On a September evening in Springfield, Illinois, Brittany Apgar arrived at a stage few people could have pictured when she first started playing ball. ABC News reported Sept. 19 that Apgar and the Los Angeles Queens were set to play in the championship series of the Women's Professional Baseball League, a new league completing its first season. The moment was a baseball milestone, but it was also the latest chapter in a practical story about a player, her family, teammates and a group of specialists who kept looking for a better way to let her play the game she loves.
A bat, a question and an online call for help
Apgar was born with a limb difference: she has a small right forearm and no fingers on that hand. In an MLB feature, she described the lessons her parents gave her as a child. Her mother taught her not to treat her hand as a reason to stop trying something, while her father encouraged her to put her whole effort into the things she wanted to do. Baseball became one of those things. The official WPBL player page says she began playing as soon as she could walk and later competed on an all-girls team that won the Boys of Summer tournament.
The league's faster pitching exposed a problem that determination alone could not solve. Apgar had been balancing a bat against the end of her residual limb, and contact could leave the area sore or split open. She and her father tried older prosthetic parts and improvised materials. Friends and teammates eventually urged her to ask for ideas online. In the MLB account, Apgar posted a video on Instagram asking people to help her protect the end of her limb. The request spread, bringing suggestions, encouragement and a useful connection.
A prosthetic designed for the swing
That connection led to Chrysta Irolla, director of Prosthetics and Orthotics at Hospital for Special Surgery in New York. HSS's own account says Irolla and her team developed a custom prosthetic for Apgar, with a gel liner and a hook extension designed to fit around a bat. The goal was specific: give Apgar a secure way to hold the bat without asking her to change the ambition that had carried her to a professional league. HSS also made custom foot orthotics with rigid plates, drawing on the medical history of her arm and leg.
When Apgar stepped into the box for her WPBL debut, the HSS report says, she was using the new device for the first time. She grounded out in that at-bat, but the result did not define the moment. For the first time, she could feel the motion of a swing that worked more like a two-handed swing. She told HSS that she felt like her teammates. That sentence is less about a gadget than about belonging: the equipment was built around her way of playing, and she could concentrate on the same next pitch as everyone else.
A place in the new league
The WPBL's official profile lists Apgar as a Los Angeles Queens outfielder from Greensboro, North Carolina, selected in the third round with the 15th pick. The league's 2026 regular-season page records six games, eight at-bats, two hits and four stolen bases for her, along with one pitching appearance. Those numbers are a small part of the story, but they establish the setting: Apgar was not appearing in a demonstration or a one-off exhibition. She was a signed player whose season reached a championship series.
ABC News placed that season in a larger public moment on Sept. 19, when it reported on Apgar's place in the title series and the help she received from HSS. The report did not need to turn her into a symbol to make the event matter. It showed a player preparing for a real game, a family and teammates who kept searching for a workable answer, and specialists who treated the problem as an engineering and care challenge.
Apgar's path to the championship stage is a useful kind of sports story because the win is not a promise that every obstacle disappears. It is a record of people making a concrete adjustment, then giving an athlete room to use it. In a league built to create new opportunities for women in professional baseball, her two-handed swing made that idea visible: access can be designed, tested and improved around the person who needs it.
Reader responses