Born with one hand, WPBL's Brittany Apgar living her baseball dream

Brittany Apgar felt good when she stepped into the box -- perhaps the best she’s ever felt out on the ballfields that have felt like home since she was 4 years old. Dressed in a crisp, white L.A. Queens uniform, the third-round selection in the Women’s Professional Baseball League draft picked up her unnaturally mint green bat with its electric pink handle and swung, lacing the ball into left field for her first career hit in the nascent league.

“I just waited back on it and I got a nice little rope up the line,” Apgar told MLB.com before her daily training in Illinois, where she’s spending the summer season. “I forgot to run for like two seconds because I was like, 'Holy [crap]! I just hit that ball so well, it sounded like an MLB pop!'”

Though there are more women and girls playing baseball every year, and the USA Women’s National Baseball Team just swept its way through the World Cup Group stage last month, these female ballplayers are still the outliers, often playing alone on teams that are otherwise all men.

That already sets Apgar apart from most other women.

But there’s something that makes Apgar different from her WPBL teammates, too: She was born with only one hand.

***

POP! The ball hits the glove.

Growing up, she heard that snap of ball meeting leather in stereo as she watched her father and brother play catch every evening. It was love at first listen.

“All I wanted to do when I was that old was replicate that sound,” Apgar said.

But Apgar was born without a forearm below a few inches past her elbow. She underwent a dozen surgeries as a child, doctors moving a bone from her leg – where she now only has one – to stretch out her arm. They installed pins and even had to break the bones multiple times as she grew to have them knit together and lengthen. The doctors took the middle bones from each of her toes to construct the digits on her residual limb, which she proudly calls her “nub.”

“My parents thought that having a longer arm would give me a better shot at a normal life, and honestly, it really did help,” Apgar said. “Especially things like tying my shoes. Now, I can put on my shoes every day and tie them because I have that length.”

But even when Apgar was a young child, not yet in preschool, she already felt ostracized for looking different from others.

“I was really nervous about meeting other kids,” Apgar said. “Just being out in public as a kid, I could feel the stares, could feel the difference, and I never wanted to feel different. I just wanted to have friends. I was scared that in preschool, when they would be cutting and gluing stuff, I would be 10 steps behind them because I'm still trying to figure out how to hold the paper and cut it.”

Knowing how badly his daughter wanted to play baseball, her dad made a deal:

“He said that if I signed up for preschool, he would sign me up for tee ball,” Apgar said. “And that is why I signed up for preschool.”

***

Apgar tried other things as she grew, including theatre, reading (even competitively), and other sports, but nothing could compare to baseball.

“I loved the way being on a baseball field made me feel, so I wanted to keep playing it,” Apgar said, a smile perpetually etched upon her face.

Her dad went to work. He studied Jim Abbott, the famous one-handed Major League pitcher and Team USA Olympian who spent 10 years in the bigs and even threw a no-hitter. He taught himself all of Abbott’s moves – how he threw, moved, switched his glove from arm to hand and back.

“My dad studied his form and then taught it back to me to learn,” Apgar said. “He would stand super close to me, and I would throw it to him, and he'd throw it back at me as quickly as he could. That way my transfer would get really quick. It is -- pitching-wise -- very similar to Jim Abbott.”

When it comes to fielding, Apgar is a little different. If the ball comes at her hip or below, she will just flick the ball up and out of her glove.

“When that happens, I can pull my hand out of my glove, catch the ball in the air and just throw,” Apgar said. “It sounds like a lot, but it’s just a way to get it out quicker because every millisecond matters when you’re on the field.”

Though she was devoted to the sport, it wasn’t always devoted to her. Every year that she grew and moved up, fewer and fewer women would be on the field around her.

“The less women that were there, the more different that I felt,” Apgar said. “Plus, I don’t have a hand, so I was usually the only one there that was missing a limb.”

Apgar was cut from her JV team in high school, so she made the switch to softball. And while she was good enough to play in college for Greensboro, she left after one season. It was partially the group she was with not clicking, and partially that the game -- as close and as similar as the two sports may be -- just wasn’t baseball.

“I just never wanted to play softball,” Apgar said. “I just enjoyed stealing bases. I enjoyed pitching. I enjoyed the size of the field.”

That could have been the end of her playing days. Then the WPBL came calling.

***

Apgar is a bundle of kinetic energy in a 5-foot-5 frame. She seems to always be moving, bouncing, laughing. It’s why her Instagram bio reads, “personality 10/10, hands 1/2.” When she heard about the WPBL tryouts just three months before they were going to be held in Nationals Park, she had spent years away from being an active participant in the sport -- whether softball or baseball. That meant she had to direct all of that boundless energy to get herself prepared in as short a time as possible.

