Keith Foulke's tenure as manager of the Boston Hunters lasted exactly three games. Two days after the team notched its first win of the season, the Women's Pro Baseball League pulled him from the dugout, ending a run that began with heavy fanfare over his Red Sox pedigree and closed with Foulke saying he never saw it coming.
The Hunters announced Sunday that Jemile Weeks would take over as manager about 30 minutes before that day's game, according to the Boston Globe. Foulke's firing came two days after Boston beat the New York Heights 9-6 on August 8 to secure its first win of the season, leaving the club with a 1-3 record and eight regular-season games remaining in the WPBL's condensed inaugural schedule.
Foulke told the Globe he was blindsided by the move, saying the league decided his commuting arrangement was insufficient and that he was losing the locker room. He had missed one regular-season practice and two days of training camp while working with WPBL CEO Keith Stein to arrange a schedule that let him live at home in Arizona with his wife and children while traveling weekly to Springfield, Illinois, where every WPBL game this season is being played at Robin Roberts Stadium.
League Says the Issue Wasn't Geography
WPBL executive Justine Siegal told the Globe that geography did not factor into the decision to fire Foulke, and that he was simply the wrong fit to manage the team. She noted Foulke was not the only coach to miss a practice, but said his baseball pedigree may have intimidated younger athletes on a roster where many players had never competed together before the season began.
Siegal said all four inaugural WPBL teams needed to become cohesive quickly, and that the league had to act fast because the first season is so brief. Boston Hunters president Alli Schroder said the team needs someone who supports players mentally and emotionally in a startup league, per the same Globe report.
That urgency traces directly to the league's structure. Under WPBL rules for its 2026 inaugural season, teams play a condensed 15-game regular season of seven-inning games with aluminum bats, packed into a roughly six-week schedule, according to MLB.com. All four franchises are playing the entire season at the neutral, 5,200-seat Robin Roberts Stadium, a setup WAND-TV reports was designed to minimize startup travel costs and secure exclusive facility access, which made Foulke's weekly commute from Arizona a persistent friction point.
Foulke's Iconic Boston Résumé Wasn't Enough
Foulke had been hired as the Hunters' inaugural manager on July 26, drawing heavily on his local popularity in New England for throwing the final out of the 2004 World Series that ended the Red Sox's 86-year championship drought, according to FanGraphs. Foulke told the Globe the franchise wanted his name attached to the team because of Boston's city and history. He played 11 seasons in the major leagues and recorded 191 saves over his career, but had no prior managerial experience.
His replacement, Jemile Weeks, brings a very different résumé. Weeks played 17 games for the Red Sox during a six-season MLB career and is the younger brother of longtime Brewers second baseman and MLB All-Star Rickie Weeks Jr. According to SOURCE Sports, Weeks was a 2008 first-round MLB draft pick who spent 2022 through 2024 working in player development for the New York Mets as an outfield, infield, and baserunning coordinator, and he also coached for USA Baseball during the 2024 WBSC Premier12 tournament.
Weeks began the WPBL season as an assistant with the Los Angeles Queens, managed by Eric Young Sr., before moving to Boston. Siegal's comments suggest the league saw Weeks' developmental background as a fit for a roster loaded with young, unproven talent — the Hunters have the youngest roster in the WPBL, with their oldest player just 26 years old.
A Season Already Under a Microscope
The coaching shake-up lands during a moment the league can't afford to stumble. The WPBL's launch this month marks the first professional women's baseball circuit in North America since the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League folded 72 years ago in 1954, a league popularized decades later by the film “A League of Their Own,” per MLB.com. The four inaugural franchises are each named for historical female trailblazers from their home cities — Boston's Hunters take their name from 19th-century physician and women's rights activist Dr. Harriot Kezia Hunt, who was twice rejected from Harvard Medical School because of her gender before opening her own practice, as Hoodline detailed in its team name reveal coverage.
More than 600 female players representing 10 countries attended open tryouts in Washington, D.C. last August before the league narrowed the field to a 120-player draft pool, according to Marketplace. Boston used the fourth overall pick in the November 2025 draft on South Korean catcher Hyeonah Kim, one of nine international players selected. Every game this season is being broadcast nationally on ESPN networks and ESPN+, with international streaming on YouTube, underscoring the commercial stakes riding on the league's early stumbles.
Rachelle “Rocky” Henley, manager of the New York Heights and a former Colorado Silver Bullets player, remains the only woman among the WPBL's four managers following Foulke's exit; Matt Williams manages the San Francisco Firebells and Eric Young Sr. leads Los Angeles. As Hoodline reported when the league first announced its Boston expansion, the Hunters were always going to be watched closely as a test case for how a startup league builds a roster and a coaching staff at the same time. With eight games left and a new manager just installed, that test is now underway in earnest.
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