Good overview of the things this new league will need to do to have a good chance of success.
For the first time since the Eisenhower Administration, women dreaming of playing baseball professionally in the United States will have the opportunity to see that dream realized with a league of their own.
Last October, the Women’s Pro Baseball League (WPBL) issued its first press release to announce the founding of the country’s only professional women’s baseball league, which is set to launch in the summer of 2026. The league is co-founded by Justine Siegal — who is best known for founding Baseball For All, “[A] girls baseball nonprofit that builds gender equity by creating opportunities for girls to play, coach, and lead in the sport” — and Keith Stein, a businessman, lawyer, and member of the ownership group for a semiprofessional men’s baseball team in Toronto. The league has also brought in former Toronto Blue Jays manager Cito Gaston and Team Japan’s two-time Women’s Baseball World Cup MVP Ayami Sato as special advisors.
Women’s baseball has a long, but unfortunately sparse, history dating back to the late 1800s, when colleges in the Northeast, such as Vassar, fielded teams. Since then, women have largely accrued playing time by representing their country’s national team at the Olympics, playing on barnstorming teams – from the Dolly Vardens in the 1870s to the Colorado Silver Bullets in the 1990s – or by earning roles in leagues primarily created for men, from the amateur ranks to the pros (see Mo’ne Davis, Toni Stone, Lizzie Arlington, and more recently, Kelsie Whitmore, among many others). Aside from the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, formed during WWII to fill a void left by the male ballplayers fighting overseas, women in the United States have not had a dedicated professional league.
So after all these years without a league, why now? “The past was the right time,” Stein says in a recent interview with FanGraphs. “Thirty years ago was the right time. Four years ago was the right time. Definitely, definitely, now is the right time.” As evidence, he notes, “There’s now a professional women’s hockey league that’s thriving, a professional women’s soccer league, a professional women’s basketball league. They’re all thriving because of the appetite, the incredible appetite, for women’s sport.”
But while the culture does seem primed to welcome more women’s leagues, an enthusiastic fan base only covers half of the demand equation. Unlike the other sports that Stein cites, women’s baseball doesn’t benefit from the existence of college programs to act as a developmental pipeline. Stein says the creation of a league will be a “catalyst for the development of a whole infrastructure around women’s baseball and hopefully spawn the development of a baseball culture in America for women.” And in the meantime, he believes there’s more than enough talent to fill the WPBL rosters. Nearly 700 players registered in the first week or so after the league’s announcement, according to Stein. “We have great professional players from around the world, top players from Japan, the U.S. — everywhere — who are very excited to play with us,” Stein says. “There are over 2,000 women playing on boys high school teams. There are thousands and thousands of players who are ready to play in this league.”
Players and fans can only get an upstart women’s league so far, though; it needs a financial support system to help it get off the ground. One way to do that would be for the women’s league to form a partnership with its male counterpart, as the WNBA did with the NBA. However, for the WPBL, partnering with MLB would mean giving men’s baseball a say in how the women’s league operates. Perhaps wary of this, the WPBL instead is choosing to remain independent and create a female-led league. To that end, the league has composed an advisory board of seven women with decades of experience in baseball and women’s sports. Maybelle Blair, a former pitcher for the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, will serve as the board’s Honorary Chair and throw out the first pitch at the WPBL’s season opener in 2026.
The WPBL plans to hold a scouting camp this coming spring, followed by a player draft late in 2025, leading up to its first season during the summer of 2026. The league’s six inaugural teams will be located in the northeastern region of the U.S. to start, with plans to expand nationwide as the league grows. Given its ambitious aims, the challenges of starting a brand new league, and the friction created by a sports culture that is still learning to properly value athletes who aren’t men, the WPBL faces a formidable path forward. Fortunately, trailblazers across women’s sports have mapped a course. The recent explosion of eyeballs on women’s basketball sets up the WNBA as an obvious model for a women’s baseball league, but the WNBA stands on the shoulders of earlier attempts at women’s professional basketball.
Many remember the American Basketball League that started one year prior to the WNBA, and lasted just three seasons, but almost two decades prior, the Women’s Professional Basketball League (WBL) gave American basketball fans their first taste of women’s pro ball. Though the league drew thousands of fans when it tipped off, it folded after three years. The WBL demonstrated that a women’s professional league could work, but it still depended on proper execution off the court. Though women’s sports are generating “incredible interest and support,” as Stein notes in the press release, there’s a lot the WPBL can learn from the missteps of the WBL in three critical areas – team ownership, the on-field product, and media coverage.
See here for the background. The article goes into detail about those three critical areas, and it’s worth your time to read. First on the list is getting the right owners, who will be in for the long haul and who can handle a few years of being in the red as they invest in the league. I’m excited for them and hope very much they get this right.