For almost each spotlight of Julie Croteau’s trailblazing baseball profession—all besides her time as a double in A League of Their Personal, actually—she shared the field with men. Ceaselessly, as teammates. All the time as foes. That’s principally the way it’s been for generations of feminine gamers.
So when she not too long ago heard about plans to offer at present’s gamers the prospect to shine in opposition to different girls in baseball, Croteau had one thought.
“It’s about time,” she mentioned with a chuckle.
The Ladies’s Skilled Baseball League (WPBL) introduced plans final month to launch in 2026 as a six-team circuit for feminine gamers. If and when it debuts, it is going to be the primary professional league for girls because the All-American Ladies Skilled Baseball League—the one immortalized in “A League of Their Personal” — dissolved in 1954.
Heightened curiosity in girls’s sports activities lately made this an excellent time to launch a girls’s baseball league, mentioned cofounder Justine Siegal, the primary lady to educate for an MLB group with the Oakland Athletics in 2015.
The consulting agency Deloitte estimated that girls’s sports activities will generate a billion {dollars} in world income in 2024 for the primary time due to skyrocketing recognition and advertising offers. The WNBA had its most watched regular season in 24 years thanks largely to its star rookie class led by Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese. The inaugural season of the Professional Women’s Hockey League introduced in record crowds.
“Actually we’re standing on the shoulders of the success of the opposite professional leagues,” Siegal mentioned.
Siegal has sought recommendation from girls main different skilled leagues and is learning what made them profitable. That features catering to the precise wants of feminine athletes—who usually face a special set of obligations than their male counterparts.
Siegal was the primary lady to educate for an expert baseball group with the impartial league Brockton Rox in 2009, and the primary lady to throw batting observe to an MLB group with Cleveland throughout spring coaching in 2001.
Again then, Siegal remembers scrambling to seek out babysitters for her daughter whereas she coached, and pulling her daughter out of faculty and bringing her alongside to the sector in some circumstances.
“I needed to do many issues to make my dream come true,” Siegal mentioned. “And so I’m significantly eager on ensuring that we don’t overlook moms who can compete and deserve a spot within the league.”
When she was 13, a coach instructed Siegal she shouldn’t play baseball as a result of she was a lady. She was instructed to play softball, which is a actuality many ladies within the sport face.
Round 1,300 highschool ladies performed baseball on boys groups throughout the US in the course of the 2023-24 college yr, based on a survey finished by the Nationwide Federation of State Excessive College Associations.
“After I see that quantity, I feel that there’s 1,300 individuals who needed to type of mainly buck the system to maintain enjoying the game that they love,” mentioned Croteau, who made headlines within the Eighties by suing her highschool for the suitable to play on the boys varsity group. She misplaced.
“They’ve needed to stare down an athletic director or strategy a baseball coach, they usually’ve needed to make it occur.”
Greater than 471,000 highschool boys performed baseball, whereas 473,000 ladies performed baseball. The NCAA doesn’t provide girls’s baseball, however 9 girls performed on males’s baseball groups in 2024, based on the NCAA’s demographics database. Round 21,000 girls performed faculty softball.
Keith Stein, a lawyer and businessman who cofounded the WPBL with Siegal, mentioned the hope is to assist set up a strong girls’s baseball tradition within the U.S. to create extra enjoying alternatives for women sooner or later.
Each Stein and Siegal pointed to early curiosity from girls’s baseball gamers as clues to the starvation for a venue for girls to compete in opposition to girls on the highest stage. Whereas there hasn’t been a professional league for girls’s ballplayers, they nonetheless play. The Ladies’s Baseball World Cup debuted in 2004 to showcase women’s talent.
Greater than 400 athletes registered to check out inside 24 hours of the league launching its participant portal, Siegal mentioned.
“These had been largely elite gamers,” Stein added. “A few of the finest gamers on the earth—from the US, after all, however there have been gamers from Japan, Canada, Nice Britain.”
The league will maintain a scouting camp in spring 2025, with a draft occurring within the final quarter of the yr. The WPBL will initially launch with six groups, although Stein estimated that quantity might later improve to eight. They’ll compete within the northeast in 2026 in order that they’ll journey by bus to compete.
Whereas Stein expects the WPBL to develop into one of many main girls’s sports activities leagues within the close to future, it received’t get there with out going through among the identical obstacles as the ladies’s leagues that preceded them.
Ladies athletes have lengthy fought to be paid as a lot as their male counterparts, maybe most prominently displayed by the U.S. girls’s nationwide soccer group’s battle for equal pay that ended within the U.S. Home passing an equal pay invoice in 2022.
“We shouldn’t gloss over a sure actuality,” Stein mentioned. “And that actuality is that girls baseball gamers, they in all probability usually are not being paid what they deserve.”
Stein mentioned he believes compensation might be appropriate for gamers hoping to take part within the league, together with those that should relocate from completely different nations or depart their present jobs.
“However it’s going to pale in comparison with in the event you’re pondering of what main league athletes in among the different leagues are making,” he added. “That’s not what’s in place proper now.
“We are going to get there due to what we do. We are going to increase the bar for professional girls baseball gamers. However it is going to be gradual over a number of years.”
Croteau, who isn’t linked to the WPBL, praised the league for attempting to bridge the hole that has existed since lengthy earlier than she and teammate Beanie Ketcham had been believed to be the primary girls to play in an MLB affiliated minor league within the now defunct Hawaiian Winter League 30 years in the past.
“The women who’re on the market enjoying on their very own,” Croteau mentioned, “these 1,300 ladies that we’re speaking about now, who we knew had been adequate as a result of they’re making the group. We additionally know they’re robust willed. They’re keen to buck the system and make it occur.
“This helps them get seen.”
—Alanis Thames, Related Press sports activities author