Sato’s resume is unreal. She’s the three-time MVP of the Women’s Baseball World Cup and a six-time gold medalist, powering Japan to gold over the United States and anybody else who dared to take her on. Her ERA in those World Cups: 0.53, 0.72, 0.00, 1.13, 0.37, and 0.00. (Yeah, she really let herself go with that 1.13 in 2016.) She also led Japan’s Women’s Baseball League in strikeouts in three of the league’s final four years before it folded.

When the WPBL launched, Sato was the #2 pick. American players geeked out about getting to play alongside the woman who had repeatedly shut them down in international play. “There was never not a crowd around her,” her future Queens teammate Brittany Apgar told Marisa Ingemi of The IX about the league’s tryouts. “I got to catch her bullpen, which was surreal,” New York Heights catcher Denae Benites told Frankie de la Cretaz for The Guardian.

It makes sense that WPBL players are generally better at batting. Many of the league’s players are softball converts, and hitting a baseball isn’t much different from hitting a softball — see ball, hit ball. But pitching a baseball overhand is way different from pitching a softball underhand. Throw in aluminum bats and short fences, and teams were regularly putting up double-digit run totals in seven-inning games.

Teams averaged 7.92 runs per game. The batting average of the entire league was .340.

And when the season started, Sato wasn’t as dominant as she’d been in her World Cup appearances. She posted a 6.09 ERA during the regular season, ending the year with a 1-2 record. She allowed more runs in a single game against New York (nine) than in all of her appearances in six World Cups combined (eight).

Maybe Sato was showing her age (she’s 36 now, 16 years removed from her debut at the 2010 World Cup.) Or maybe it was just this league filled with incredible hitters. I’ll get back to Sato and the championship game in a second, but first: Holy crap, let’s talk about Denae Benites, the New York catcher quoted above raving about catching Sato’s tryout.

I honestly don’t think I’ve ever seen any player dominate any league as much as Denae Benites dominated the WPBL. She led the league in … everything. Batting average (.552), home runs (11), hits (32), runs (25), RBI (37), slugging percentage (1.155), OPS (1.752), and stolen bases (15, while never once getting caught). That’s 13 categories: the Tredecuple Crown. Benites also was exceptional as a catcher on defense; the Heights allowed the fewest stolen bases (12) and caught the most runners stealing (six).

While we’re digressing: I really enjoyed Thursday’s episode of Good Game in which Sarah Spain interviewed Queens star Ashton Lansdell. Lansdell broke down talking about how much the league means to its players, and also discussed the scene at the gay bar in Springfield, Illinois, when an entire women’s baseball league showed up to town.

Sato’s struggles continued in the postseason. She gave up five runs in three innings in a semifinals appearance against the Heights (Benites drilled a homer off her), and gave up four runs in four innings in her first appearance in the WPBL Championship.

LA looked like it was on the ropes after giving up 17 runs to San Francisco in Game 4. (Like I said: This is an offense-heavy league!)

But in Game 5, Sato was her legendarily dominant self. LA’s 2-0 win was the lowest scoring game of the WPBL season. The previous low was a 6-1 Boston win over New York.

Sato is killer in winner-take-all matchups. She also pitched shutouts in the 2014, 2016, and 2018 World Cup gold medal games. Perhaps her dominance is waning, but her clutchness remains. She’s still the last person Team USA will want to see in next year’s World Cup gold medal game.

First: What a weird team. The Sun were owned by the Mohegan Tribe, the only pro sports team owned by a Native American tribe. They played in the Mohegan Sun casino in Uncasville, Connecticut … which is not located particularly close to any of Connecticut’s biggest cities, none of which aren’t particularly big on their own.

The team trained in makeshift practice facilities (The Athletic reported that the team practiced next to a children’s birthday party ahead of the 2024 WNBA playoffs) that were an hourlong bus ride from any major airport.

The sale has also been weird. The WNBA blocked a sale for $325 million to an ownership group from Boston in favor of a $300 million bid from Rockets owner (and Trump-appointed ambassador to Italy) Tilman Fertitta.

(I am still thinking of the headline: “Rockets owners expand talks to buy, move Sun,” which thankfully is not something any owners of actual rockets currently plan on doing to the actual sun.)

Moving the team to Houston seems like a worse choice than Boston, considering Boston turned out in huge numbers for a handful of Sun games in recent years, and that many Connecticutters (???) have pan-New England sports allegiances and could have continued supporting the team in Boston.

(In a first for me, I am getting mad on behalf of Boston sports fans.)

AND they made the Sun’s ownership group take 25 million fewer dollars to get the Houston deal done!

