Two Women Signed by Sonoma Stompers to Play Professional Baseball

Kelsie Whitmore and Stacy Piagno have signed with the Sonoma Stompers and will be in the starting lineup on July 1 to make their professional debut.

The Sonoma Stompers are about to make history once again. The Stompers signed Kelsie Whitmore and Stacy Piagno and the duo is set to play their first professional game together on Friday, July 1. Whitmore is a 17-year-old outfielder who also pitches. The 25-year-old Piagno pitches and plays the infield. Both are on the Team USA roster for the Women’s Baseball World Cup that will be played in South Korea in September.

Kelsie Whitmore was an all-around athlete growing up. She played golf, soccer, and baseball in high school at Temecula Valley High. She also graduated from the California Baseball Academy and has a softball scholarship to play at Cal State Fullerton next season, even though she grew up playing baseball, not softball. She’s a line drive hitter who can handle the stick from both sides of the plate.

Stacy Piagno was on the 2015 U.S. women’s national baseball team that won the Gold Medal at last year’s Pan American Games. In those games, she threw the first complete game no-hitter in national women’s baseball history. She played baseball through high school, then switched to softball in college at the University of Tampa. In 2012, she made the USA Women’s National Baseball Team and has competed in international World Cups in 2012 and 2014.

The Sonoma Stompers have an interesting history. They play in the independent Pacific Association of Professional Baseball Clubs, which had its inaugural season in 2013. The league is based in Northern California and the league commissioner is former Major League Baseball player Mike Marshall, who spent 11 seasons in the big leagues from 1981 to 1991, most of that time with the Los Angeles Dodgers.

The Stompers joined the league in 2014 and made history that year when 67-year-old Bill “Spaceman” Lee pitched and won a game against the Pittsburg Mettle on August 12. It’s believed that Lee’s victory in that game set the record for oldest person ever to win a professional baseball game.

Long before pitching for an independent league team as a 67-year-old, Bill Lee was quite a character during his Major League playing days. He was best known for pitching with the Boston Red Sox in the 1970s and was inducted into the team’s Hall of Fame in 2008. He also spent some time with the Montreal Expos. Lee’s mother played in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, the league that was the inspiration behind the movie A League of Their Own. It’s a fitting connection that Lee pitched for the Stompers in 2014 and two females will be playing for them in 2016.

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Last year, the Sonoma Stompers turned their day-to-day operations over to writers Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller, who used advanced statistical analysis to run the team. Their experience heading baseball operations for the Stompers led to the book The Only Rule Is It Has To Work. During the season, the team broke ground with an openly gay player, Sean Conroy, and a Japanese manager, Takashi “Yoshi” Miyoshi. Conroy is the first openly gay player to appear in professional baseball. Miyoshi started the season as the bench coach but was promoted to manager in July and became the first Japanese-born manager in the history of American professional baseball. He’s back managing the team again this year. Along with those more important landmark moves, the Stompers had former MLB player Jose Canseco appear in two games. Canseco had two hits, including a homer, in eight at-bats.

Even with the Stompers making history this year with the signing of Whitmore and Piagno, the record of women in professional baseball is sparse. Three African American women played in the Negro Leagues in the 1950s, just as the leagues were winding down after losing so many star players to Major League Baseball. Toni Stone was a brash and scrappy second baseman who played for the Indianapolis Clowns and Kansas City Monarchs. She once said the “happiest moment of her life” was when she got a clean single over second base off the legendary Satchel Paige. Mamie “Peanuts” Johnson was a right-handed pitcher for the Clowns. She would often appear at reunions of former players long after her playing days were over. Second baseman Connie Morgan joined the Clowns when Toni Stone was traded to the Monarchs in 1954.

In 1997, left-handed pitcher Ila Borders became the first woman to pitch in a minor league baseball game when she took the mound for the St. Paul Saints of the Northern League. The Northern League is another independent league that is not affiliated with Major League Baseball. Borders was a 5’8”, 140-pound lefty with a fastball that topped out around 80 mph, so she mixed an assortment of off-speed pitches and relied on changing speeds and location to get hitters out. She pitched for three years in the Northern League and one year in the Western League. Her career record in professional baseball was 2-4, with a 7.90 ERA.

A decade later, a teenager named Eri Yoshida pitched for the Chico Outlaws of the independent Golden Baseball League. Yoshida was a 5’1”, 115-pound side-arming knuckleball pitcher who first pitched for the Outlaws as an 18-year-old in 2010. She struggled in her first year, going 0-4 with a 12.27 ERA. Yoshida ended up pitching three years in professional baseball and finished her career with a 5-10 record and a 7.62 ERA.

Along with Whitmore and Piagno, there is one other female currently playing professional baseball. Her name is Melissa Mayeux. She’s a 17-year-old French baseball player who plays shortstop on the French U-18 junior national team. Last year, she became the first woman ever to be added to the MLB international registration list, which makes her eligible to be signed by any MLB team. She hopes to play for France in the 2017 World Baseball Classic.

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The Sonoma Stompers are owned by movie director Francis Ford Coppola. In a press release, Coppola said, “My family would play co-ed baseball games and inevitably the star player would always be an aunt who could run and hit and that made the games so much more fun. When watching Major League Baseball, I always wondered why there couldn’t be a co-ed team. It’s the one major sport in which weight and strength come less into play.”