Earlier this month, something unexpected happened: I started to rekindle my love for baseball. A World Series for the ages — perhaps the greatest ever — reminded me of everything that I loved about the game.
I used to love baseball. I never played myself — neither it nor softball — but my dad passed his love for the game to me. As a kid, he would regale me with stories about how, after the tobacco harvests on the family farm, they’d turn the grounds into a makeshift field. That’s how his love for baseball began — on that makeshift field, turning discard tobacco leaves into bases — and, ultimately, it’s the soil from which my own fandom grew.
But over the years, my interest in the sport has waned. The time I once might have spent watching the boys of summer is now devoted to watching the WNBA or the NWSL. I loved baseball but there was something about seeing women succeed at the highest levels — and, perhaps, even imaging yourself doing it — that baseball just couldn’t compete with…
…that is, until now. Next year, for the first time since 1954, women’s professional baseball will be played in the United States.
How Did the Women’s Professional Baseball League Get Started?
When she was 13, a coach told Justine Siegal that girls shouldn’t play baseball and, since then, she’s worked tirelessly to prove him — and all the other naysayers — wrong. She’s a trail blazer: Siegel was the first woman to coach in Major League Baseball and now dozens of others follow in her footsteps. In 2010, she launched Baseball for All, a non-profit that “empowers girls to play, coach, and lead in baseball.” Now, alongside Keith Stein (owner of the Intercounty Baseball League’s Toronto Maple Leafs), Siegal reaches the pinnacle of her lifelong fight: the launch of the Women’s Professional Baseball League (WPBL).
“There’s something special about girls playing with other girls,” Siegal told ESPN earlier this year. “One, they’re no longer the girl, they’re just ballplayers. Two, there’s a lot of camaraderie. And three, there’s a pipeline that can be created. And that’s one thing that the WPBL provides: an end to that pipeline.”
Back in August, the WPBL held their first tryouts and the response was overwhelming: 600 women from 10 countries descended on Washington, DC and tried to realize their dream of playing professional baseball. Over the course of four days, scouts whittled down the number of players at the tryout by putting them through drill-focused sessions, athletic performance testing, and player evaluations. On the fourth day, those who remained got to play a game in Nationals Park…a last attempt to show what they were capable of. After final cuts, just 21% of the original group remained and they make up the WPBL’s first class of draft prospects. On Thursday night, 120 of those women went from prospects to players as each of the league’s four franchises participated in a six round, snake-style draft to select the team’s first 30 players.
The WPBL arrives at an interesting time. In the last two years alone, we’ve seen the launch of nine other women’s leagues in North America. Obviously, that much growth — on top of expansions by the NWSL and WNBA — mean that there’s a buffet of competition to watch; there’s no time of year where women’s sports aren’t being played at the highest levels and that’s certainly something worth celebrating. But, on top of that, each league seems to be taking lessons from the ones that have come before and building a strong foundation for women’s sports. Given how we’ve see other professional leagues come and go, that feels like a positive step.
How is the Women’s Professional Baseball League Structured?
Like the Athletes Unlimited Softball League and the Women’s Lacrosse League, the WPBL’s inaugural season will feature four teams: New York, Boston, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Originally, the WPBL was slated to have six teams to start the season but they scaled back to four and will add two additional clubs in the 2027 season.
Like Unrivaled, the WPBL will play inaugural season at a neutral location: the Robin Roberts Stadium in Springfield, Illinois (which is, apparently, not named for the out lesbian co-host of Good Morning America). Though the Midwest will play host to the inaugural run of the WPBL, the league plans to host exhibition games in its four franchise cities ahead of the season’s start.
It feels fitting that this next iteration of women’s professional baseball in the United States is set in Springfield. In 1875, the city was the site of the first ever women’s professional baseball game: a battle between the Blondes and the Brunettes. The game was less about women playing the sport and mow about entertaining audiences but it opened the door for what was to come. Nearly 75 years later, the Springfield Sallies were added as an expansion team in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, the league immortalized in A League of Their Own. Hopefully the WPBL write a better story for women’s baseball in Springfield: the Sallies were the worst team in the AAGPBL and folded after just one year and became a player development team. That said, I’d love to see one of the remaining Springfield Sallies — Luisa Gallego and Eileen Gascon — toss out that first pitch.
The inaugural season is expected to launch in August 2026 and last seven weeks, with teams playing two games per week. The league already comes to the table with a media deal with Fremantle, a British multinational production company, but given that Fremantle’s most well-known products in the United States are game shows and reality shows, I’m curious about what that’ll look like in practice.
Who Are the Gay Players of the Women’s Professional Baseball League?
The WPBL’s roster of players is incredible. Dozens of national team players from around the globe. So many athletes who excelled not just as baseball but at other sports at high levels, almost by necessity. We’ve got household names like Mo’Ne Davis — who you might remember from the 2014 Little League World Series — and Kelsie Whitmore of Savannah Bananas fame (I once heard someone on Tiktok once called the Savannah Bananas “drag shows for straight people” and it feels like the most accurate description I’ve ever heard). We’ve got teenagers — multiple 17 year olds heard their names called Thursday — and 40 year olds who want to give their dream of playing professional baseball in America one last shot. There are players who spend their days, criss-crossing the globe looking for opportunities to play, and others who were already writing the next chapters of their lives, as grad students, coaches, or first responders. It’s just an amazing array of talent.
But, of course, this is Autostraddle, so what we really need is an answer to everyone’s most pressing question: Who All’s Gay Here? These are the players who are publicly out — there are others that we’re pretty sure are gay but don’t want to put them on this list until they’ve chosen to put themselves on this list, if you know what I mean.
Boston
Paloma Benach (LHP)
Drafted: Fourth Round, 8th Pick
Nadia Diaz (3B)
Drafted: Fifth Round, 8th Pick
Stephanie Everett (LF)
Drafted: Fourth Round, 9th Pick
Raine Padgham (RHP)
Drafted: First Round, 12th Pick
Los Angeles
Ashton Lansdell (3B)
Drafted: First Round, 7th Pick
Jamie Mackay (Catcher)
Drafted: Second Round, 3rd Pick
Luisa Hernandez (3B)
Drafted: Fifth Round, 18th Pick
New York
Denae Benites (Catcher)
Drafted: First Round, 6th Pick
Elodie Ciamarro (Catcher)
Drafted: Third Round, 3rd Pick
Beth Greenwood (Catcher)
Drafted: Third Round, 14th Pick
London Studer (1B)
Drafted: First Round, 19th Pick
San Francisco
Jordan Eyster (CF)
Drafted: Fourth Round, 4th Pick
Amanda Gianelloni (2B)
Drafted: First Round, 8th Pick
Arwen McCullough (RHP)
Drafted: Sixth Round, 5th Pick
Micaela Minner (1B)
Drafted: Sixth Round, 13th Pick
So now I’m officially counting down the days until I can recapture my love for baseball all over again; no doubt, it’ll be a little easier now with so many queer women on the field. Let’s play ball!
feature image by Jess Rapfogel/Getty Images
