With WPBL, pro women’s baseball suddenly appears within reach

Basketball Wednesday

Presented by The BIG EAST Conference

So it has been, even longer, for professional women’s baseball since the end of the All American Girls Professional Baseball League, memorialized so beautifully in “A League of Their Own”. That is the history that the Women’s Professional Baseball League, a venture officially announced Tuesday after existing in its current form — co-founded by Keith Stein and Justine Siegal — only a few days earlier. It is new, but it has the chance to change decades of stopped or stunted careers for girls and women in the sport.

The WPBL plans to begin play in the summer of 2026, with six teams stationed in the northeastern United States. For Stein, who also owns the baseball Toronto Maple Leafs and has been in ownership groups of a number of other teams, including the indoor football Toronto Phantoms, the absence of the league is nothing less than an absurdity it is time for the market to correct.

“I was really confused and so surprised when I started thinking about professional baseball over the last little while — so surprised and confused that a professional women’s baseball league did not already exist,” Smith said in an hour-long phone interview with The IX. “…So of course, the creation of a league like this is long overdue. It begs the question, why hasn’t it already happened? I can’t answer that question. I mean, the only thing I can think of is if people just didn’t have the guts to undertake this, but it doesn’t even take a lot of courage, really, I don’t think, in the day and age we live in now, given the success of other professional women’s leagues.”

Women in baseball have not only faced all the casual sexism and entrenched patriarchy that have hampered the growth of other sports. An entirely different sport was elevated in the early 1970s to choke off the very pipeline of players from the game. Maria Pepe sued Hoboken Little League in 1972 to allow her to play baseball, the sport she grew up loving. It was the essence of a Pyrhhic victory — Pepe won, but by the time she did in 1974, she was too old for Little League, and wouldn’t you know it, by coincidence, that was the first year of the Little League Softball World Series.

There is nothing wrong with softball. It is simply a different game. As the great baseball player and former Colorado Silver Bullet — the defining women’s baseball team of the 1990s — Tamara Holmes said in the seismically important “See Her, Be Her” documentary, which premiered on MLB Network this week: “No one tells Serena Williams to take up ping pong.”

With the traditional feeders for talent in other sports choked off, it was Siegal’s genius to create Baseball For All, which laid the groundwork for a path girls could follow, playing the game the way Siegal always wished to pursue it — without judgement and for as long as her talent would allow. Baseball For All built gradually, starting programs for girls 8U, 10U, 12U, 14U, gradually escalating to high school, then the College Championships, entering their fourth year in 2025.

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Siegal is almost criminally unwilling to self-promote — always centering the game, not herself — and demurred when I pointed out to her that she’d clearly created a model for a pipeline of talent necessary to fuel a pro women’s league: “I just wanted nine-year-olds not to have to play softball if they didn’t want to,” she said in a phone interview.

But Siegal has been working on different models for a pro league for nearly a dozen years. So when Stein, who said he’d spent the past 8-9 months working on the business logistics for a women’s pro league, connected with Siegal late last week, the two proceeded to have what both described as a long series of phone calls, astounded to see their “shared vision”, as Stein put it, lining up.

In Siegal, Stein had the women’s baseball visionary, “a natural pillar”. In Stein, Siegal had a willing and eager investor, who’d already connected with Japanese women’s baseball star pitcher Ayami Sato and former Toronto Blue Jays manager Cito Gaston to serve as special advisors to his project, and, critically, someone who isn’t afraid to try something new.

“I think the time is now,” Stein said. “The word I use is ‘league-i-fying.’ Every other sport these days is league-i-fying. There are leagues for fringe sports and mainstream sports. So it’s incredible that we have this opportunity to create a league for a sport that is is so compelling for women and for all baseball fans across America.”

