Martha Reeves enters the picture through Ayami Sato’s first start for the Los Angeles Queens on Saturday, her American debut in the Women’s Professional Baseball League. The assignment puts one of women’s baseball’s most accomplished pitchers into the league’s opening week, with the WPBL launching its first U.S. season after decades without a pro women’s league.
Sato’s résumé is not the kind a startup league usually gets on opening day. Her 16-year career has stretched across three countries, and she has won six gold medals with the Japan National Team since 2010, plus three consecutive MVP awards at the Women’s Baseball World Cup.
Los Angeles Queens in Springfield
The WPBL will play all its games in a centralized setting at Robin Roberts Stadium in Springfield, Illinois, and it opens with four teams: the Los Angeles Queens, the New York Heights, the San Francisco Firebells and the Boston Hunters. That setup keeps the league’s first season tight and easy to track, while giving each club the same base of operations.
Sato will not be entering as a raw prospect. In 2024, she became the first woman to play pro baseball in Canada as a member of the Toronto Maple Leafs of the Intercounty Baseball League, and she led Japan’s Women’s Baseball League in strikeouts in three of the last four seasons. She also comes in alongside Ashton Lansdell and Mo’ne Davis on the Los Angeles Queens, which gives the team immediate name recognition inside a league still building one.
Justine Seigel’s international plan
Justine Seigel said the league planned to recruit internationally from the beginning, and the roster math shows that plan is already in motion. At least nine players from the US women’s national baseball team will play in the WPBL, while Sato’s path from Japan to Canada to the United States gives the league a profile that reaches beyond one market.
Seigel also framed the point in practical terms: “We want many of the best players, and to have many of the best players, you have to go out into the world and find the best shortstop in Venezuela, and who’s pitching in Japan,” she said. That is the actual business case here — if the WPBL wants to be more than a one-country exhibition, it needs players who already matter across borders.
Sato’s rookie mindset
“This is a brand new league for all of us,” Sato said through a translator. “So I also want to approach it with the mindset of a rookie –staying curious, paying attention to everything around me, and embracing this new challenge with an open mind.”
Most Americans tuning into the WPBL may not have heard of Sato, even though she is widely considered the best pitcher in the history of women’s baseball. That gap is the league’s opening-week challenge and its selling point at once: Saturday’s start is not just another debut, it is the first U.S. look at a pitcher who has already proved herself in Japan and Canada.
