This summer, female baseball players will once again have a league of their own. On Aug. 1, the Women’s Pro Baseball League begins its first season, marking the return of professional women’s baseball for the first time in 70 years.
The four inaugural teams, each named for a visionary woman from the 19th and 20th centuries, are the Boston Hunters, Los Angeles Queens, New York Heights, and San Francisco Firebells. In year one, they’ll compete at a neutral site in Springfield, Illinois.
Ahead of the first pitch, NHPR’s Rick Ganley spoke with Beth Greenwood, catcher for the Hunters. Greenwood is an Amherst native, and the first American woman to catch in an NCAA baseball game. She reflected on what it means to be part of the revival of professional women’s baseball and the “New England love” in the league.
“As a little kid, there was no women's professional baseball league,” Greenwood said. “So I just dreamed of playing for the Boston Red Sox.”
This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Transcript
You're a native. You grew up playing baseball in New Hampshire?
I grew up in Amherst, New Hampshire, and kind of spent my entire life in New Hampshire until I went away for college. And now I've been training and prepping for the pro league.
So tell me where you are right now.
Currently I'm in Rockford, Illinois. I am working for Baseball for All, and we're putting on the largest girls youth baseball tournament in the country. It's the same time right now as the Women's Baseball World Cup, which is also in town, which has six teams all across the world with the best female baseball players. But we have 900 girls playing baseball in our tournament this week.
That's a lot of athletes in one spot.
Yeah, it is.
You obviously are very busy with this, but at the same time you're getting ready to start up and play in this new league, starting up on, I think it's in August, right?
Yes. This event for Baseball for All just happens to be kind of the week before. I'm supposed to report to Springfield, Illinois, for spring training for the Women's Pro League. Our first games will be the first week in August.
Tell me about the names of the four inaugural teams here that are starting up in the league. They're all inspired by trailblazing American women from the 19th and 20th centuries, all of it tied to baseball. Tell us about the Boston Hunters.
The Boston Hunters are named after Harriet Hunt. She was really famously known for trying to apply to Harvard multiple times and kind of getting told no. And so she went on to still practice medicine and be super impactful, kind of in that space for women's health and also just women's rights in general.
I think she's super representative, just kind of being told no and doing it anyway and kind of pushing the needle forward. So super proud to represent her and kind of the history of that within Boston and New England. I mean, some of the other players who are local to the New England area are people that I've been playing with at least since, I think, 2018.
For the last eight years, you have Maggie Fox playing for the Los Angeles Queens. She's from Bedford, New Hampshire, which is pretty awesome. You also have players like Jackie Reynolds playing for the New York Heights. She grew up in Woburn, Mass., and still lives in Woburn, Mass. So we have a lot of New England love in the league this season.
So tell me about where the league's games are going to be played this year.
All of our games for the first season are going to be played at a neutral site in Springfield, Illinois. So it's just I think an opportunity. We're representing four cities. So we have San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, and Boston, most importantly Boston.
For the first year, that's a lot of travel. I think they want to put us in one place for the first year just so that we can kind of get things right, make sure we're treating the players the right way, make sure we're, you know, kind of making sure everyone's taken care of that first year and try to have success building fan bases, doing that.
And then hopefully we get enough support kind of throughout this season that we're able to expand next year and travel a bit more and kind of go to those cities, see more of those fans and kind of build off of that.
It'd be really fun to see a game played at Fenway, wouldn't it?
Yeah, that would be amazing. I had the opportunity a couple of weeks ago to throw out the first pitch. And I remember going out there, first of all, that was incredible. Just because I grew up a Red Sox fan. And as a little kid… there was no women's professional baseball league. So I just dreamed of playing for the Boston Red Sox and playing at Fenway.
Walking out there to go throw out the first pitch. I was just taking it in and I was like, wow, I can't wait for us to play in a place like this and to have the stands packed with fans and just to be excited about women's baseball.
The Hunters will play their first game on Aug. 2 at 7:30 p.m. EST against the Firebells. Stay tuned here for details on how to watch.
