A Catcher Got the Ball: Jamie Mackay’s Game 1
She caught softball at South Carolina. In the WPBL’s first championship game, she came out of the bullpen and threw 5⅔ innings to win it.
The Women’s Pro Baseball League waited a whole inaugural season for a championship game. The first one it ever played came apart early.
Amanda Gianelloni hit a grand slam for the San Francisco Firebells. Four outs in, the Los Angeles Queens trailed 4-1 and their starter was finished. So they gave the ball to their catcher.
Jamie Mackay threw 5⅔ innings on Wednesday night, September 16. She struck out five, allowed two runs, and retired the last nine batters she faced. Los Angeles came back to win 7-6, and Mackay got the win in Game 1 of the best-of-five series.
Mackay has been catching and pitching for Team USA since she was a teenager
Mackay has played baseball since she was four years old. Her father, Dana, played college baseball and backed her all the way. She tried out for the United States Women’s National Baseball Team in 2019.
That year she pitched for it at the Pan-American Championships in Mexico. She came home named the tournament’s relief pitcher. Then she went back to Team USA camps in the fall of 2025.
She came close to becoming the first woman to play Division I baseball. Olivia Pichardo reached that first at Brown University. Los Angeles took Mackay in the second round of the WPBL draft in November 2025.
Her other sport is softball. Mackay finished her college career this spring as a senior catcher and outfielder at the University of South Carolina. She started 41 of her 53 games and hit eight home runs. She transferred there from Ole Miss after three years.
The Queens handed her the ball four outs into the biggest game the league had played
San Francisco arrived as the top seed and Los Angeles as the third. The Firebells had finished the regular season first in runs, hits, home runs and batting average. So Gianelloni’s grand slam looked like more of the same. Amira Hondras came off the mound, and Mackay came in.
By the end of the third inning San Francisco led 6-2. But Los Angeles answered with a run in the fourth and two in the fifth. Meanwhile Mackay kept handing innings back to her offense. The Queens scored twice more in the sixth to take the lead, and Mackay held it.
A catcher already knows what a hitter cannot handle
Mackay is a catcher by trade, and her pitching line says so plainly. She made five appearances on the mound for the Queens during the regular season and threw 10⅔ innings. Her earned run average was 11.81. That number is the honest context for Wednesday night.
What Mackay has instead is a catcher’s vantage. She has spent her career crouched behind hitters, watching what they chase and what they let go. Every inning she decides what a hitter cannot handle. On Wednesday she was the one throwing it.
Mackay had already shown the league what that looks like. Against these same Firebells on August 21, she started as the designated hitter. She relieved Michelle Roche in the fifth with the bases loaded. One inherited runner scored on an infield single, and she stranded the other two.
Then in the bottom of the sixth, with the bases loaded again, she drove in two runs. Los Angeles won 8-6, and Mackay got the win on the mound that night too.
She had also started Game 2 of the semifinal series that got the Queens here. In that start she gave up one run in two innings. Los Angeles beat the New York Heights two games to one and closed it out 15-11 on Monday. That was the game that ended the season of Denae Benites, the Heights catcher and captain.
Not every catcher will be handed a championship game. But every catcher gets the same education Mackay used to win one. You spend nine innings a night reading a release, tracking what hitters chase, and learning why the 2-2 slider worked when the 1-1 slider didn’t. That knowledge goes wherever you go, including sixty feet forward.
Sweat the gear and never fear.
Try this at your next practice
- Name the weakness. During batting practice, watch each of your own hitters for one round. Write a single sentence on the pitch that gave them trouble. Then call three pitches against that hitter in live work, using what you wrote. Mackay had been doing that job for years before the Queens handed her a title game.
- Call it before it’s called. Do this in a game you are not catching, from the bench or the coach’s box. Write down the pitch you would call in every count before it is thrown. Then compare your card against what got thrown and what the hitter did. Three innings is plenty.
- Ten minutes on the mound. Spend the last ten minutes of your throwing session on a mound instead of flat ground. Work from the stretch, with a teammate giving you signs. You already own the arm and you already know the sequences, and Mackay’s second career is built on the idea that both travel sixty feet forward.
Sources: Los Angeles Queens take Game 1 of WPBL championship behind Jamie Mackay’s relief work (MLB.com), WPBL Championship Game 1 box score (Women’s Pro Baseball League), Softball’s Jamie Mackay Also Chasing Baseball Dreams (University of South Carolina Athletics), Jamie Mackay player profile (Women’s Pro Baseball League), Queens Reign Over the Heights and Advance to WPBL Championship Series (FanGraphs), 2-way Jamie Mackay’s clutch hit gives Los Angeles Queens a win (The IX Sports), San Francisco Battles LA in Inaugural WPBL Championship Series Opener (Just Women’s Sports).