Posted by Kaitlyn Tiffany

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2025/08/womens-professional-baseball-league-tryouts/684030/?utm_source=feed

The mosquitoes and the National Guard were out, but it was otherwise a perfect day in the capital. Clear and sunny, not too hot: baseball weather. The first pitch was at about 9:30 in the morning. A player waiting in the dugout yammered “Whaddaya say, whaddaya say” before nearly every pitch. Another, after working a long at-bat and winning a walk, celebrated by turning to her teammates and tossing her bat gently toward them with both hands, palms up, like she was presenting them with a gift.

It was a regular workday, a Monday, for the rest of Washington, D.C., but inside Nationals Park, it was the final day of tryouts for the new Women’s Professional Baseball League. This will be the first of its kind since the dissolution of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League—a wartime entertainment that gave hundreds of women the opportunity to play baseball in front of paying fans, but which fell apart in the early 1950s due to mismanagement and dwindling attendance.

More than 600 players from 10 countries, including Japan, Australia, Canada, and Venezuela—places that have fielded successful teams in the Women’s Baseball World Cup—had reported on the first day of drills and evaluation. The tryouts were led by Alex Hugo, a former player who won a silver medal with the U.S. team during the most recent World Cup and who said in a Monday press conference that the open-tryout format was designed to find “anybody that we would have missed just trying to search ourselves.” Over the weekend, women were evaluated in the batting cages, in fielding drills, and as pitchers, with cuts at the end of each day. The count had been narrowed to just more than 100 for Monday’s doubleheader of scrimmages, which was open to the public. Those who made the final cut in the tryouts will be eligible for a draft in October.

The ceremonial first pitch was thrown out by Maybelle Blair, the 98-year-old elder stateswoman of women’s baseball, who played for the AAGPBL’s Peoria Redwings and now uses a cane made out of a baseball bat. Instantly identifiable by her white bouffant and chunky sunglasses, Blair has been a celebrity for many years, and is often associated with the 1992 movie A League of Their Own, which resurfaced women’s-baseball history in popular memory. “You have no idea the fun I went through when I was playing ball and how I wish that these girls could have the same opportunity,” she said in a press conference afterward. “I never in holy, holy life figured that we would have another league of their own, and here it is.”

A few hundred were people in the stadium, many of them families with young children. Preteen girls who’d come with their parents ate stadium nachos for breakfast and cheered for players who are household names, at least in certain households—Mo’ne Davis, who, 11 years ago, was the first girl to pitch a shutout in the Little League World Series; Alli Schroder, a Canadian pitching phenom who is also a firefighter (a baseball commentator’s dream). One roaming pack of three girls and two boys ran around the stands looking for Kelsie Whitmore, the face of the new league and arguably the most famous woman baseball player in the United States. She was one of the first women to play professional baseball, in a men’s independent league in 2016, and is currently pitching for the Savannah Bananas, the Harlem Globetrotters of baseball. The (mostly male) Bananas play regular baseball, except they also dance and do tricks and comedy bits during the game (and it counts as an out when a fan catches a foul ball).

When Whitmore came up to bat, a mom and daughter seated near me cheered enthusiastically. “Do you know her?” I asked, because many in the stands were there to support family members. “Yeah, who doesn’t know her?” the mom, a New Yorker named Jennifer Montero, replied. “It’s Kelsie Whitmore.” She and her daughter, Edally, had responded to the open call for players, but Edally was only 16 and had been told to come back when she was older. They stayed for the rest of the week anyway to watch. “It’s definitely surreal,” said Edally, who works on her curveball on the weekends in Central Park and plays on her high school’s otherwise all-boys baseball team. “It gives me hope, knowing I’m not working towards nothing.”

The league will start small, with four to six teams. They will play in small ballparks predominantly in the Northeast—places with about 3,000 seats, one of the league’s co-founders, Justine Siegal, told me. These are roughly half the size of those used by lower-level Minor League teams affiliated with Major League Baseball. Still, however modest its beginning, this league is historic: Though I wrote a feature on the history of women’s baseball in the U.S. earlier this year, I was still a little surprised when Whitmore and Davis used the word integration in the press conference, pointing out that the AAGPBL had been whites-only. They’re right. The WPBL, when it starts play in the spring of 2026, will be the first-ever integrated baseball league for women in the U.S.

[From the April 2025 issue: Why aren’t women allowed to play baseball?]

When I spoke with Whitmore after the conference, she rattled off a list of things she hopes to see in the next five years. That would be a full six-month season, a full spring training, maybe a winter league to help accelerate player development. There should be high-school and college baseball for girls in order to create a pipeline of talent, and the women should have salaries that allow them to make baseball their full-time job (a common issue with women’s sports). While playing for the Savannah Bananas, she is also getting a glimpse of the further-off future. “I feel like I’m living two different dreams right now,” she said. “I’m in an environment of playing women’s professional baseball, and then, on top of it, I’m playing in front of sold-out crowds in Major League parks. So, I mean the ultimate goal is we have sold-out crowds for women’s professional baseball.”

