September 6, 2026 | Springfield, IL: On the last game of the regular season, we celebrated the traditional Fan Appreciation Day and honored the OG, Maybelle Blair, with her bobblehead giveaway.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Tonight, Boston came to the stadium with some swagger. You got the feeling that the Hunters had something up their sleeve \u2013 and were just waiting to show the world they were better than they have been.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Lexi Hastings on why the Hunters\u2019 sudden surge, \u201cYou continuously see us improving\u2026 that should scare some teams.\u201d And with that, Boston scored the first five runs of the game. And Hastings\u2019 hands were all over it.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In the first, Hasting\u2019s lead off base hit, stolen base, and race to home plate on a wild pitch put Boston on the board. Her leadoff walk in the third, followed by Denver Bryant\u2019s free pass, gave Alli Schroder incentive to lace a two-RBI double to the left-center gap, followed by Edith De Leija\u2019s two-RBI jack, two batters later.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The momentum Boston craved was so thick and promising in the Springfield air after lefty starter Olivia Bricker retired the first six batters she faced.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
But the gnawing issue for Boston, especially when it comes to a team like San Francisco \u2013 if you give them one error, they\u2019ll get three runs, and if you do it again, with walks, they\u2019ll tag you for seven \u2013 which they did off of Ma\u00efka Dumais, and by the end of the fourth the Firebells had a 10-5 lead. And to quote one of the best malaprop men in the business, the late, great former NY Yankee, Yogi Berra, \u201cIt was deja vu all over again.\u201d<\/p>\n
Every Firebell bat but one had something to say. Amanda Gianelloni was 3-5, two doubles and three RBI\u2019s, Skylar Kaplan, who doesn\u2019t know how to not get on base, went 3-4 with a run batted in and on the last day to tie and\/or go ahead of Denae Benites in the heated long ball race, Kelsie Whitmore matched her counterpart captain with a three-run blast ending her night 2-4 with four RBI\u2019s and bestowed the final Player of the Game.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Hunters made an attempted rally run in their last at-bats. Hastings, yeah, she\u2019s heating up for the Postseason, led off with an opposite-field double; Bryant brought her home, but in trying to stretch a single into a double, got herself out, and Schroder, swinging something special the past few games, clocked a two-run shot over the centerfield fence, her first WPBL home run on the last Sunday of the regular season.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"September 6, 2026 | Springfield, IL: On the last game of the regular season, we celebrated the traditional…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":456300,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[101,103,102,104,106,105],"class_list":["post-456299","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco-headlines","tag-san-francisco-news","tag-sf","tag-sf-headlines","tag-sf-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/456299","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=456299"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/456299\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/456300"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=456299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=456299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=456299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}