SPRINGFIELD, Ill. – Mo’ne Davis crossed home plate in the first inning of the first Women’s Professional Baseball League game Saturday, becoming the first woman to score a run in professional baseball in 71 years. It happened fast, cleanly, without ceremony. Davis had singled to lead off the top of the frame; Maggie Foxx drove her in two batters later. The Los Angeles Queens had a 1-0 lead, and women’s professional baseball, extinct since 1954, was back on the scoreboard.
What followed was more complicated, and considerably more fun to watch.
The Queens would give away that lead and most of the others they built through the night. The New York Heights, resilient and offensively dangerous, turned a deficit into a four-run advantage by the fifth inning. Robin Roberts Stadium, the ballpark in Springfield that honors the Hall of Fame right-hander who grew up in this city, was loud with people who had come expecting history and were getting a game instead.
Then came the seventh inning.
Down by four with six outs left, the Queens scored four runs, taking the lead for the last time. Amira Hondras was the name to know: two hits and four RBIs on the night, including the runs that mattered most. The final was 10-8. It was not the tidy inaugural statement the Queens might have scripted. It was better than that.
The Women’s Professional Baseball League is the first professional women’s baseball circuit in the United States since the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League shut down after the 1954 season, a run that began in 1943 when World War II had thinned the ranks of men available to play and Philip Wrigley needed something to fill parks in the Midwest. The AAGPBL produced some of the most compelling baseball played anywhere in that decade, and it disappeared when the men came back. The league that opened Saturday night in Springfield exists because a generation of players who grew up after that gap decided to try again.
The Queens and the Heights were two of four founding clubs, along with the San Francisco Firebells and the Boston Hunters. Each team will play 15 regular-season games at Robin Roberts Stadium, all on neutral ground, through September 6. The logistics are deliberate. Before a women’s baseball infrastructure can support home venues in four cities, it has to first demonstrate the product in a single location. Saturday showed that the crowd will show up: the stands at Robin Roberts were packed, fans in rain gear leaning into a gray summer afternoon to watch something that had not existed in their lifetimes.
Davis was not the only familiar name in the Queens lineup. Michelle Roche went 2-for-4 with two runs and two RBIs. Foxx, operating as both pitcher and outfielder, finished 2-for-2 as well. But the player who gave Los Angeles its margin was Hondras, whose bat in the seventh inning made the difference between a historic loss and a historic win.
The Heights had their own standout. Denae Benites, the New York catcher, went 4-for-4 with three runs and two RBIs, and hit the first home run in WPBL history. Kylee Lahners added three RBIs. The Heights were not there to be a footnote. They led by four runs with two innings left, and what unraveled for them in the seventh said something about the difficulty of finishing in baseball, which has never much cared what the score was after five.
Robin Roberts won 286 games over a career that ran from 1948 to 1966, most of those years with the Philadelphia Phillies. He was born in Springfield, Illinois, which explains both the venue and the weight the name carries in this setting. The full account of Saturday’s inaugural game makes clear that what happened in his hometown was not accidental. The Illinois city has not been a center of professional baseball attention in a long time. On Saturday it was the only game in the country that mattered in the way that first games tend to.
The WPBL’s next action comes Sunday when the Firebells and Hunters open their seasons. The schedule concentrates all four teams in Springfield through the regular season, creating a rotating showcase rather than a traditional home-and-road structure. Whether that model eventually scales into something with individual home markets is a question the season will start to answer.
What Saturday did not resolve was how the product looks in a sustained broadcast setting, or what the WPBL’s television and streaming arrangements look like heading into the rest of the schedule. The coverage question matters for a league that needs casual fans to discover it without already knowing it exists.
Davis gave them a reason to look. She was 13 when she pitched a shutout at the 2014 Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, and made the cover of Sports Illustrated, one of the most covered moments in the history of youth sports, in part because a young Black girl from Philadelphia was handling the mound better than the boys across the bracket. That moment did not come with a clear next chapter in professional baseball, because for women, one did not exist. It does now, and on the night it started, Davis was the first across the plate.
The Queens did not make it easy. They gave away leads, fell behind by a figure that looked decisive, and then found the runs when they needed them. Baseball has always been more interested in resolutions than in processes, and Saturday’s resolution was a Queens victory that nobody in the third inning would have predicted with any confidence. That disorderly competitiveness may be the best advertisement the WPBL could have made for itself on opening night.
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