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When Michael Che of Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update” made a joke during an episode about the Women’s Pro Baseball League set to debut in 2026, it might have been news to many viewers. But league officials are taking the WPBL quite seriously.
Billed as “the only professional women’s baseball league in America” and claiming to “rewrite history” in a news release announcing the WPBL’s launch, the league is co-founded by baseball pioneer Justine Siegal, who was the first woman to coach a professional men’s baseball team (the Brockton Rox of the independent Canadian American Association of Professional Baseball) and to throw batting practice with a Major League Baseball team (the Cleveland Indians, now known as the Cleveland Guardians). She also is founder of Baseball for All, a nonprofit organization that strives to build gender equity by creating opportunities for girls to play, coach and lead in the sport.
“I am so excited that there will finally be a professional women’s baseball league. It is a dream come true for all the girls and women who play America’s pastime,” Seigel said in a statement. “We have been waiting over 70 years for a professional baseball league we can call our own. Our time is now.”
Japanese professional baseball pitcher Ayami Sato and Cito Gaston — the first Black manager in MLB history to win a World Series, with the Toronto Blue Jays in 1992 — are serving as special advisors to the WPBL, and co-founder Keith Stein is a lawyer and businessman with a history in professional sports leagues and team ownership.
“We believe that the success of other women’s professional leagues such as the WNBA and NWSL [National Women’s Soccer League] demonstrates the incredible interest and support for women’s sport,” Stein said. He didn’t mention the Professional Women’s Hockey League, which is taking the ice for its second season and planning its first expansion.
According to league officials, the WPBL plans on securing a national broadcast deal for its inaugural season, which will consist of a regular season, playoffs and a championship during the summer of 2026. The WPBL will launch with six teams, mostly in the Northeast.
Will the league hit a home run? As NBCNews.com notes, the WPBL faces a starting lineup of challenges:
The Ruthian task of securing franchise owners, six Northeastern cities, stadiums and sponsors might pale in comparison to the league’s most basic need: players with experience in America’s pastime.
No state offers girls baseball as a high school sport, according to representatives at the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS). The NCAA and the NAIA have softball for women but not hardball.
Still, there were 1,372 high school girls who played on boys’ baseball teams across America last academic year, according to NFHS data.
That surprisingly large number still pales in comparison to the 471,761 boys who played baseball and the 345,607 girls who whipped softballs around the diamond this past spring.
“There are girls playing baseball and local leagues around the country right now,” Siegal told NBCNews.com. “The baseball community has already moved forward, growing the sport for girls, and the WPBL is going to be able to give a pipeline for girls who are being told they should quit when now they know that they have a place that they could play in.”
The truth is, according to the National Baseball Hall of Fame, “women have been playing baseball almost as long as men have. Their long connection with the game began in the 1860s and has continued through the efforts of individual pioneers like Amanda Clement, Jackie Mitchell, Toni Stone, Maria Pepe, and Ila Borders.”
The two most recent entries on the Hall of Fame’s history of women in baseball timeline are Olivia Pichardo, who became the first woman to appear in an NCAA Division I baseball game when she pinch-hit for Brown University in 2023 and Jenny Cavnar, who earlier this year was named the first woman in Major League Baseball history to serve as a team’s regular play-by-play announcer, for the Oakland A’s.
Meanwhile, See Her Be Her, a new two-hour documentary that premiered on MLB Network in late October, “captures the burgeoning transformation of women’s baseball around the world, according to TheAthletic.com.
“It seems like a real logical evolution that there should be a [women’s] league,” Hall of Famer Cal Ripken Jr. says in the film.
See Her Be Her includes a cameo by 97-year-old Maybelle Blair, who played for the Peoria Red Wings in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, which ran from 1943 to 1954 and was immortalized in the hit 1992 movie, A League of Their Own, with an all-star cast that included Madonna, Geena Davis, Rosie O’Donnell, Jon Lovitz and Tom Hanks.
Ahead of the release of See Her Be Her, Blair told TheAthletic.com that it “brings tears to my eyes thinking about starting a new league.”
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