Seventeen-year-old schoolgirl Eri Yoshida became the first woman to play professional baseball with men in Japan when she took the mound at the weekend in a new independent league.

Her tally: one walk, one strikeout — and thousands of curious fans.

Yoshida drew more than 11,000 spectators to her debut with the Kobe 9 Cruise, a record for an independent league game in a baseball-crazy nation whose men’s national team just brought home the World Baseball Classic title.

‘I want to increase the number of women playing baseball,’ Yoshida said. ‘I will make the grade in Kobe first of all.’ The pint-sized pitcher wowed the Cruise in tryouts with her baffling knuckleball, and the club say she is anything but a marketing gimmick.

‘We haven’t picked her because she is a woman,’ team owner Kazuyo Hirota said. ‘We want people to see her play for themselves.’ Yoshida made her debut Friday night, summoned in the bottom of the ninth inning with the Cruise leading the Osaka Gold Villicanes 5-0, and had a shaky start.

She walked her first batter, Yosuke Hiramatsu, on four straight pitches but then struck out the second, whiffing Takayuku Furuya on a 2-2 fastball that was clocked at 97 kilometres (60 miles) an hour.

‘One pitch fluttered and dropped, and there was another that just carried,’ Hiramatsu said. ‘I haven’t seen such pitches before.’

Yoshida, who was pulled after just the two batters, said she wasn’t satisfied with her performance.

‘I will not stay content with that,’ she said. ‘I want to pitch a whole inning or two.’Standing at 155cm (5'1”) and weighing 52kg (115lbs), Yoshida made headlines when she signed with Kobe to play in the new Kansai Independent Baseball League.

A women’s professional baseball league existed in Japan before — for two years, 1950-1951 — and the country’s women are a softball powerhouse, winning Olympic gold in Beijing last year.

But the tiny right-handed Yoshida is the first to play a Japanese pro game with men.

A Yokohama native who started playing baseball at age eight, Yoshida decided to try out for the Cruise with her brother ‘to see what it was like.’

Her brother failed. But Yoshida, who says she has studied film of Boston Red Sox knuckleball master Tim Wakefield, wowed the scouts with her version of the fluttering, keep-them-guessing pitch.

And in a country that expects nothing less than excellence on the diamond, her performance appeared to win over fans.

‘Her pitches might still look a little questionable,’ the hometown Kobe Shimbun newspaper said. ‘But fans in the bleachers warmly accepted a high-school girl standing on the mound with the pros.’

Just being out there won’t be enough for Yoshida, though.

‘I want to remain an active player as long as possible,’ she said. ‘I want to become a leader in women’s baseball one day.’