In the meantime, she was thrilled by the few days she’d gotten to spend with women who might be her teammates next year. She told me that she feels more like herself and plays more freely “with the girls.” “They’re just a breath of fresh air,” she said. Usually, when this happens—at an international tournament or after an exhibition game—the women have no idea when their next opportunity to play together will be. With a new league on the horizon, that’s over.

What that new league will look like in practice, and how would-be fans will engage with it, is still somewhat of a mystery, but the Savannah Bananas are an interesting parallel. Their goofy theatrics are not to my personal taste, but it’s obvious people like them in part because they feel approachable in a way that Major Leaguers really can’t. During the morning game at the tryouts, players who were scheduled for the second game lounged in the stands among everyone else. At one point, I watched a girl in an Aaron Judge jersey walk up and get an autograph from a WPBL player who was just finishing a hot dog.

The casualness reminded me of a conversation I had with Kevin Baker, the author of The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City, earlier this year. We were talking about how a new women’s league might be able to differentiate itself by recapturing some of the old neighborhood spirit of baseball. The Dodgers were just guys who lived in Brooklyn; Mickey Mantle walked to work through Central Park. “Players are so much more aloof now and kind of have to be aloof; I don’t blame them for it,” he said. “But you know, when they could live among us, that was in a way more thrilling.”

That’s one of many ways in which the women’s game might be different. In the stands, I spoke with a group of four players from Vancouver who’d come to the tryouts together and offered various other practical considerations. The women’s league will use metal bats instead of wooden ones. “Realistically, we don’t hit the ball as hard or as fast as men,” Claire Eccles, a pitcher and an outfielder, told me. Metal bats will mean more hits and a faster game, which is what people generally want to see. (Though it’s a new challenge for some of the pitchers who are used to playing with men and throwing to wooden bats.)

Juliette Kladko, a pitcher and first baseman sitting next to Eccles, guessed that the average fastball at the tryouts was probably in the range of 70 to 75 miles an hour. Professional men usually throw in the mid-90s or harder, so women who have played with men their whole life have often focused more on the timing and location of their pitches, the shape of their breaking balls, and what old-timers call the “lost art” of pitching. All four of the Vancouver women had a curveball in their repertoire, and one of them, Eccles, had a knuckleball. The classic curveball is an endangered pitch in velocity-obsessed Major League Baseball, and there are currently no knuckleballers.

The WPBL could offer a looser, more familiar, backyard kind of play, even if it intends to roster elite talent. Not only may the pitching be more painterly; the pitchers will also be the batters, base runners, and defenders. Shohei Ohtani, the Dodgers’ $700 million superstar, is an anomaly and a thrilling novelty because he has continued to pitch and hit at the highest level, even after the practice went completely out of style in the age of the designated hitter. In the WPBL, that would be the norm. Most of the women have been compelled by circumstances and limited opportunities to be super–utility players, and the WPBL teams will probably not even have full-size rosters, so it will remain necessary for women to do it all.

The scrimmages I watched were a bit sloppy at times—lots of hit-by-pitches, lots of defensive errors—but they had exhilarating moments too. On a sharp, bang-bang double play, someone behind me let out a “Hoo, hoo, that was sweet.” After I watched a great play in the outfield, I chatted with two older men in the stands. One of them, Jeff Stewart, told me he’d also gone to watch the Colorado Silver Bullets, a women’s barnstorming team that played for a short time in the 1990s. He was impressed by the WPBL games, he said, and excited for the new league. Obviously, there was room for improvement, but there was a lot of potential. “You saw it!” he said. “That girl in center field just made an outstanding catch.”

The day was generally jubilant, but there was a hum of anxiety in the air. Siegal more than once made a point of saying that the league was going to be built to last and would be around, as she put it, forever. “My grandchild is going to play in this league,” she said in the press conference. Although everyone present certainly wanted that to be true, it doesn’t feel like a given. The first season of the new league will be only four weeks long, followed by a week of All-Star events and two weeks of playoffs, barely a blip on the calendar in comparison with Major League Baseball. During the four weeks of the regular season, each team will play two games a week.

Nobody expected the league to start with 162 games a year, but this seems awfully short—like the season would have hardly begun before it was over already. Montero, the mom who came with her 16-year-old, was dismayed. “Definitely it should be longer, way longer,” she said. “We’ve waited how many years?”

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2025/08/womens-professional-baseball-league-tryouts/684030/?utm_source=feed