Over 800 miles from Flushing, Queens, Ailana Agbayani made her professional softball debut with the Chicago Bandits. Her dad, Benny Agbayani, did the same in Major League Baseball with the New York Mets at Shea Stadium in the summer of 1998.
But the legacy of the Agbayanis in baseball and softball starts a continent (and an ocean) away from where the two became the first father-daughter duo to make “the Show” in the AUSL and MLB.
“Basically, our family time would mostly come from being at the field and just working out all together,” Ailana explained.
The Agabayani household in Honolulu, Hawaii, could not have been more competitive growing up. Ailana was one of three kids who all grew up playing baseball and softball, and both their parents had successful careers of their own on the diamond.
A Family Started at Home Plate
Before his five-year career in the majors, Benny played collegiate baseball at Hawaii Pacific University, where he became the program’s only First Team All-American. He was drafted by the Mets in 1993 and spent several seasons in the minors. Four of those seasons were with the team’s Triple-A affiliate — the Norfolk Tides — in Norfolk, Virginia, until he made his Mets debut on June 17, 1998.
Benny saw limited playing time in the Majors that season before heading back to the Tides in July.
That same summer, he planned to use the Triple-A All-Star break to marry his fiancée, Niela Guigui. They planned to do something small, but their plans changed when both Norfolk Tides representatives could no longer participate — reliever Jeff Tam was called up to the Mets, and pitcher Mark Mimbs left the Tides to play in Japan.
So the team asked fan favorite Benny, but he had a conflict – he was getting married that day. Ken Young, the Norfolk Tides president at the time, offered him not just a slot in the Triple-A All-Star Classic but also the opportunity to hold the ceremony at home plate.
Benny and Niela started their family at a ball field.
Niela had a career of her own. She was an outfielder on the softball team at the University of Hawaii — something Ailana says people often overlook.
“I think that my mom doesn’t get talked [about] enough. It’s more like, ‘Oh, you learned everything from your dad,’ when reality is, I feel like most of my mechanics and fundamentals are from my mom. My mom sees the little things… men don’t really see the little things,” Ailana laughed. “So it’s always my mom nitpicking and helping me in my game.”
‘Hawaiian Punch’
During the ceremony at home plate, both wore leis, with Benny in a blue Hawaiian shirt. Soon after, he would be nicknamed the “Hawaiian Punch” by Mets fans. During his true rookie season in 1999, he hit a staggering 10 home runs in his first 73 at-bats.
Then he stamped his legacy with Mets fans during a prolific postseason. He recorded a hit in 13 of 14 playoff games in the 2000 season, including a 13th-inning walk-off home run to end a five-hour Game 3 of the National League Division Series against the San Francisco Giants.
He spent four full seasons in New York, with his final year in the bigs split between the Colorado Rockies and Boston Red Sox. His career had a second chapter in Japan, where he played six seasons with the Chiba Lotte Marines. He was with the Marines in 2005 when they ended a 31-year championship drought and later won the Asia Series (a tournament between league champs of Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and China), and Benny earned the series’ MVP honors. He retired from baseball in 2009.
Flying Toward the Next Generation
Ailana’s oldest sister, Aleia, spent a good deal of her childhood in Japan. Once the Agabayanis returned to Hawaii, Benny joined Hawaiian Airlines as a ramp agent.
“I just do it for the flight benefits,” he told the New York Daily News back in 2022. “My kids have been playing travel ball, so I decided to do this to cut down the travel costs.”
Aleia started playing for one of the top travel fastpitch softball organizations in the country, the Orange County Batbusters, when she hit seventh grade. Ailana was right behind her in the organization. The youngest, Bruin, was coming up in baseball, too.
“Looking back at it, it was a crazy, smart decision,” Ailana said of her dad’s job at the airline.
All three earned Gatorade Hawaii Player of the Year honors: Aleia in 2019, Ailana in 2022, and Bruin in 2025. Those flight credits mattered again as they set off to the next stage of their careers.
Aleia played softball at UC Berkeley and BYU. The two sisters overlapped as teammates at BYU during the 2024 season while Aleia pursued a master’s degree in public health.
Ailana transferred to Oklahoma for her final two seasons in 2025. Meanwhile, Bruin was a sixth-round draft pick by the Minnesota Twins the same year.
Instead of playing in the outfield like her parents, Ailana has made her career as an outstanding infielder. In her junior year at Oklahoma, she earned the Rawlings Gold Glove award and was the only recipient at second base that year. Defense is the part of her game she takes the most pride in.
“I love ground balls so much,” she laughed.
She’s started every game there for the Bandits as a rookie. Ailana didn’t always see this path of following in her dad’s professional footsteps. Her goal had always been to play college softball and then go to nursing school. But as the league took off, she began to dream differently. Ailana was selected in the third round of the 2026 Athletes Unlimited Softball League College Draft. Nursing school would have to wait.
And the flight credits have come in handy yet again for her mom and dad to see her play in softball’s new counterpart to MLB.
But whether it’s her parents, siblings, or now her, Ailana hopes the Agbayani name continues carrying a legacy in baseball and softball.
“Hard work and sacrifice,” she said. “My family has sacrificed so much for me, and I made so many sacrifices to be able to play this game of softball, especially traveling every weekend growing up. So I think just hard work and sacrifice.”
Savanna Collins is the Senior Reporter for the AUSL. You can follow her on Instagram @savvyco.