“My training sessions were: I would wake up, and the thing that I dreaded most that day, like let's say it was running, I'd run even extra,” Apgar said, her cadence picking up pace with her words. “Or let's say it was swinging because I was sore. I'd swing even more. I knew that tryouts were going to be a bunch of professional athletes, DI athletes, people who were currently in shape and hadn't had that time off to play.”

Her goal was to make sure that there was nothing that could make her uncomfortable come the tryout day. It paid off. More than 640 people arrived at tryouts, with only 60 spots available. Apgar got one of them.

When the Draft came, her name was called in the third round by the L.A. Queens, who took her in the third round. Even then, her ordeal wasn’t over.

When Apgar stepped up to the plate for an inter-team scrimmage at the Red Sox's facility in Fort Myers, Fla., earlier this spring to face San Francisco pitcher Niki Eckert, a veteran of the U.S. Women’s National Team, she soon faced a problem she didn’t know how to fix.

“She threw me a nice little nasty slider on the outside corner, and I just hit it the wrong way, and it was the right velocity,” Apgar remembered. “It split the tip of my residual nub, so the bone would start being exposed. And while I can't feel any of that, I was really worried about infection. I was really worried that if I messed it up on the first game of this season – we play three games a week. I have already missed out on so much baseball, I don't want to sit because I couldn't figure out how to not be hurt.”

Apgar spent the next month working with her dad on a possible solution. She looked at older prosthetics and tried to fix them up. She tried to change her swing or find a different way of balancing the bat on her “nub” without risking injury. Nothing seemed like it would work.

Finally, some friends and teammates told her to post a video on Instagram asking for help. Surely someone out there – maybe one of Apgar’s friends who was a biomechanical engineering major – would have a solution. So, Apgar posted a video, finishing her plea with a request for someone to help her “protect the nub.”

The algorithm picked it up and spread the video to thousands of new eyes. Fans would drop in ideas or tag friends who might help. Others offered words of encouragement or simply repeated Apgar’s rallying cry of “Protect the nub.”

Eventually, with the help of a WPBL investor, Apgar found Chrysta Irolla, the director of prosthetics and orthotics at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York. They built a new prosthetic for Apgar that has actually changed her swing.

In the past, she would rest the bat on the top of her residual limb, putting a lot of the impact from contact on the tip, making it split open on occasion.

However, when Apgar stepped into the box for her WPBL debut at-bat, it was her first time swinging with the new prosthetic. This one not only changed how she swings, but lets her feel the swing in her arm, too, as it attaches to the base of her forearm. For the first time in her life, she could swing the bat with two hands.

“I remember walking up to the box and for the first time, I felt confident in that box,” Apgar said. “I was just standing there, my legs weren’t shaking there. I was up there like, ‘I’m about to hit the crap out of this ball!’”

Though she grounded out in her first at-bat, there was something else that was far more important:

“I feel like my teammates now,” Apgar said.

***

The WPBL is brand new, and for many of the women, it’s the longest stretch they’ve had where they can focus solely on baseball. Apgar expects that the league’s level of play will only improve over these next few weeks as the players benefit from dedicated training.

“There's going to be such a difference in the teams from what we're watching right now versus what we're going to be watching at the end of August,” Apgar said. “I think that once teams start getting to know each other better and trusting each other more and more, the games are going to start getting really close and really hard fought. Since we only have seven innings, we’ve got to make [stuff] happen fast.”

For someone who has loved this game her whole life, but is just now learning to swing with two hands, Apgar knows how quickly some things can change. She knows, too, that she’s become a role model for any young child who feels like they don’t belong -- whether they're an athlete or not.

“What if a disabled kid sees my Instagram and then sees all of these comments saying ‘Protect the nub?’” Apgar asked. They’ll feel like they have a place in this world too, just because they can see that people are so accepting. On the unselfish part, this is for all of the kids that can see that, and their parents who are worrying that they might not have a normal life. Your kid is going to be fine. Your kid is going to ball out if they want to.”

"Ball out": That’s a fitting term for what Apgar hopes to do for the rest of the season. Then she wants to return and do it again. She hopes that one day the league is big enough that people won’t find it strange when a woman or young girl wants to play baseball. Perhaps the contracts in the league will rise to match other sports and she can make sure that her parents never have to work again.

Whatever happens, Apgar will be happy if she’s out on the field. That’s where she’s always felt most at home, and now she’s surrounded by 59 other women who feel the same.

“People started hashtagging ‘Protect the nub’ in the comments, and now we're here,” Apgar said. “We got the nub protected.”