Just three games into the inaugural Women’s Pro Baseball League season, Keith Foulke is out as manager of the Boston Hunters.
Why? It depends who you ask.
The league said it was strictly a baseball decision and boiled down to the ex-Red Sox reliever being the wrong “fit” to manage the team.
“It was really about just the connection he had with the players and finding a coach who was better with a younger team,” WPBL commissioner Justine Siegal said. “It’s not that deep.”
Foulke, however, was “blindsided” by the decision.
He said he thinks the root of the disconnect was the fact that he was commuting to games in Illinois, from his home in Arizona — an arrangement he said the league was aware of and one he informed the players of upon his arrival.
“Did they convey that to the commissioner? Did they convey that to the assistant coaches that they provided for me? I do not believe they did,” Foulke said. “So when I wasn’t there, I think that was a big shock. Like nobody else knew the plan that we had in place.”
Foulke lives in Arizona with his wife and children and wanted to remain there for the seven-week WPBL season. Every game during the league’s inaugural slate is being held at Robin Roberts Stadium in Springfield, Ill.
During contract negotiations prior to the season, Foulke said he worked with WPBL CEO Keith Stein to ensure he could live at home while traveling to Springfield weekly for games.
Foulke said he missed two days of training camp and one regular-season practice while he remained in Arizona for his wife’s medical appointments.
“After the first couple weeks of the season, they decided that [commuting back and forth] wasn’t enough, and what they said was I was losing the room,” Foulke said.
Siegal agreed that the manager had lost the locker room, but said geography did not factor into the decision to fire him.
Foulke, Siegal said, was not the only coach to miss a practice.
About 30 minutes before Boston’s game against the New York Heights on Sunday, the team announced Jemile Weeks would take over for Foulke. The Hunters were three games into its season and had just secured their first win, a 9-6 decision over New York, the previous day.
Weeks, who began the WPBL season as an assistant with Los Angeles, played six MLB seasons, including 17 games for the Red Sox. He is the younger brother of longtime Brewers second baseman and MLB All-Star Rickie Weeks Jr.
He joins fellow WPBL managers Rachelle “Rocky” Henley (New York Heights), Eric Young Sr. (Los Angeles Queens), and Matt Williams (San Francisco Firebells), the latter two of whom have MLB playing and/or coaching experience.
The league had to make the decision to move on from Foulke when they did, Siegal said, because of the brevity of Year 1. Boston is 1-3 and has eight games remaining in the regular season. For the league to be successful, she said, all four teams needed to be cohesive as quickly as possible.
“We needed someone with the experience with a younger age group to give them the confidence and give them very specific skills in real time on how they could get better,” Siegal said, noting that Weeks fits that bill.
The Hunters roster is the youngest in the WPBL (Boston’s oldest player is 26) and many of the players had never competed together prior to the start of this season. Plus, the league is in its infancy, which means every game is uncharted territory.
“As far as I’m concerned, as a player, it’s important that we just have somebody that works — I mean not literally works for us, but like mentally, emotionally, all of the above, supports the players, especially in a startup league,” said Hunters righthander and captain Alli Schroder.
Foulke — who played 11 seasons in the majors and won a World Series with the Red Sox in 2004 — comes with a baseball pedigree that may have been intimidating to some of those younger athletes, Siegal said, resulting in the “fit” issue.
“The players respected Keith, and they wanted to do so well that for him that they were a little tight,” Siegal said. “They need to feel that making mistakes is part of the game, and that they can grow from them.”
But Foulke believes that pedigree is the reason they hired him in the first place.
“They wanted my name,” Foulke said. “They wanted me to be a part of the Boston franchise because of the city and the history.”
Emma Healy can be reached at emma.healy@globe.com or on X @ByEmmaHealy.