For practically each spotlight of Julie Croteau’s trailblazing baseball profession — all besides her time as a double in “A League of Their Own,” actually — she shared the sector with males. Frequently as teammates, all the time as foes. That’s largely the way it’s been for generations of feminine players.
So when she just lately heard about plans to offer right now’s players the possibility to shine towards different girls in baseball, Croteau had one thought.
“It’s about time,” she mentioned with a chuckle.
The Women’s Professional Baseball League (WPBL) introduced plans final month to launch in 2026 as a six-team circuit for feminine players. If and when it debuts, it is going to be the primary professional league for girls because the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League — the one immortalized in “A League of Their Own” — dissolved in 1954.
Heightened curiosity in girls’s sports activities lately made this a great time to launch a girls’s baseball league, mentioned co-founder Justine Siegal, the primary lady to teach for an MLB crew with the Oakland Athletics in 2015.
The consulting agency Deloitte estimated that ladies’s sports activities will generate a billion {dollars} in world income in 2024 for the primary time as a result of of skyrocketing recognition and advertising and marketing offers. The WNBA had its most watched common season in 24 years thanks largely to its star rookie class led by Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese. The inaugural season of the Professional Women’s Hockey League introduced in file crowds.
“Certainly we’re standing on the shoulders of the success of the opposite professional leagues,” Siegal mentioned.
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Siegal has sought recommendation from girls main different skilled leagues and is learning what made them profitable. That contains catering to the particular wants of feminine athletes — who typically face a completely different set of tasks than their male counterparts.
Siegal was the primary lady to teach for a skilled baseball crew with the impartial league Brockton Rox in 2009, and the primary lady to throw batting follow to an MLB crew with Cleveland throughout spring coaching in 2001.
Back then, Siegal remembers scrambling to search out babysitters for her daughter whereas she coached, and pulling her daughter out of college and bringing her alongside to the sector in some circumstances.
“I needed to do many issues to make my dream come true,” Siegal mentioned. “And so I’m notably eager on ensuring that we do not overlook moms who can compete and deserve a place within the league.”
When she was 13, a coach advised Siegal she should not play baseball as a result of she was a woman. She was advised to play softball, which is a actuality many ladies within the sport face.
Around 1,300 highschool ladies performed baseball on boys’ groups throughout the United States throughout the 2023-24 college yr, based on a survey finished by the National Federation of State High School Associations.
“When I see that quantity, I feel that there is 1,300 individuals who needed to type of principally buck the system to maintain taking part in the game that they love,” mentioned Croteau, who made headlines within the Eighties by suing her highschool for the proper to play on the boys’ varsity crew. She misplaced.
“They’ve needed to stare down an athletic director or method a baseball coach, and so they’ve needed to make it occur.”
More than 471,000 highschool boys performed baseball, whereas 473,000 ladies performed softball. The NCAA does not supply girls’s baseball, however 9 girls performed on males’s baseball groups in 2024, based on the NCAA’s demographics database. Around 21,000 girls performed school softball.
Keith Stein, a lawyer and businessman who co-founded the WPBL with Siegal, mentioned the hope is to assist set up a stable girls’s baseball tradition within the U.S. to create extra taking part in alternatives for ladies sooner or later.
Both Stein and Siegal pointed to early curiosity from girls’s baseball players as clues to the starvation for a venue for girls to compete towards girls on the highest degree. While there hasn’t been a professional league for girls’s ballplayers, they nonetheless play. The Women’s Baseball World Cup debuted in 2004 to showcase girls’s expertise.
Siegal mentioned that greater than 400 athletes registered to check out inside 24 hours of the league launching its participant portal.
“These had been largely elite players,” Stein added. “Some of the very best players on the earth — from the United States, of course, however there have been players from Japan, Canada, Great Britain.”
The league will maintain a scouting camp in spring 2025, with a draft taking place within the final quarter of the yr. The WPBL will initially launch with six groups, although Stein estimated that quantity could later improve to eight. They’ll compete within the northeast in 2026 in order that they will journey by bus to compete.
While Stein expects the WPBL to change into one of the most important girls’s sports activities leagues within the close to future, it will not get there with out going through some of the identical boundaries as the ladies’s leagues that preceded them.
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Women athletes have lengthy fought to be paid as a lot as their male counterparts, maybe most prominently displayed via the U.S. girls’s nationwide soccer crew’s combat for equal pay that ended within the U.S. House passing an equal pay invoice in 2022.
“We should not gloss over a sure actuality,” Stein mentioned. “And that actuality is that ladies baseball players, they most likely should not being paid what they deserve.”
Stein mentioned he believes compensation will likely be appropriate for players hoping to take part within the league, together with those that have to relocate from completely different nations or depart their present jobs.
“But it can pale in comparison with in the event you’re pondering of what main league athletes in some of the opposite leagues are making,” he added. “That’s not what’s in place proper now.
“We will get there as a result of of what we do. We will increase the bar for pro-women baseball players. But it is going to be gradual over a number of years.”
Croteau, who is not related to the WPBL, praised the league for attempting to bridge the hole that has existed since lengthy earlier than she and teammate Beanie Ketcham had been believed to be the primary girls to play in an MLB affiliated minor league within the now-defunct Hawaiian Winter League 30 years in the past.
“The ladies who’re on the market taking part in on their own,” Croteau mentioned, “these 1,300 ladies that we’re speaking about now, who we knew had been ok as a result of they’re making the crew. We additionally know they’re strong-willed. They’re prepared to buck the system and make it occur.
