Exclusive: USA Baseball’s Alex Hugo discusses her new role with WPBL

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When USA Baseball’s Ashton Lansdell’s pop up landed in the glove of Japan catcher Nanako Hanabusa, clinching this past summer’s Women’s Baseball World Cup for Japan, 11-6, USA Baseball star Alex Hugo walked off the field knowing her team had fallen just short of its championship goal. But the two-time USA Baseball Woman of the Year didn’t know when or even if she’d ever play again.

“I mean, I’m getting kind of old,” Hugo, 31, joked in a phone interview with me on Monday.

But behind that joke is the essential limiting factor in women’s baseball today, and the biggest reason, of many, that Hugo signed on as special advisor to the Women’s Pro Baseball League, becoming the first of what Hugo and the WPBL hope are many of the top American talents in women’s baseball joining forces with Japanese ace Ayami Sato, previously hired as a WPBL special advisor as well, to provide women’s baseball with its first real professional circuit in the United States in more than 70 years. Elite women’s baseball players need a place to play.

“I’ve been in so many situations where you fall short and your heart breaks for that, but I think it is kind of different now, because there is such a long gap until you get that chance again, a waiting game,” Hugo said of the time between chances to suit up. “But it also made me think too: I can prepare myself differently… in that time in-between, you can bring people with you.”

It is that collaboration that is driving Hugo’s involvement in the league. The early signs are extremely positive for the vision of Justine Siegal, founder of Baseball For All and businessman Keith Stein, owner of the Toronto Maple Leafs baseball team who co-founded the WPBL. In Stein’s view, the given was the amount of talent and interest there’d be from a broad cross-section of women’s baseball players, between those who have developed through Baseball For All to overseas stars and plenty of converts from softball, too. The more than 800 players who have already registered their interest with the WPBL is an early indicator that Stein and Siegal are right.

Hugo herself is a softball convert. She grew up loving “A League Of Their Own”, because who doesn’t love that movie? But she starred as a softball player, both collegiately and in the dearly departed National Pro Fastpitch (NPF), before turning to baseball, where she’s been not just a critical part of USA Baseball’s rise and a roving instructor for the Oakland Athletics, but also a mentor to countless young players through programs such as MLB Develops.

It makes Hugo an absolutely perfect choice to help guide this league, which is why it was so critical that Hugo, too, felt as if the larger concept outlined by Siegal and Stein fit with what she believed would be possible.

“I was obviously interested,” Hugo said when she’d first heard about the WPBL. “…And I think that hearing from Keith and Justine and just knowing that they have the right people in the right seats, and they really are organized and well-versed, I think that it was even more exciting, because this is what people have wanted. Once I spoke to them, I was comfortable, I was right on board, because I know that it’s a good idea, and I know that it’s possible for it to happen.”

If Hugo thinks so, it will impact how other people view the WPBL, too. Back in 2023, Jordan Gilreath, then in eighth grade and a member of the Texas Rangers’ Academy, was asked to reflect on her favorite coach at the MLB Trailblazers series held in Vero Beach. She didn’t hesitate.

“I met her at the GRIT tour in Dallas,” Gilreath said of Hugo. “She’s a great teacher, funny, and down to earth. She called me ‘J Money’ at Trailblazers, and I thought that was cool. She keeps the game fun but makes sure we are learning the right way… Coach Alex also told me in the cage to be violent when I swing. That’s not a word girls use a lot, but it made me feel strong, like, ‘Yes, I can swing hard.’”

It’s this ability to connect with people — everyone from young players to the figures around MLB who Hugo counts among her greatest supporters — that led Stein to see Hugo as such an important part of developing the WPBL, at a time when relationships will be paramount. Yes, Hugo has deep ties in every corner of the women’s baseball world. Yes, she is still an incredible player, who homered twice during last summer’s World Cup and plays an exquisite second base. But it will be necessary for this older (yes, in baseball terms, though especially as measured against the many prematurely-ended careers in women’s baseball due purely to lack of opportunity) to find emotional resonance with those who she will recruit to join the effort at its nascent stages, to believe in something before it is possible to even see it.

