“He’s not coming out of this game” was the comment from NBC play-by-play announcer Dave Flemming while the broadcast lingered on a shot of Padres Game 1 starter Michael King as he sat in the dugout looking through a notebook during the bottom of the sixth inning. “He’s not reading War and Peace either,” added color commentator Mark Grant. “He’s studying hitters.”

But that’s not to say King and the Padres wouldn’t find certain aspects of War and Peace relatable. Speaking in reference to his own work, Leo Tolstoy acknowledged that War and Peace defies conventional attempts at classification, saying it is “not a novel, even less is it a poem, and still less a historical chronicle.” Comparatively, analysts have struggled all season to properly define the 2026 Padres. If Tolstoy had scripted the Friars, he might have said they are “not a playoff team, much less a contender, and still less a club in the midst of a rebuild.”

Instead, the Padres were a team that went 30-20 in its first 50 games, 19-31 over the next 50 games, and then finished out the season by going 42-20. On July 22, their odds of making the playoffs bottomed out at 7.4%. Then they went on a run, and just one month later, their odds had surged to 68.9%. But rather than continue that upward trajectory en route to clinching a playoff spot, they first endured a backslide that shrank their odds to 39.2% as recently as September 2. It would have been logical for San Diego to sell at the trade deadline, but Padres POBO A.J. Preller was born without the specific bit of genetic code that allows humans to understand selling as a strategic concept. Instead, they added starting pitchers Robbie Ray and Casey Mize and finished the year as the top-seeded Wild Card team in the National League. Read the rest of this entry »

Royalty is all about taking a select few and placing them upon a pedestal for adoration and worship by the faceless masses. And often, when a team wins a title, it happens as a result of star players doing what star players do — making big plays at pivotal moments and swaying outcomes with jaw-dropping feats. But as the championship series of the WPBL’s inaugural season progressed from one game to the next, the stories behind each result weren’t written by the team captains or the players with the most impressive regular-season stats. Rather, a varied cast of unlikely heroes took the stage each night and managed to put on a unique rendition of a show we’ve all seen dozens of times before. We’re all familiar with how a playoff series typically unfolds, and we’ve even seen how it’s gone when these exact teams faced one another during the regular season. And yet, a band of unlikely heroes with representation from both the Los Angeles Queens and the San Francisco Firebells came together to offer us something completely unexpected.

Below we’ll walk through the five-act play that was the WPBL’s championship series, which went the full five games and which the Queens ultimately won, and highlight the unlikely heroes from each game by describing what they did and why their accomplishments were so improbable.

Game 1: Queens 7, Firebells 6

Because their first-round series with the Heights went the full three games, the Queens had just one day off prior to Game 1 of the championship series on Wednesday. Comparatively, the Firebells’ last game was the previous Friday, since their series against the Hunters began one day prior to Queens-Heights and San Francisco dispatched of Boston in a two-game sweep. Michelle Roche — the Queens’ most effective starter — threw 3 1/3 innings in Game 3 against the Heights, and Ayami Sato — their only other pitcher with more than one start during the regular season — threw two innings in Game 3 after covering three innings in Game 2. Out of necessity, Game 1 was a bullpen game for Los Angeles, while the Firebells got to line up their optimal rotation, which meant no. 1 starter Kelsie Whitmore took the ball for San Francisco in the series opener. Read the rest of this entry »

To the extreme dismay of schoolchildren everywhere, the semifinal series between the Los Angeles Queens and the New York Heights came down to which team was the most thorough in completing its homework. In any league, a playoff series provides the opportunity to devote more dedicated study time to an opponent than is typically afforded by the day-to-day grind of the regular season. It’s a group project with season-ending consequences, if not done properly. Both sides delivered a strong showing during the practical exam, but Monday’s decisive Game 3 ended with a 15-11 victory for Los Angeles. Yet, despite the win on the scoreboard and in the series, it would be a bridge too far to say that the Queens aced the test. At several points during the series, the Heights posed a question and the Queens had no answer, but Los Angeles kept New York guessing too, and you can only default to bubbling in B on the scantron so many times before your score starts to look ugly.

Here’s the game-by-game breakdown of how the Queens ultimately outwitted the Heights.

Game 1

Queens Game 1 starter Michelle Roche was interviewed on the field following their 10-3 win. She went five innings, threw a modest 65 pitches, and allowed just one run on four hits and a walk with two strikeouts. When asked what made her so effective, Roche said the team’s pitchers and catchers got together and, “Went through all the data, all of the games, and just figured out the weaknesses of their batting, but also the strengths of our pitching — and just went with our strengths.”

