The first-ever season of the Women’s Professional Baseball League (WPBL) begins its ultimate series tonight. It has been a journey too quick, too excellent to be saying goodbye already, but we play the game to find a winner, and we sort those games into a season to find a champion. This time next week, the champion will either be the San Francisco Firebells or the Los Angeles Queens. Just as the sun waits the longest to say goodnight to the west coast, so too will the first WPBL season give just a bit more time to its two West Coast teams.

The challenge for these squads looms like a mountain in the infield. For the Firebells, they must overcome four days of rust and a lingering injury to a key player. The Queens, fresh off a marathon 15-11 victory on Monday, have asked their top two pitchers (Ayami Sato and Michelle Roche) to pitch a combined 153 pitches since Saturday—well above their normal workloads.

It’s a hitter’s league, as we’ve noted, and one that allows for some exceptionally “hot” bats. The kind of composite metal bats that make pitchers bolt upright in their beds at night. Dangerous, light, powerful bats. The most common tool of choice? The drop-five BBCOR Supra bat that’s explosive enough to get a footnote in the Geneva Convention.

Workloads are a problem. The offenses are a problem. The central question for the Firebells and Queens coaches heading into this best-of-five series—how the heck do you manage a playoff game in such an extreme run environment?