July 31, 2022: USA Baseball Women’s National Team clinches 2022 Friendship Series with win over Canada

It’s often assumed that boys and men play baseball and girls and women play softball, but girls and women have played baseball – at both the amateur and professional levels – for as long as the game has existed.

Students at all-female Vassar College formed two baseball teams in 1866 but didn’t get to play for long. The sport was considered to be too strenuous or dangerous for women to play. Students were playing baseball at other women’s colleges but often had to play secretly off campus to avoid condemnation from the college hierarchy.1

Baseball was becoming a professional sport in the nineteenth century, and Albert G. Spalding, a notable player and sporting-goods mogul, was very much involved in shaping the masculine character of the game, along with the exclusion of men of color. Spalding espoused that “neither our wives, our sisters, our daughters, nor our sweethearts, may play Base Ball on the field. … Base Ball is too strenuous for womankind.”2

Still, many wives, sisters, and daughters defied this view and continued to play baseball, even as softball became the more accepted sport for girls and women.3 The Bloomer Girls were a highly skilled barnstorming team from the 1890s to the 1930s, often mixing female players with two or three male players. They traveled around and challenged local teams, often exchanging batteries, the pitcher and catcher. Rogers Hornsby and Smoky Joe Wood got their start in professional baseball on Bloomer Girls teams.4

One of the most intriguing characters of this era was Maud Nelson, who pitched, played third base, and owned, scouted, and managed her own teams until the 1930s.5 Lizzie Arlington/Stride, Alta Weiss, and others also had remarkable professional careers on barnstorming teams.

During World War II, Chicago Cubs owner Philip Wrigley wanted to keep baseball going and formed a women’s professional league. This league eventually became the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, which began play in 1943 and lasted until 1954. As in the movie A League of Their Own, young women, many of whom were softball standouts, were scouted to play for teams in smaller Midwestern cities. Unlike the movie, they initially played a softball/baseball hybrid, but the AAGBL gradually became more like men’s baseball in ball dimensions, playing field size, and overhand pitching.6

While the United States has not had a prominent professional women’s baseball league since the AAGPBL, there have been many great stories involving girls and women in baseball since then. Three women, Toni Stone, Mamie Johnson, and Connie Morgan, played in the Negro Leagues in the 1950s. Maria Pepe fought for and eventually won the right for girls to play in Little League, which was key in leading to thousands of girls playing baseball rather than softball. A professional women’s team called the Silver Bullets barnstormed and played men’s teams from 1994 to 1997.7

Ila Borders in 1994 was the first woman to pitch for an NCAA men’s baseball team, and eventually pitched professionally for the St. Paul Saints, the Duluth Superior Dukes, the Black Wolf of Madison, Wisconsin, and the Zion Pioneers.8

At the international level, the United States and other countries first fielded women’s national baseball teams early in the twenty-first century. The Women’s Baseball World Cup, run by the World Baseball Softball Confederation (WBSC) began in 2004 and had been played biennially until it was disrupted by the pandemic in 2020. The United States used to be the team to beat, winning the first two World Cups, but Japan became the powerhouse, drawing talent from its own professional league to win the 2008 World Cup and the next five through 2018.9

In anticipation of the 2024 World Cup, Baseball Canada and the Thunder Bay International Baseball Association hosted a five-game series between the Canadian and US teams in Thunder Bay, Ontario, during July and August of 2022. Canada was ranked third, behind Japan and Chinese Taipei, and the United States fourth.

The series took place at Baseball Central, Thunder Bay’s 1,000-seat amateur baseball facility. Each team was managed by former national team players. At the helm for the United States was Veronica Alvarez, who was also a minor-league coach for the Oakland A’s. Ashley Stephenson, a tournament all-star at third base in the 2008 World Cup, was Canada’s manager. The United States took the first two games, but Canada rebounded to win the third.

For Game Four, played on July 31, Alexane Fournier, just shy of her 20th birthday, took the mound for Team Canada, which fielded a number of young players. Among Canada’s more experienced players was center fielder Claire Eccles, who had played for the Women’s National Team since 2014. In 2017 she became the first woman to play in the West Coast League, a collegiate summer wooden bat league, when she joined the Victoria HarbourCats.10

The United States’ star player was 24-year-old Kelsie Whitmore, who had played with men’s pro teams, the Sonoma Stompers of the Pacific Association in 2016 and 2017, and the Staten Island FerryHawks, an MLB-affiliated team in the Atlantic League, in 2022. Whitmore did double duty as both an outfielder and a pitcher, with a baffling knuckle curve. In Game One of the Friendship Series, she had displayed her two-way talent, pitching four shutout innings and dominating on offense, slamming a triple and a 375-foot home run. When she wasn’t pitching, she played center field.