By contrast, here’s a quote from Heights manager Rocky Henley during a postgame press conference on August 19, “I really don’t know about Trackman yet. Trackman is available, but it takes so much time,” she said. “My days are just so full of other things right now that I just can’t sit down and learn Trackman. I need someone to actually walk me through it, so I can kind of learn a little bit more about it, and I’m waiting for that day. Maybe this weekend, I can really sit down on Sunday and start really diving into those numbers.” Read the rest of this entry »

The Firebells took on the Hunters in a best-of-three postseason series that began last Wednesday. The WPBL’s regular season had concluded three days prior, with San Francisco holding the league’s best record at 10-5, while Boston finished the year at 4-11. Despite the dramatic difference in winning percentage between the one-seed and the four-seed, the Hunters made the series closer than the sweep suggests.

The Firebells won the first game of the series 6-4, then came away with a 9-6 victory in Game 2. Given that the average margin of victory in a WPBL game is over five runs, the Hunters at least forced the Firebells into a save situation to close out both games — a feat they had only managed in two of their 11 regular season losses. But even though the Hunters looked better on the postseason stage, they still didn’t have the firepower to go toe-to-toe with the Firebells’ league-leading offense. Read the rest of this entry »

The WPBL’s first ever regular season is complete, making this the final weekly recap before the playoffs. Next week’s edition will cover the semifinal round of the postseason. As a reminder, these weekly roundups are designed to run through each week’s action by highlighting the most notable players, moments, and anything else I deem worthy of further commentary. For each edition of the recap, I re-license the naming rights to this list of highlights to whichever team I feel has won the week. And how does a team win the week? Well, unlike actual wins and losses in baseball, this type of win is purely subjective and will operate under the time-honored tradition of making it up as we go along.

Along with the list of highlights, the Unforced Errors section typically discusses the more confounding aspects of the prior week, because good faith criticism is a necessary component of continuing progress, but my gripes are fairly minimal this week, so in a season already awash in firsts, we’ll add one more to the pile and make this the first recap without an Unforced Errors list.

And on the topic of firsts, rounding things out are the Historic Firsts of Lesser Renown. The league’s momentous firsts will obviously get their shine, but there’s something to be said for the more strange and mundane firsts, the smaller day-to-day occurrences that make a new league feel familiar and complete. Think of these firsts as the knickknacks on a shelf that make a new house feel like a home. Baseball fans won’t really feel settled into a new league until the first time a player on their favorite team commits a TOOTBLAN. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to your weekly WPBL recap! Week Five marked the league’s second-to-last week of the regular season, and several teams are using their last few games to test out new defensive alignments and lineup configurations with an eye toward optimizing their strategies before the postseason. Certain tactics were more effective than others, and as such, no team’s performance this week was an unqualified success. Rather, the teams that flourished demonstrated an ability to puke and rally when things went sideways.

As a reminder, these weekly roundups are designed to cover each week’s action by highlighting the most notable players, moments, and anything else I deem worthy of further commentary. For each edition of the recap, I re-license the naming rights to this list of highlights to whichever team I feel has won the week. And how does a team win the week? Well, unlike actual wins and losses in baseball, this type of win is purely subjective and will operate under the time-honored tradition of making it up as we go along.

Along with the list of highlights, the Unforced Errors section discusses the more confounding aspects of the prior week because good faith criticism is a necessary component of continuing progress. Rounding things out are the Historic Firsts of Lesser Renown. The league’s momentous firsts will obviously get their shine, but there’s something to be said for the more strange and mundane firsts, the smaller day-to-day occurrences that make a new league feel familiar and complete. Think of these firsts as the knickknacks on a shelf that make a new house feel like a home. Baseball fans won’t really feel settled into a new league until the first time a player on their favorite team commits a TOOTBLAN. Read the rest of this entry »

With Week Four wrapped, we are now two-thirds of the way through the WPBL’s first season. Each team has just five regular season games remaining on the schedule over the next two weeks. Over this past week, the teams at the bottom of the standings were able to close the gap against the teams at the top. Following Week Three, the California teams had the west coast looking like the best coast, but as we’ll explore, reports of beasts in the east are growing louder all the time.

As a reminder, these weekly roundups are designed to cover each week’s action by highlighting the most notable players, moments, and anything else I deem worthy of further commentary. For each edition of the recap, I re-license the naming rights to this list of highlights to whichever team I feel has won the week. And how does a team win the week? Well, unlike actual wins and losses in baseball, this type of win is purely subjective and will operate under the time-honored tradition of making it up as we go along.

