A professional women’s baseball league aims to begin competition in the U.S. in 2026, according to a news release issued Tuesday.
The Women’s Pro Baseball League will feature six teams, based in the northeastern United States, and will be the only professional women’s baseball league in America, the release says.
The league’s co-founders are Keith Stein, a lawyer and businessman, and Justine Siegal, founder of Baseball For All, a nonprofit that provides opportunities for girls to play and coach baseball. In 2015, the Oakland A’s hired Siegal as a guest instructor for their club in the Arizona Instructional League, and she became the first female coach in Major League Baseball. She has also pitched batting practice for a handful of MLB teams.
Decorated Japanese pitcher Ayami Sato and former MLB manager Cito Gaston, who won back-to-back World Series with the Toronto Blue Jays, will serve as special advisors.
Sato was featured in “See Her, Be Her,” a two-hour documentary that premiered on MLB Network last Sunday and tells the stories of several top female baseball players. The film features a cameo by Maybelle Blair, 97, who played for the Peoria Red Wings in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League in 1948.
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The league is working on securing a national broadcast deal for its inaugural season.
In the news release, Stein, the WPBL co-founder, cited the success of the WNBA and National Women’s Soccer League as examples of “incredible interest and support for women’s sport.”
The announcement of this new league comes soon after the conclusion of what WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert recently called “the most transformational year in the WNBA’s history,” capped by a Game 5 that was the most-viewed WNBA Finals game in 25 years.
Also on Tuesday, the Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL) announced it is preparing to expand beyond its inaugural six teams, possibly as early as in the 2025-2026 season. The league’s second season is set to begin Nov. 30.
I’m excited to hear this. It is a great time for women’s sports – kudos to the PWHL on their planned expansion, by the way – so this new league should have some momentum behind it. I will admit that my first thought was to wonder where the talent pool would come from, since softball is far more prevalent and visible in the US, but there is a Women’s Baseball World Cup, which goes back to 2004 and which was hosted in the US for the first time in 2018, so there shouldn’t be any problems getting the rosters together. Awareness may be the bigger issue – I didn’t know there was a WBWC, for what it’s worth – but with the start of the league in 2026, there’s time to work on that. Maybe some kind of partnership with MLB, who knows. Anyway, I’ll keep an eye on this. Yahoo Sports has more.