The United States hoped to “clinch” the series in Game Four even though all five games would be played. The team wasted no time on offense. In the first inning, first baseman Malaika Underwood started it off with a single. Underwood, the 41-year-old veteran of the team, had played for the Women’s National Team since 2006.

After third baseman Kylee Lahners was hit by a pitch, Whitmore ripped a double to right, scoring Underwood. Starting pitcher Jillian Albayati’s groundout plated Lahners, and Whitmore scored on a single up the middle by shortstop Jade Cortarez to make it a 3-0 lead.

Albayati pitched an impressive five shutout innings, giving up only three hits with three strikeouts. In the sixth, second baseman Alex Hugo drew a walk and Underwood and Lahners singled to load the bases for Whitmore, who pulled a double to the wall in left-center to clear the bases. The United States added one more with a run-scoring single by Underwood, who ended up with three hits. Fournier took the loss, tagged for five runs on five hits in 4⅓ innings. Relief pitcher Alizee Gelinas gave up the other two runs. The series was clinched with a 7-0 win.

It might’ve been all-USA on this day, but Canada turned it around for the fifth game the next day, winning 8-4. Mia Valcke, left fielder for Team Canada, led her team with six hits and four RBIs in the Friendship Series.11

There were a number of new players for each side. For Team USA, 16-year-old Alana Martinez and Elise Berger were the youngest. Starting pitcher-outfielder Olivia Pichardo, 18, featured a fastball in the low 80s.

This series was most likely a practice run for the next World Cup, in 2024. There would also be a women’s baseball series planned for November of 2022 in Sarasota, Florida, hosted by American Girls Baseball, an offshoot of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League developed by former Rockford Peaches player Sue Zipay (née Parsons). The older players were supporting the new, hopefully leading to a modern league of their own.

Author’s Note

This was real hardball, 90 feet between the bases, and these players handle it like pros. The United States-Canada series featured a number of double plays and balls driven to the wall, and the catchers had no problem throwing from home to second. There were good crowds for all the games. The field at Baseball Central is beautifully kept, with standard dimensions, 330 feet down the lines and 400 feet to deep center.

As of November 2022, Brown University student Olivia Pichardo made it onto the school’s varsity baseball roster. Although many other women have blazed the trail into college baseball, she’ll be the first woman to play baseball for a NCAA Division I team. Progress.

After the game, my husband and I went out for dinner and met a table of USA Baseball WNT parents, a wonderful, dedicated, and diverse group from all over the country. Pichardo’s father produced condensed versions of the games. You can check out Game 4 in less than 14 minutes:

https://youtu.be/yUaRi_Zn2R0

Acknowledgments

This article was fact-checked by Stew Thornley and copy-edited by Len Levin.

Special thanks to John Fredland, Gary Belleville, and Kurt Blumenau for their tremendous help and patience.

Photo credit: USA Baseball.

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author consulted the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League Players’ Association website, AAGPBL.org, for pertinent information. A complete video of Game Four of the Friendship Series is posted on Baseball Canada’s YouTube account.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phWh7QXTCLk

Notes

1 Marilyn Cohen, No Girls in the Clubhouse – The Exclusion of Women from Baseball (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2009), 20-21.

2 Jennifer Ring, Stolen Bases – Why American Girls Don’t Play Baseball (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 55.

3 Softball had been invented in the late nineteenth century by men as a way of playing indoors during the winter. As softball was considered less “strenuous,” most girls and women were steered into playing the game by the 1930s. Barbara Gregorich, Women at Play – The Story of Women in Baseball (Orlando, Florida: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1993), 6-11.

4 Ring, 42-45.

5 Gregorich, 6-11.

6 Gregorich, 84-89.

7 Cohen, 98-104.

8 Jean Hastings Ardell, Breaking Into Baseball – Women and the National Pastime (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005), 126-135

9 USA Baseball, Women’s National Team, USA Baseball.com, accessed December 15, 2022, https://www.usabaseball.com/team-usa/womens-national-team.

10 Baseball Canada, Women’s National Team, Baseball.CA.com, accessed December 15, 2022, https://baseball.ca/womens-national-team.

11 USA Baseball, Women’s National Team, USA Baseball.com, accessed December 15 2022, https://www.usabaseball.com/team-usa/womens-national-team.