As a result, the new league came together fast — in ways that leave Siegal and Stein with a lot of work to do, and not just externally, the building of a professional league in something like 18-20 months. Women’s baseball is a small but mighty collection of talented players and visionaries who have worked, on their own dimes, to pursue and promote this sport. Not only is there an unmatched level of institutional knowledge that the WPBL must bring in-house to maximize its chances of success, doing so will signal to the star players necessary to bring eyeballs to this nascent league that the endeavor will do right by the sport as it professionalizes it.

“You also don’t just need money, but someone, boots on the ground, organizing and running the whole thing,” USA Baseball catcher and Philadelphia Phillies Minor League Development Coach Beth Greenwood told me Tuesday. “Money is probably the most important, especially to get it started, but if you want it to be successful, you need it all.”

Around the women’s baseball world, the excitement about reaching this potential end of the rainbow has been tempered by the unknown. Stein speaks with the enthusiasm and confidence of someone certain that in a country that loves baseball — with resurgent 2024 MLB television ratings to prove it, once again — bringing the women’s game to televisions and ballparks at a time it is greater than its ever been will be a huge win. But many players are adopting a wait-and-see attitude — they need to hear from Stein directly.

Stein’s vision, as long as he does the important work immediately of reaching out to the key figures in women’s baseball, is clear and easier than ever to envision at the conclusion of a women’s sports year that’s been both the most lucrative and the most central yet to American popular culture. Over the final months of 2024, he plans to fill out his executive team — again, a big tent will be vital. People like longtime Baseball For All Director of Brand and Strategy Lena Park, USA Baseball’s current women’s senior team manager Veronica Alvarez and many others who helped build the women’s game as they worked to find their role in baseball, anywhere, will take what will be a difficult endeavor and infuse it with the energy only possible from lifting together.

Stein’s goal in “the first half of 2025” will be to assemble a team of six team owners. The geographical footprint of the teams themselves is to be the northeast, to minimize travel costs in year one, but he is open to owners from anywhere. The key will be finding owners who understand this isn’t about making money, or even breaking even, in year one, but investing in a sustainable path for the league that, yes, Stein sees as potentially “break-even-to-profitable” within 3-5 years.

“it’s the most critical part,” Stein said of owners, adding that he’d already begun sounding out potential franchise owners, and has been encouraged by the response. “In any league, great ownership will allow a league to succeed and thrive, and if you don’t have strong ownership at the franchise level, it can hamstring the league. So it is vital.” For Stein, capitalized owners will matter more than geography.

Serious investment will have second-order effects on the WPBL before a single pitch is thrown, too. Stein knows that players, to join this league, will need to give up other, full-time jobs to pursue this, and it is his goal to make sure that the economics of playing in the WPBL reflect this right away. Players like Greenwood, current Milwaukee Brewers minor league coach and infielder Luisa Gauci and the two-way superstar Kelsie Whitmore will either certify the league’s bonafides with their presence or doom it with their absence.

“We have to make sure that women in our sport can earn appropriate compensation, but they’re not going to be making what WNBA players or soccer players make,” Stein said. “Our salary cap is going to be a lot lower…the reality is that professional women baseball players aren’t making enough money. We’re not going to take advantage, we’re going to try to elevate player comp. However, our player comp and our salary caps and our budgets at the team level are going to be really, really attractive.”

If that all seems like a difficult needle to thread — a media rights deal, too, will lean heavier on exposure over maximizing every dollar at the dawn of the league, a wise long-term move but one that limits immediate financial payoff for owners — well, that is the challenge of starting any new league. This is one with the wind at its back in many vital ways, beyond simply the general climate for women’s sports, which encourages investors to shed the outdated belief that only men can make them money.

