{"id":94161,"date":"2026-08-16T11:13:27","date_gmt":"2026-08-16T15:13:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/?p=94161"},"modified":"2026-08-16T11:13:27","modified_gmt":"2026-08-16T15:13:27","slug":"womens-pro-baseball-league-first-game-72-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/sports-and-faith\/womens-pro-baseball-league-first-game-72-years\/","title":{"rendered":"A Women’s Pro Baseball League Just Played Its First Game in 72 Years"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n \t<\/i> Read Time:<\/span>8 Minute, 16 Second <\/div>\n\n <\/div>

On August 1, at a mostly empty ballpark in Springfield, Illinois, a 24-year-old former Little League World Series star named Mo’ne Davis crossed home plate and scored the first run in the history of a brand-new professional sports league.<\/p>\n\n

It didn’t trend nationally. There was no primetime broadcast deal, no confetti cannon, no arena packed to the rafters. Just Robin Roberts Stadium, a modest six-week schedule, and four teams \u2014 the Boston Hunters, the New York Heights, the Los Angeles Queens, and the San Francisco Firebells \u2014 playing real professional baseball. The Queens beat the Heights 10-8 that day. Heights catcher Denae Benites went 4-for-4 and hit the first home run in league history in the bottom of the fourth.<\/p>\n\n

It was, on the surface, a fairly ordinary opening day for a small new sports league. It was also 72 years in the making.<\/p>\n\n

A League Nobody Thought Would Actually Happen<\/h2>\n\n

The Women’s Pro Baseball League isn’t the first attempt at professional women’s baseball. It’s not even the second. It’s the latest entry in what one wire report called “a scattered history” \u2014 a string of leagues, teams, and tryouts that kept starting over from nothing because nothing before them had been allowed to last.<\/p>\n\n

The first real version ran from 1943 to 1954. The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League started as a wartime experiment \u2014 a way to keep ballparks filled while men’s baseball lost players to the draft \u2014 and by 1948 it was drawing over 900,000 fans a season. Then the war ended, the men came home, and the league quietly folded. It’s the league “A League of Their Own” was based on, and for forty years after it closed, women’s professional baseball didn’t exist at all. Not a small version. Not a regional version. None.<\/p>\n\n

In the 1980s, a former Atlanta Braves executive named Bob Hope tried to organize a women’s minor league team. He held tryouts. He built a roster. And then he discovered that no minor league in the country would let a women’s team in, at any level. It took until 1994 \u2014 fifty years after the AAGPBL folded \u2014 for the Colorado Silver Bullets to take the field, managed by Hall of Famer Phil Niekro, playing men’s amateur and college teams because there was still no women’s league for them to play in. They lasted four seasons before a brawl and the loss of their main sponsor ended the experiment in 1997.<\/p>\n\n

That’s the part most people don’t know when they hear “women’s professional baseball just launched”: it isn’t a new idea catching on for the first time. It’s an old idea that kept getting shut every single door it tried, for the better part of a century, before one finally held.<\/p>\n\n