On Sept. 5, 1954, the Kalamazoo Lassies were already ahead by one run in the ninth inning when RBI singles by June Peppas and Chris Ballingall helped put away the 1954 All-American Girls Professional Baseball League championship.It was a great game. It was also the league’s last.The AAGPBL, founded in 1943 to keep interest in baseball high during World War II, folded in 1954 due to low revenue and the rising popularity of televised MLB games. So for the new Women’s Professional Baseball League, set to throw its first pitch Saturday in Springfield, Ill., selling out its first game is a promising start.Inside softball's offensive explosionLindsay Schnell and Lia GriffinThe WPBL is a four-team league, with each franchise representing a major coastal city: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston and New York. Co-founded in 2024 by commissioner Justine Siegal, the first woman to coach a pro men’s baseball team, the WPBL put out an open call for tryouts last October. The response illustrated just how strong the public’s appetite was for women’s baseball.More than 600 players from around the world — three times as many as when the AAGPBL held tryouts back in the 1940s — registered interest.The United States hasn’t had a women’s professional baseball league in almost 72 years, nor a centralized pipeline from which the WPBL could mine talent. So where did all the players come from? The league’s emerging faces took different paths to this moment.