Copyright The Boston Globe
Boston is one of four cities to be awarded an inaugural franchise, with New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. The league is the first founded for women in North America since the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (of “A League of Her Own” fame) folded in 1954. While details about coaching staffs, branding, and schedule are still being sorted, the league says it intends to play at one or two neutral-site venues for its first season. The aim is parks with about 5,000 seats — “smaller parks that will fill up,” Siegal said. The rosters will each feature 15 players. They’ll be paid from a pool of $95,000 per team for the seven-week season, divvied up per game and based on experience. Some league sponsorship revenue also will be earmarked for players. “One of my favorite things is being able to make people’s dreams come true, as corny as it sounds,” Siegal said. “Because I’m someone who pursued their dream for so long and it was always such a difficult path, it’s always like, oh wait, I can get you in here.” Siegal has often been a first. The Cleveland native was the first woman to throw MLB batting practice, for her hometown Indians in 2011. She was the first female coach employed by an MLB team when the Athletics hired her for a short stint in their instructional league in 2015. “The more people tried to take the game away from me, the more I hung on, and the more I loved it,” she said. Siegal made the decision at 16 to become a coach — despite her coach at the time saying “no man would listen to a woman on a baseball field.” She pursued a PhD at Springfield College, where she was an assistant with the baseball team from 2008-10. In 2010, she founded Baseball For All, a nonprofit focused on opening up opportunities for girls to play. The nonprofit is now affiliated with teams across the US, including the Pawtucket Slaterettes in Rhode Island and the Boston Slammers, based in Dorchester (but with plans to expand into New Hampshire). Siegal has nearly single-handedly created the pipeline that will feed into the WPBL’s inaugural rosters. In August, more than 600 aspiring players turned out for a four-day tryout run by national-team standout Alex Hugo and hosted alongside the Nationals in Washington, D.C. They included 24-year-old Mo’ne Davis, the teenage phenom from Philadelphia who starred in the 2014 Little League World Series, and Ayami Sato, a 35-year-old pitcher from Japan widely considered to be the best female player in the world. From the tryouts and other avenues emerged 130 players eligible for this November’s draft. Some of them, like Ashton Lansdell, played softball in college. Lansdell grew up playing baseball, then helped Ole Miss to its first Women’s College World Series appearance this past spring. She’s spent two summers playing for the barnstorming Savannah Bananas. But the expectation is many players will come in with a baseball background — one forged primarily by playing against men. “There’s almost like a survival rate, right?” Siegal said. “How many are starting at age eight, and how many are making it through the high school ranks? So, if you’re making it through high school, or even if you’re making it through college, you are at a skill level that is impressive.” According to the National Federation of State High School Associations, no states sponsor high school girls’ baseball, but 1,381 girls competed on teams in 2024-25. The NCAA does not offer women’s baseball, but there are a handful of club teams around the country. The US has a national team run through USA Baseball. It competes in the Women’s World Cup, winning the first two titles in 2004 and 2006. It finished second in 2024 behind Japan, which has won seven straight titles. On the national team is Kelsie Whitmore, another Bananas player who played college softball before working through the professional ranks in the Atlantic, West Coast, and Pioneer Leagues. “Us women in baseball have been doing it on our own for so long,” Whitmore told USA Today in August. “... And now, being able to have other people see the vision we do — that’s where everything’s going to blossom, where opportunities are going to grow.” Siegal jumped at the opportunity to form the WPBL after being approached in 2024 by Keith Stein, a lawyer in Canada and the owner of the Toronto Maple Leafs, a semi-pro baseball team. “He was like, wait, where’s women’s pro baseball?” Siegal explained. “And he said, well, we got to make that happen.” In April the league added a chair: Assia Grazioli-Venier, the founder of venture firm Muse Capital. Grazioli-Venier is leading the charge for investment in the WPBL. It’s familiar ground for her. She was the youngest board member of Juventus, the Serie A soccer club, and helped launch its women’s team in 2017. She also helped lead Muse’s investment into the NWSL’s Washington Spirit, where she assisted Michele Kang become majority owner in 2022. Kang has since invested tens of millions of dollars into the US girls’ soccer pipeline. “On one hand, this is an emerging sport in that it doesn’t exist,” she said. “On the other hand, it’s America’s national pastime. There’s nothing emerging about it.” Grazioli-Venier called it the “perfect opportunity commercially — but also for the future of women.” The founding of the WPBL comes as women’s sports continues its ascent. Deloitte projects revenue internationally around women’s sports will eclipse $2.3 billion in 2025. While the founders closely watch leagues forming and growing around the country, they believe their product is what sets them apart — 40 percent of MLB fans are women, Siegal says, and they’re already familiar with the rules of the sport. That’s why Boston is among the first four cities to get a team. “When you think of the Dodgers, Giants, Yankees, and Red Sox, you can’t get anything better from a men’s perspective,” Grazioli-Venier said. “So we need to go out with a bang, and we should give those teams a women’s counterpart. These are all great cities with huge baseball history.” From there, Grazioli says, “there is no ceiling. “Just like the NWSL and women’s basketball have no ceiling. I mean, the fact that women’s pro baseball has not existed and doesn’t exist is wild to me. I think it’s going to, at the very least, catch up to the NWSL. I really, truly believe that.”
