Max Chase: The future is now for women's pro baseball
‘You’re a girl. You shouldn’t play baseball.
“You’re too short. You’re not strong enough. Why don’t you play softball instead?”
Hearing this many times over would be draining for most girls. But Justine Siegal takes a different, more courageous approach in her thinking.
“When I was 13, I was told to quit baseball because I’m a girl,” she said. “I knew that day I would play forever.”
Fast-forward to today and Siegal’s vision is simple: Instill hope in today’s young girls by giving them a chance she never got — a chance to play baseball on the professional level.
Despite lack of backing from Major League Baseball — it is instead investing in the Athletes Unlimited Softball League — optimism is sky high among backers of the Women’s Professional Baseball League, which Siegal co-founded.
The next step? Recruiting players.
According to the National Federation of State High School Associations, only 1,372 girls joined boys on high school baseball teams during the 2023-24 academic year.
Yet a Google search reveals the United States already fields a women’s national team. So do Canada, Mexico, Japan, Australia, South Korea and Great Britain, among other countries. And thanks to Siegal’s launch of the nonprofit Baseball for All organization, female players from early grade school through college age can now compete in an annual tournament.
None of these girls and women play in skirts, as did those featured in the movie "A League of Their Own," based around the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League’s run from 1943 to 1954.
The fences aren’t moved in and the mounds aren’t lowered either. Nor does anyone pitch underhand at any level.
The Women’s Professional Baseball League seeks to make all of these facts common knowledge, after decades of softball drowning out its sport.
According to a Callie Maddox article in The Conversation, an online repository featuring lay versions of academic research findings, softball became the broadly accepted diamond sport for girls and women in the United States due to the ball’s larger size, the field’s smaller size and the less-stressful underhand pitching format.
She noted Little League Baseball lost a court case in the early 1970s, brought under Title IX to force the offering of equal opportunities for girls. But instead of integrating existing teams or creating a girls baseball division, it responded by creating a Little League Softball program.
Despite all of this, there were still enough women — 600 of them — willing to travel to travel to Washington, D.C., out of pocket to try out for Siegal’s new WPBL. They believed the country was ready for women’s baseball and wanted to be part of the history-making endeavor.
Actually making a team roster means first surviving cuts to a draft pool of 150, then going on to become one of 90 ultimately selected in a draft slated for October.
Six teams will eventually be drafting six women each. Tryouts for the draft pool just wrapped up at the Washington Nationals Youth Baseball Academy.
Siegal credits the academy for believing in the new endeavor enough to let it use the facility, which grew out of the Montreal Expos’ messy 2004 move to Washington, D.C., to become the Washington Nationals. Creating the academy was a condition of relocation approval.
The nine-acre complex features high-quality, well-maintained artificial-turf fields. Most of the women flying in for tryouts had never played on turf, so Siegal warned them it requires them to start their baserunning slides earlier to avoid injury.
The prospects ranged in age from 17 to 48 and hailed from 10 different countries.
Among their home countries was the Czech Republic, almost halfway around the world. Siegal said she was delighted to welcome the Czech contingent, as most European countries used to ban women by law from playing baseball.
Among players showing up were four members of Cal Poly’s national champion club baseball team, which vanquished USC twice on its way to the title — Arwen McCullough, Ginger Duncan, Kendra Wise and Katherine Henning.
McCullough, a San Francisco Bay Area native who grew up playing boys’ baseball and rooting for the hometown San Francisco Giants, founded the Cal Poly team. Only three women turned out the first year, but that soon changed.
She’s excited to get a shot at playing professionally. “It’s just been exciting for me to have that goal whether I make it or not,” she said.
The tryouts ran three days. By the end of day two, hundreds have already been cut, including all but McCullough from the Cal Poly crew. She is put through rigorous pitching, hitting, fielding, throwing and baserunning drills. She considers herself a pitcher, first and foremost, but is prepared to settle for a spot in the outfield if need be.
She considers herself lucky to get a chance to show off her pitching process under the watchful eye of Ayami Sato, a pitching legend from Japan. And Sato, widely considered the best women’s baseball pitcher of all time, signals enthusiasm for a McCullough curveball with a vigorous strike call from her perch behind the plate.
The third and final day is particularly grueling, with more cuts coming at the mid-point, followed by final cuts at the conclusion. McCullough, though, ends up earning an official WPBL uniform, marking her admission to the league’s six-team draft pool.
The tryouts were closed to the public, but correspondents were on hand from outlets around the country, including The Associated Press and USA Today, to cover the historic event. And two teams assembled from players making the final pool cut performed in a pair of public scrimmages after the tryouts concluded.
Though she didn’t take the field in the exhibition play, McCullough remains hopeful she will get that chance when league play opens next year.
She’s one of the lucky 150. Now she’s setting her sights on becoming one of the even luckier 90.
Several hundred people showed up for the exhibition play, including a mother and daughter duo wearing matching T-shirts proclaiming, “Our Time is Now.”
Siegal seconded that over the PA system, announcing to the world, “The Women’s Professional Baseball League is here, it’s now, and it’s never leaving. This is our game, too.”
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