Along with the list of highlights, the Unforced Errors section discusses the more confounding aspects of the prior week because good faith criticism is a necessary component of continuing progress. Rounding things out are the Historic Firsts of Lesser Renown. The league’s momentous firsts will obviously get their shine, but there’s something to be said for the more strange and mundane firsts, the smaller day-to-day occurrences that make a new league feel familiar and complete. Think of these firsts as the knickknacks on a shelf that make a new house feel like a home. Baseball fans won’t really feel settled into a new league until the first time a player on their favorite team commits a TOOTBLAN. Read the rest of this entry »

Week Three has concluded in the WPBL, and as such, let’s get to recapping. As a reminder, these weekly roundups are designed to cover each week’s action by highlighting the most notable players, moments, and anything else I deem worthy of further commentary. For each edition of the recap, I re-license the naming rights to this list of highlights to whichever team I feel has won the week. And how does a team win the week? Well, unlike actual wins and losses in baseball, this type of win is purely subjective and will operate under the time-honored tradition of making it up as we go along.

Along with the list of highlights, the Unforced Errors list discusses the more confounding aspects of the prior week because good faith criticism is a necessary component of continuing progress. Rounding things out are the Historic Firsts of Lesser Renown. The league’s momentous firsts will obviously get their shine, but there’s something to be said for the more strange and mundane firsts, the smaller day-to-day occurrences that make a new league feel familiar and complete. Think of these firsts as the knickknacks on a shelf that make a new house feel like a home. Baseball fans won’t really feel settled into their new league until the first time a player on their favorite team commits a TOOTBLAN.

If you need a refresher on the league’s structure and mechanics, check out the Week One recap.

Without any further ado, your Week Three winner is the San Francisco Firebells. The Firebells went 3-0 on the week with two decisive wins over the second-place team in the standings (the Los Angeles Queens), and team captain Kelsie Whitmore issued a temporary moratorium on the Denae Benites MVP chatter. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to your Week Two recap of all things WPBL. As a reminder, these weekly roundups are designed to cover each week’s action by highlighting the most notable players, moments, and anything else I deem worthy of further commentary. For each edition of the recap, I re-license the naming rights to this list of highlights to whichever team I feel has won the week. And how does a team win the week? Well, unlike actual wins and losses in baseball, this type of win is purely subjective and will operate under the time-honored tradition of making it up as we go along.

Along with the list of highlights, the Unforced Errors list discusses the more confounding aspects of the prior week because good faith criticism is a necessary component of continuing progress. Rounding things out are the Historic Firsts of Lesser Renown. The league’s momentous firsts will obviously get their shine, but there’s something to be said for the more strange and mundane firsts, the smaller day-to-day occurrences that make a new league feel familiar and complete. Think of these firsts as the knickknacks on a shelf that make a new house feel like a home. Baseball fans won’t really feel settled into their new league until the first time a player on their favorite team commits a TOOTBLAN.

If you need a refresher on the league’s structure and mechanics, check out the Week One recap.

But enough preamble, let’s get to the Week Two winner: The New York Heights. The Heights went 2-1 in the second week of WPBL action, including a victory in the league’s first extra-inning game on Sunday. Though the Los Angeles Queens own the league’s best record and run differential through two weeks of play, they did suffer a 12-3 loss to the Firebells, while the Heights have yet to lose a game by more than three runs. Add in what Denae Benites and Natsuki Yonetani have been getting up to (more on them below), and giving the dub to New York feels pretty obvious. Read the rest of this entry »

Opening weekend of the WPBL’s inaugural season is officially in the record books. Around 5,200 fans happily crowded into a wet and windy Robin Roberts Stadium in Springfield, Illinois on Saturday for the privilege of being able to say they were present for the league’s first pitch. A rain delay lasting just over an hour prolonged the suspense that had been building since the league was first announced early last year, but women are used to waiting their turn.

With the season now underway, I’ll be recapping each week’s action by highlighting the most notable players, moments, and anything else I deem worthy of further commentary. For each edition of the recap, I will re-license the naming rights to this list of highlights to whichever team I feel has won the week. And how does a team win the week? Well, unlike actual wins and losses in baseball, this type of win is purely subjective and will operate under the time-honored tradition of making it up as we go along.

Along with the list of highlights, the Unforced Errors list will discuss the more confounding aspects of the prior week because good faith criticism is a necessary component of continuing progress. And to round things out, we’ll touch on the Historic Firsts of Lesser Renown. The league’s momentous firsts will obviously get their shine, but there’s something to be said for the more strange and mundane firsts, the smaller day-to-day occurrences that make a new league feel familiar and complete. Think of these firsts as the knickknacks on a shelf that make a new house feel like a home. Baseball fans won’t really feel settled into their new league until the first time a player on their favorite team commits a TOOTBLAN. Read the rest of this entry »