All The Way Mae, was handed to Madonna's character in the 1992 film. In 2022, at the Tribeca premiere of the Amazon series, at 95, she came out.
"I hid for 75, 85 years and this is actually basically the first time I've ever come out," she said.
Sit with the shape of that. A woman plays professional baseball in the 1940s alongside women who were, a great many of them, also gay, and the entire apparatus of the era makes sure nobody says so. Eighty years later a new league starts up and puts her face on the thing. Not a discreet plaque in a corridor. The mascot. They also held their first Pride Night on September 3, two months into existing, which is early for an organization still working out where the parking is.
what is actually at stake
A trophy, obviously. But leagues like this one live or die on whether year two gets funded, and year two gets funded on the strength of how year one finished. A championship series people actually watch is the argument.
We have spent a lot of this year writing about institutions quietly dropping the Pride night they used to advertise, and about what happens to queer organizations when the money leaves. Here is a brand new one that looked at the same weather and put the cruise ad on the wall anyway. First pitch Wednesday.