(In another first for me, I am getting mad on behalf of a pro sports team ownership group.)

As the franchise prepared to move, the on-court product deteriorated. In 2024, the team went 28-12 and won a first round playoff series. That offseason, all five starters left in free agency. The resulting 2025 team went 11-33 … and then Connecticut lost its two best players: Tina Charles to retirement, and Marina Mabrey to the expansion draft.

The Sun were a husk this year. The team is currently 10-33, with the worst offense in the league (78.6 points per game) and worst net rating in the league (-12.2 points per 100 possessions.) It shot just 29.4 percent from three and 70.7 percent from the free throw line, both the lowest by any team in the league in several seasons. It was outscored by 9.6 points per game, the 16th-worst mark in the WNBA’s 30-year history (and one of the 15 teams that were worse was last year’s Sun squad.) The Sun is on a six-game losing streak, and will play its final game without four of its best players.

The Sun did have the second-youngest roster in the league — so hey, it is building for the future. But honestly, the team doesn’t seem to be doing a great job of that, either. It made the odd choice to trade away Aneesah Morrow, the team’s leading rebounder and the seventh pick in the 2025 draft, for a future second round pick and a 28-year-old Russian player who might never play in the WNBA again.

The final game will be “fan appreciation night.” From the team website: “Fans can partake in a photobooth on the concourse, designed with Connecticut Sun photo strips, as well as a mini-print machine. Fans are encouraged to bring quarters for the mini-print machine.”

“Fans are encouraged to bring quarters for the mini-print machine.”

I’m sorry, I’m sure everybody is trying their best here, but I just had to stand up for about a minute and stare out my window thinking about the sentence, “Fans are encouraged to bring quarters for the mini-print machine.”

Can somebody with the Connecticut Sun just put out a big bucket of quarters in front of the damn photobooth?

Actually, I guess “big publicly available bucket of quarters” is a pretty bad idea in a casino.

Moving on.

It’s unclear what’s happening with head coach Rachid Meziane. It was reported in April that he had been hired as the next coach for Turkish club Galatasaray, one of the best teams in Europe. However, Galatasaray has since hired another coach. So Meziane is still hanging around … but reading between the lines, it doesn’t seem like he’ll be part of what’s next.

I think you can sort the broader history of the WNBA into three eras. It started with excitement, energy, and record crowds. The league was founded in 1997 by the NBA, with teams owned by NBA owners, playing in NBA arenas, and supported by massive hype and fanfare. The attendance and viewership records from this era held for decades. Women’s pro sports were new and the next big thing.

The second era of the WNBA saw interest steadily decline. NBA owners became pissed off that their women’s teams were losing money. Teams folded, or were moved into smaller markets and smaller arenas. Attendance and viewership dropped. Women’s pro sports were the type of thing you could make fun of in public without expecting pushback.

Now we’re living through the third era of the WNBA: The Women’s Sports Boom. Everybody knows famous female athletes. Everybody watches Women’s Sports™️. And everybody can see the line going up. NBA owners like Fertitta are now falling over themselves to buy back into a league that they were eager to abandon 25 years ago.

The Mohegan Tribe bought the team (then the Orlando Miracle) during that second era, when everybody else was bailing on the WNBA. (For $10 million. Good deal!) They were the league’s first owners who didn’t also own an NBA team.

Surprisingly, moving the team to Connecticut worked. In 2010, the Sun became the first WNBA team to turn a profit — during a global recession, and during the league’s nadir of popularity. The casino in the middle of nowhere became a fortress. The Sun has won 64.5 percent of its home games. It developed a real fanbase and made four WNBA Finals.

The Connecticut Sun is not the first WNBA team to die. (Enjoy this haunting image of the mascots for the Sacramento Monarchs, Utah Starzz, Detroit Shock, and yes, the Houston Comets, hanging out, smiling, not realizing that death will soon come for them.)

But it’s the first WNBA team to die for this reason: Not because nobody cared, not because it couldn’t make money, not because it couldn’t find fans or win games, not because the league is shrinking … but actually because the league is growing. The Sun helped the WNBA survive, but the period of mere survival is over. The league is moving on to bigger markets and bigger money and leaving Connecticut behind.

The WNBA was never going to keep a team in Connecticut forever. It’s too small and too off-the-beaten-path for a mainstream league with big-time ambitions. But the way this move went down feels like an insult to the Connecticut fans who showed up when nobody else would, and the ownership group who proved the WNBA could make money when nobody else could.

I’ll leave the final word to Connecticut’s fans, who spoke heartfelt messages into a random microphone stand on the casino floor. We’ll remember the Sun shining: