Kelsie Whitmore, an outfielder for the Staten Island FerryHawks, made history on Sunday as the first woman to start in an Atlantic League of Professional Baseball (ALPB) game.
Whitmore, who signed with the team in April, started in left field and batted ninth in the game against the Gastonia Honey Hunters in Gastonia, North Carolina.
“If you really want something bad enough, you’ll do anything you can to make it happen,” Whitmore said after the game. “You have to put in the work. It’s going to be hard, it will not be easy. There are going to be moments where you’re going to ask yourself exactly how bad you want it.”
Just over a week before her history-making moves on Sunday, Whitmore became the first woman to participate in an ALPB game when she was the pinch-runner for the FerryHawks game against Charleston.
Whitmore previously played exclusively for the United States women’s national baseball team from 2014 to 2019. She is a former pitcher for the Sonoma Stompers under the former Pacific Association of Professional Baseball Clubs. She, with catcher Anna Kimbrell, formed the first professional all-female battery (the combination of the pitcher and catcher) in 2016.
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