It is happening at a moment when media rights are at a premium, live sports serving as a beacon for old and new networks alike, inventory scarce and more buyers than ever before. The league, situated in the northeast, should have its pick of potential venues, given Major League Baseball’s inexplicably foolish move to reduce its minor league footprint. Stein repeatedly referred such questions to Siegal, anything baseball-related, while Siegal was quick to send any business questions Stein’s way, making the footprint of each clear already, a vital component to any successful partnership. And the level of talent was on display throughout 2024, from a Women’s Baseball World Cup thriller this summer — Sato and Japan won gold, though Team USA got the better of Sato in the penultimate game of the tournament — to a four-team event earlier this month put on by American Girls Baseball and the Bulls in Durham.

But while the success of the WPBL will come down to dollars and cents, as it must, there are bigger stakes here, as is so often the case in women’s sports. I have been emotional all week since watching “See Her, Be Her”, watching women I’ve had the privilege of covering since they were in high school or, in some cases, even younger, developing through Siegal’s program that will land her in Cooperstown someday, and playing in this summer’s World Cup while spreading the message of baseball all over the world.

Watching Kelsie Whitmore plead for a women’s professional league near the end of that film served as a reminder that she wasn’t the young woman I saw excel on the mound at 15 anymore. Kelsie turned 26 this season, playing for the Oakland Ballers, following two seasons with the Atlantic League’s Staten Island Ferryhawks. Every year, she sets the pace for the USA Baseball Women’s National Team, while struggling every winter to figure out how to make a career of playing baseball, her mastery of the game somehow not enough to secure even consistent employment. It should have been enough, and it makes me angry every time I think about it that it wasn’t. And no one wants that to change for the next Kelsie more than Kelsie herself.

Those are the stakes for the WPBL, why it is so exhilarating to so many that Stein and Siegal are creating this now, finally, a league of their own. (Look, it’s true!) Exciting, but also, a lifelong habit, a series of calculations. Is it too soon? Too late?

“My first thought when you sent me the link was also just worried about timeline,” Greenwood told me. “Obviously I want a league as soon as possible… I’m 25 so I’m hoping I’m not too old to play when it does happen. That being said, I know for something like this it can’t be rushed and needs to be funded right.”

Siegal remembered when her pro dreams derailed — she was 23, about to try out for the Silver Bullets, got pregnant, had to put her baseball aspirations on hold. When she wanted to resume, the Silver Bullets were gone.

“If I grew up knowing that I had a women’s professional baseball league that I can play in, maybe I would have turned around and told all those people who told me I should quit to look up and see what’s possible,” Siegal said.

But there’s been nothing like that since, for nearly 30 years. Until now.

Greenwood has a limitless future in the game. She said many around baseball assume she wants to coach in the big leagues, or serve as an MLB front office executive.

“But I want to be the GM of a women’s pro team someday,” she said. “I sure do hope I have time to play for them first, same as Kelsie, but I know whether we do or don’t we will all be a part of it.”

That’s the inherent tension in women’s baseball right now — people like Beth Greenwood, who in a just world, we’d all get to be enjoying as a mid-career high-IQ catcher, a J.T. Realmuto we’d be talking up as a future manager, but many years down the road, after she threw out runners with her elite pop time as long as she cared to do it. Instead, she has to wonder whether the job she aspires to most will ever even exist. Luisa Gauci should be turning double plays and slashing line drives into the gap, Kelsie Whitmore should be confounding hitters on the mound with her pinpoint pitch assortment while carrying her team offensively and playing center field.

That is the promise of the WPBL: the idea that we can take the pleasure of watching them do this as a given, they will know exactly which dugouts they’ll bound out of, running toward their positions, which they have earned through their hard work, talent and desire to play this great game. The given for men here for well over a century. Why hasn’t it already happened? Stein and Siegal don’t know. They just know it’s time to change it to stop “living in the frustration”, as Siegal put it. And they believe they can.

“I was 23 years old when I first started, took my first step into growing women’s baseball,” Siegal said, growing emotional despite her even demeanor, “which is now the similar age to Beth and Kelsie. All I ever wanted to do was play professional baseball. And now, to be on the side where I can make that possible for other women and for girls to know it’s possible? Pretty humbling.”

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