The Women’s Professional Baseball League threw out its first pitch on August 1 in Springfield, Illinois, opening a new era for women’s professional baseball after seven decades without a league at this level. Maybelle Blair, the 99-year-old who once pitched for the Peoria Redwings, returned to the diamond in a wheelchair to help usher it in.
Blair said nothing would keep her away, even after breaking four ribs, and she delivered the ceremonial first pitch before the inaugural game between the LA Queens and the NY Heights. For readers searching the title A League Of Their Own, the connection is more than a nod: Blair inspired the character Mae Mordabito in the 1992 story that carried the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League into pop culture, and now she was back at the center of a real league’s first day.
The opening game gave the new league an immediate highlight. Denae Benites hit the first home run in WPBL history, finished 4-4 at the plate and added three stolen bases, while the Queens scored four runs in the final inning. Ayami Sato also worked three innings for the Queens, giving the first game a box score that looked less like an exhibition and more like the start of something built to last.
Still, the scale is modest. The WPBL launched with four city teams, and every game in its first season will be played in Springfield. That setup keeps the league controlled and manageable for a 30-game schedule that runs through September, but it also shows how far it has to go before it resembles the bigger operation its backers want next year.
The old women’s league ended in 1954, after World War II had already passed and the brief era that produced the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League had faded. This new version is trying to do something the women’s game has not had in generations: create a permanent professional stage, not just a memory, for players like Benites, Sato and Mo’ne Davis, who became the first girl to throw a shutout in the 2014 Little League World Series.
Blair’s appearance made the day feel like a handoff as much as a ceremony. The question now is not whether the WPBL can claim a meaningful first day; it already has. The question is how quickly it can turn a single city, four teams and 30 games into the kind of structure that can survive beyond the nostalgia of its opening pitch.
