--- title: "The LA Queens play the first game in a new women's pro baseball league today in Illinois" description: "The Women's Pro Baseball League opens today at 3 p.m. Pacific, with the Los Angeles Queens facing the New York Heights. Before you look for tickets: the Queens do not play in Los Angeles. All four teams are based at one ballpark in Springfield, Illinois for this first season. Mo'ne Davis is in the LA outfield, Ayami Sato is on the mound, and Eric Young Sr. manages." category: "Sports" category_url: https://herald.la/category/sports author: "Gabriela Soto" published: 2026-08-01T19:52:00.000Z updated: 2026-08-01T19:52:00.000Z canonical: https://herald.la/article/the-la-queens-play-the-first-game-in-a-new-women-s-pro-baseball-league-today-in tags: ["wpbl", "womens-baseball", "la-queens", "mone-davis", "ayami-sato", "eric-young"] --- # The LA Queens play the first game in a new women's pro baseball league today in Illinois The Women's Pro Baseball League opens today at 3 p.m. Pacific, with the Los Angeles Queens facing the New York Heights. Before you look for tickets: the Queens do not play in Los Angeles. All four teams are based at one ballpark in Springfield, Illinois for this first season. Mo'ne Davis is in the LA outfield, Ayami Sato is on the mound, and Eric Young Sr. manages. The first professional women's baseball league in the United States since the 1950s plays its first game this afternoon, and Los Angeles has a team in it. The Los Angeles Queens meet the New York Heights at 3 p.m. Pacific at Robin Roberts Stadium in Springfield, Illinois, [ABC7 reported](https://abc7.com/post/wpbl-opener-la-queens-face-new-york-heights-inaugural-game-womens-pro-baseball-league/19612162/). ESPN Select is streaming it. ## The part to understand before you look for tickets The Queens do not play in Los Angeles. Four franchises represent San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and Boston, but Springfield is the host city for the entire inaugural season, [Yahoo Sports reported](https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/women-pro-baseball-league-everything-000500632.html). Every team plays at the same ballpark. The city names are identity and future intent, not geography, and there is nothing to attend here. That is a normal way to start a league on a small budget, and it is worth saying plainly rather than letting an Angeleno reader assume otherwise. ## How the game itself differs Seven innings, not nine. Aluminum bats, not wood. The distances are standard: 90 feet between bases, 60 feet 6 inches to the mound. Each team carries about 15 players and plays 15 regular-season games before the playoffs. Yahoo Sports describes a seven-week season in total: four weeks of regular-season play, a week of all-star competition, then two weeks of playoffs, with games Thursday through Sunday and each team playing twice a week. ## Who is on the LA roster Two names carry most of the attention, for opposite reasons. **Mo'ne Davis** is the one Americans already know. In 2014, at 13, she became the first girl to pitch a shutout in the Little League World Series, and she was on the cover of Sports Illustrated for it. She is an outfielder now. **Ayami Sato** is the better player. The 36-year-old Japanese pitcher helped Japan win six Women's Baseball World Cup titles and is widely regarded as the best women's baseball player in the world. Yahoo Sports notes she is a six-time world champion and three-time World Cup MVP making her American debut. The manager is **Eric Young Sr.**, who played 15 seasons in the majors including with the Dodgers and was most recently a third base coach for the Angels. ## The history this sits in This is not the first women's professional baseball league in America, and the league does not claim to be. The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League ran from 1943 to 1954, filling ballparks in the Midwest while men were at war, and folded once the postwar attention moved on. It is the league most people know from "A League of Their Own." Seventy-two years is a long gap. What happens after this season, whether the teams ever play in the cities on their jerseys, and whether the money holds, are all open questions that a first pitch does not answer. It is still a first pitch. ## Sources - [LA Queens to face New York Heights in inaugural game of Women's Pro Baseball League](https://abc7.com/post/wpbl-opener-la-queens-face-new-york-heights-inaugural-game-womens-pro-baseball-league/19612162/) - [The Women's Pro Baseball League: everything we know about the WPBL's 2026 start](https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/women-pro-baseball-league-everything-000500632.html)