This site wrote about the tribulations of women playing baseball back in the late 1990s, and it was an incredible experience sitting in the dugout with members of the Baltimore Barncats as they told stories about their experiences of trying to find an outlet to play the sport they loved.
A quarter of a century later, that dream is being realized.
The Women’s Professional Baseball League is being organized for next year, but with a bit of a limited rollout. Like Athletes Unlimited, the four baseball teams will be playing their games at one site: Springfield, Ill.
Like the Women’s Professional Hockey League, the four sides will represent four cities across the United States — Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and Boston — but will not have team nicknames for the time being.
But here’s the thing about the league: the current website is chock full of articles by league vice-president Matt Warren, giving capsule facts about each player in the draft, and a post-draft wrapup for each of the four teams.
Warren’s capsules for the players are some of the most informative bits of information written about women athletes for a new league since the mid-90s formulation of the WNBA. Here, as an example, is the mini-bio of the final pick of the WPBL Draft, San Francisco’s Kailyn Bearpaw:
Bearpaw closes the draft with a story that reaches far beyond the field. After playing tee-ball with the boys she moved to softball and chased her goal of Division I—first at the University of Tulsa, then at North Texas, where she earned all-conference honors, All-Tournament recognition, AAC Player of the Week, and a spot on NCAA’s D1 lineup of the week. When graduation closed one door, the WPBL opened another. A proud Native American athlete, she talks openly about playing for her people and for a small, often overlooked community, showing them that all things are possible. For San Francisco, she’s a first baseman with real offensive pedigree and powerful symbolism as the final pick of the inaugural draft.
This is one of the most interesting things about the way this league is being formed: it is going away from the social media-driven strategy of the last three years of the WNBA or women’s soccer in the post-WUSA era. Instead, you have folks in the front office furnishing information to allow fans around the country to get to know the players and form opinions as to who is likely to come out ahead in the upcoming season.
I think it will be interesting to see how this sports promotion evolves, especially when it comes to which sponsors step up to latch themselves onto the product of women’s baseball, as well as to see if more pro women’s clubs decide to form to create a league which will be truly nationwide.
Thing is, I’ve noticed that the pro softball success arc has roughly followed the economy. The first women’s pro softball experiment, International Women’s Pro Softball, folded in 1979 partially because of the oil crisis. The Women’s Professional Softball League would fold in 2001 after the tech bubble burst. Another, National Pro Fastpitch, closed because of the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic.
I am hoping for the best for the hardball league. I have met a number of players from various teams over the years who have endured a lot of gender-based social opposition to playing baseball.
I think it’s time to give them a chance.