Women’s baseball trailblazer Justine Siegal officially kicked off her new Women’s Pro Baseball League on Monday. The WPBL held tryouts for its inaugural season at Nationals Park in Washington, D.C. Over 600 women from ten countries participated in the event. Siegal has been a pioneer in women’s baseball, starting Baseball For All to support female participation in the sport at all levels. Here is a look at the event and the new league.
Attendees included veterans of the international women’s baseball circuit, like Kelsie Whitmore and Ayami Sato. Whitmore, 27, spent five years playing men’s minor league baseball. She most recently played in 13 games for the Oakland Ballers in the Pioneer League in 2024. Baseball America ranked Sato, 35, as the world’s best female baseball player for several years. Her Japanese team won the Women’s Baseball World Cup six consecutive years, and she was the MVP three years in a row. Sato, a pitcher, set records for complete games and strikeouts in the now-suspended Japan Women’s Baseball League. In 2024, she became the first woman to play in the Intercounty Baseball League, signing with the Toronto Maple Leafs.
Once the 600 hopefuls were whittled down to 100, they were divided into four squads that took part in two scrimmage games. Many of the women in attendance had never played on a team with other females before. 98-year-old Maybelle Blair, who played in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League that inspired the movie A League of Their Own, was in attendance. So was Mo’ne Davis, the first girl to pitch a team to victory in a Little League World Series game. Davis was also among the hopefuls who tried out on Monday.
The 100 players who made the cut, along with some international players who were unable to attend, will be eligible for a dispersal draft that will be held in October. The WPBL is planning to start its inaugural season next summer with six teams. The goal is to centralize the teams in one area of the country to minimize travel expenses and to find multiple venues within that area. Games will be played mostly on weekends to maximize attendance and allow the players to maintain regular jobs during the week. Player compensation will be tied to their draft position.
Siegal and her business partners are still working out all the details. The WPBL plans to announce the team names and host cities sometime in the next four weeks. The venture is the culmination of her 26 years of work worldwide to make the sport more accessible to females. The league has partnered with Fremantle, the entertainment production company behind television shows like The Price Is Right, Family Feud, and the Got Talent franchise. Fremantle will develop content around the league, including a documentary. The hope is to establish revenue streams around the league to bolster its financial viability.
The WPBL will face an uphill battle. There are already multiple women’s professional softball leagues in the United States alone, so its talent pool will be split. Collegiate athletes will be unable to participate in the league without losing their NCAA eligibility. So, until the league gets established financially and salaries increase, the WPBL won’t be able to draft any college athletes until they graduate and have a world of other options at their feet.
The league will also be competing for revenue against the juggernaut that is Major League Baseball. Unlike how the WNBA offset its season from the NBA’s, the WPBL will be playing its season at the same time as MLB. Fans of the sport will have to choose between men’s and women’s games on television and in person. I hope that the WPBL will be able to partner with MLB to have the women’s games pair with the men’s in some way. Perhaps fans will be able to purchase combo tickets to watch a women’s game before a men’s game in the same stadium. Maybe WPBL could also get representation in MLB’s Home Run Derby X.
Any new financial endeavor like this will face a lot of obstacles, but if anyone is up to the challenge, it is Siegal. She has faced this struggle for decades. She has been lifting up women’s baseball all over the world for half my lifetime and has travelled the world to raise awareness for her cause. She has thrown batting practice to the Cleveland Indians (now Guardians) and Oakland Athletics, the first woman to do so. Siegal has put on events in places like Korea and Dubai. She has spent years building a pipeline for what will now be the WPBL. I hope that next year, she gets to see all that hard work pay off.
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