“We couldn’t think of a better ambassador, role model, and also baseball resource for us, she’s deeply experienced at various levels,” Stein told me in a phone interview. “She has all sorts of insight, so she just checks every box for us in terms of the type of brain power we want access to.”

Stein is a whirlwind these days, working on the many vital parts of standing up a league in time for 2026, a timetable he says the WPBL remains on track to meet. The vision he and Siegal, who continues to travel the world building girls and women’s baseball, first outlined at The IX last October hasn’t changed — a six-team league, playing primarily in the northeast United States in the summer of 2026, with a draft in 2025. But everything from the ownership structure, the ramping up sequence of events and media rights to the finer details of the schedule and day-to-day experience are all still getting filled in. He is clear that on anything baseball, he is looking for Dr. Siegal’s vision, and in Hugo, a chance to collaborate on what the player experience should look like is central to the way he views 2025 unfolding.

“She’s not just a a symbolic figure for us,” Stein said. “We want her to be involved, to assist us with a lot of components of this league that we are developing. There’s player recruitment, there’s assistance with the draft, it’s going to be really important to to have her support for whatever types of activities we have.”

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Hugo echoed Stein’s vision for her new job, which is by its very nature open-ended as the needs of the league grow and change.

“They’re very collaborative,” Hugo said. “And so I felt like I could speak freely, and they’re very open to: does this make sense? And there’s no, ‘this is how it’s gonna go,’ and let’s just wing it, you know? So it’s exciting for me, because I think that this can come to fruition, and it’s going to be really successful, and they’re also open to making it make sense.

“We’re not dealing with MLB, let’s say, where their whole life is based around training and playing, and that is how their lifestyle is, right? You’re dealing with people that have jobs and have kids and have a million things going on, meanwhile, also being professional athletes. So it has to make sense for everybody, and it has to be functional enough to last. And I think that this blueprint, let’s call it, I think it’s going to be sustainable.”

Stein and Hugo both understand that adding Alex Hugo to the vision of what the WPBL can be is simply the beginning of a process, not an endpoint. Seeing the biggest stars in women’s baseball join the WPBL — Kelsie Whitmore, most important of all, but a remarkable cohort of women who have turned themselves into elite players absent the regular reps men in the sport can take for granted at any age — will simultaneously strengthen the league and serve as proof of concept for the idea of the WPBL writ large and of Hugo’s ability to recruit around her.

I’m not stopping at Alex,” Stein said. “We’re going to get other leading lights in the female baseball community. It doesn’t end with Alex.”

The entire concept is a leap of faith, to be sure. Even Hugo’s life will require some serious changes she’s yet to fully work out with Taylor Schlopy, her wife, and the world they’ve built around their two children, four-year-old Finn — Hugo serving as a ludicrously overqualified coach of Finn’s tee-ball team this spring — and four-month-old Fisher, in Georgia.

But Hugo described Taylor, her former teammate at University of Georgia softball (but now retired from playing, Hugo says) as “a saint”. Hugo is confident the vision of finally returning professional women’s baseball to the world stage is compelling enough to take that leap, knowing she gets to be part of a collaborative effort with Stein and Siegal to shape how it all comes together. By its very existence, the amount of time women’s baseball players will get to play baseball will mushroom, and the development of the sport itself will be the biggest beneficiary of all.

“So many opportunities and so many good things are going to stem from this, and I think it’s going to become a part of people’s yearly plans,” Hugo said. “This is something that they can structure their life around.”

As Siegal, Stein, Sato and now Hugo see it, every day in the WPBL, some players will win, some will lose. But as they walk off the field, none of the very best women’s baseball players in the world will ever have to wonder again when they’ll play their next game.

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