Bay Shore native Sarah Edwards a star in fast growing Women's Pro Baseball League

Sarah Edwards wasn’t thinking about making history when she walked to the plate at Robin Roberts Stadium in Springfield, Illinois, last Wednesday. She wasn’t thinking about producing the kind of moment that would go viral, get replayed on ESPN and get her mentioned on National Public Radio.

“I was just thinking about being on time and hitting a line drive,” the Bay Shore native told Newsday.

A first baseman for the Los Angeles Queens, Edwards became the first woman to hit a Grand Slam in a professional baseball game in more than 70 years when she connected with a 3-and-1 pitch in the second inning of what ended up being a 12-4 victory over the Boston Hunters.

Edwards is one of 60 players competing for four teams in the inaugural season of the Women’s Pro Baseball League. The WPBL is the first pro baseball league for women since the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League — immortalized in the movie “A League of Their Own” — was dissolved 52 years ago.

There are no sanctioned girls baseball high school teams in the U.S. Around 1,300 high school girls played baseball on boys teams across the United States during the 2023-24 school year, according to a survey done by the National Federation of State High School Associations.

The NCAA doesn’t offer women’s baseball, but nine women played on men’s baseball teams in 2024, according to the NCAA’s demographics database. Around 21,000 women played college softball.

Edwards played softball at Bay Shore High School before going on to have a collegiate career at SUNY Buffalo and Hofstra. After graduating from Hofstra, Edwards forged a career overseas as a star hitter playing softball in 11 different countries and represented Italy in softball in the 2022 World Games.

She moved into the baseball world in 2023 when she landed a job as the hitting development coach for the Philadelphia Phillies Rookie Level affiliate in the Florida Complex League and then played for Team USA, the women’s national baseball team. Earlier this year, she became the first female on-field coach in Asian professional baseball when she was named the CTBC Brothers’ hitting coach in Taiwan.

Edwards, 30, knew she had to be a part of the Women’s Professional Baseball league when she first heard about its formation last year.

The league was co-founded by Justine Siegel, who became the first woman to coach for an MLB team when she was hired by the Oakland Athletics in 2015, and Keith Stein.

The four WPBL teams — the Boston Hunters, San Francisco Firebells, New York Heights and Los Angeles Queens — are playing a 15-game season over the course of six weeks. All games are being played in Springfield, this season but the league is looking to move to their namesake cities next season.

The WPBL already has shown growth potential. The league secured streaming deals with ESPN and Scripps Sports. Before the season opener, they had amassed 600,000 social media followers across platforms and inked a sponsorship deal with Dick’s Sporting Goods.

“I think it’s mind boggling that we’re only starting a league like this in 2026,” Stein said last week in an interview on NPR’s Marketplace. “ . . . We think this league is really important on so many different levels. But one of the things it’s going to do, we think, is it’s going to be a catalyst for the creation of a true baseball ecosystem for women to play baseball in this country.”

Given the lack of baseball opportunities for girls, a portion of the American players are, like Edwards, softball converts. There also are a significant group of players who learned the game playing with boys, including Mo’ne Davis, who landed on the cover of Sports Illustrated in 2014 when she threw a shutout in the Little League World Series. Just under 50% of the players, however, are from outside of the United States, primarily from Japan, Australia and Canada.

Edwards says she is in awe of players like teammate Davis, who faced adversity in order to play the game they love.

“To watch these women, who have had to pave their own way and be pioneers and keep going when people said no and face a lot of harsh criticism and doubt and still keep going, is special,” Edwards said.