"The Future is Now" for Women's Pro Baseball
- Max Chase
- Sep 2, 2025
- 20 min read
“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 young 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. I knew that was the day I would play forever,” she says.
Fast forward to today and Siegal’s vision is simple—give today’s young girls hope by giving today’s young women a chance she never had—a chance to play professional baseball.
Despite no backing from Major League Baseball, which is instead investing in the Athletes Unlimited Softball League, optimism is sky high among everyone involved in the Women’s Professional Baseball League, which Siegal co-founded.
The most important step—find players.
Where are these players?
According to data from the National Federation of State High School Associations, only 1,372 girls played high school baseball on boys teams during the 2023-24 academic year.
And yet, a Google search reveals that the United States has a women’s national baseball team. So does Canada, Mexico, Japan, Australia, South Korea, and Great Britain, among other countries.
And thanks to Siegal’s efforts in starting the nonprofit organization Baseball for All, girls from 8 years old to college age can now compete in an annual tournament.
None of these girls and women play in skirts, as in the movie A League of Their Own based around the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League that lasted from 1943-1954.
In the women’s games, the fences are not moved in, and the mounds are not lowered.
Pitching is overhand at all levels.
The Women’s Professional Baseball League seeks to make all of these facts common knowledge after decades of softball drowning out their sport.
According to an article from Callie Maddox for TheConversation.com, softball became known as the more acceptable diamond sport for girls and women in the United States due to the ball’s larger size, the field’s smaller size, and the underhand pitching that puts less strain on arms.
Maddox points out that Little League Baseball lost a court case in the early 1970’s after Title IX and was forced to allow girls on teams.
As a response to this, they created Little League Softball, instead of creating a girls’ baseball division.
Despite all of this, there are still enough women—600 of them—that travel to Washington, D.C. out of pocket to be the first players in Siegal’s WPBL.
They believe the country is ready for women’s baseball, and they want to be a part of history.
To make a league roster, they will first have to survive cuts and be one of 150 women in the draft pool. Only 90 of them will be drafted in October.
But they know that even if they don’t make it, this is still historic and still worth doing.
The Washington Nationals Youth Baseball Academy is an impressive, and yet unassuming facility on Ely Place, across the street from a junior high school. Only two signs facing the school give it away. Blink driving down the road and you might miss it.
The first three days of the tryouts, fittingly, are not open to the public. Those who are not part of the WPBL or a prospective player must either have press passes, or be close friends and family that promise to respect the league’s wishes.
Siegal credits the Nationals for believing in them and letting them use the facility. If it weren’t for the Montreal Expos’ messy move to Washington, D.C. in 2004, who knows where the tryouts would have taken place.
These are quality artificial turf fields that are well-maintained. Most of the women trying out have never played on turf. Siegal explains to them that when they slide into third as part of the tryout, they should start sliding sooner than they think to avoid injury.
But none of this intimidates the prospects as young as 17 years old and as old as 48. Ten countries are represented, including the Czech Republic that is almost on the other side of the world. Siegal thanks the Czech women for coming and tells them how happy she is to see them, since most European countries used to ban women from playing baseball by law.
Each tryout group—eight total during the next two days—starts off by dividing in half. One half sprints from home plate to first base, while the other half sprints from first, rounds second, and slides into third, and they gradually switch until everyone has gone.
Then each woman finds a partner, and each pair lines up at a right angle to the left field foul line to play a timeless game of catch to warm up some more.
As an observer, there is something surreal—almost foreign—about watching all of these women in one place simply playing catch with baseballs.
I remember the history and realize why this is, and wonder if things might change for the better starting now, in this moment.
Four players come to the tryouts at 3pm Friday as defending college club champions.
Arwen McCullough, Ginger Duncan, Kendra Wise, and Kathren Hennig were all part of Cal Poly’s women’s club baseball team that won the title by beating USC twice and UC Davis once in the Baseball For All college final in Petaluma, Calif.
Arwen started the team all on her own. As a Bay area native, she grew up a Giants fan, played baseball with the boys despite feeling the extra pressure of being the only girl, and never stopped dreaming of pitching even when she stepped away to play softball for two years.
When she found out about all the clubs Cal Poly has, she jumped at the idea of starting her own women’s baseball team as a new club.
The first year, only three women were in the club. Now there are enough to field a full team of nine. Arwen runs everything, and “it has been absolutely worth it,” she says.
Going into the tryouts, her expectations are muted.
“It’s just been exciting for me to have that goal [of making the draft pool], whether I make it or not, just to go out there and be in that environment,” she says on The CJ Silas Show, a sports radio show based out of San Luis Obispo, Calif.
Arwen says she was named after a character from The Lord of the Rings. Growing up, her parents named their cats Luke and Obi-Wan after the Star Wars characters. Her dad learned baseball right along with her.
They never went to her family’s native country of Scotland for her 13th birthday, as her parents suggested, because she was always playing baseball. She is a go-getter.
“When she wants something, she’s committed. Like coming here, training for something, training for marathons,” Kendra says.
“It’s very motivating, because sometimes I get stuck…on the idea of having to do this thing. Then she’s like ‘Okay, so we have to go book our flights, go do this, start practicing once a day.’ It’s a good dynamic.”
Arwen looks the part, and talks the part, and means business.
She wears a navy San Luis Obispo Blues baseball cap with the abbreviation “SLO” in yellow letters on the front. The cap covers most of her short blonde hair. This summer, she interned with the Blues as part of her recreation, parks, and tourism administration major requirements. Arwen picked sports management as her concentration.
Her pink sunglasses have bright, solid gold shades. She wears them outside most of the time.
She wears a Christian cross around her neck.
She carries all of her baseball gear in a large duffel bag and brings a large water tumbler. Both have her last name and phone number written in Sharpie. All of the players have had to bring their own gear, which is expensive if you have to check it on a flight, and more expensive to replace.
While very focused and serious at the task at hand, Arwen is also quick to joke, and quick to compliment, and quick to help out. If she is nervous, it’s impossible to tell. She agrees to have me follow her and her teammates around with an audio recorder—a great privilege that they did not have to give to me.
Today, on Friday, Arwen is there to help Ginger, Kendra, and Kathren get ready for their tryouts. Her own tryout isn’t until tomorrow.
So, Arwen hits fungoes to all three of them on one of the side fields used for shared warm-ups. She finds time to buy packs of Gatorade so that players and coaches can stay hydrated in the dry heat, and makes sure the bottles stay in the shade. She uses a spare bat to get balls unstuck from the top of the batting cages.
Arwen knows how important these few days are for everyone here. It is apparent that she wants to maximize everyone’s chances to succeed and have a good time, even if she does not make the first round of cuts.
The word selflessness comes to mind, and it’s not always there in men’s baseball.
This selflessness is everywhere in the women’s tryouts. It seems contagious, and it is easy to forget at times that this is a competition.
When the women trying out aren’t actively participating, they’re cheering for those who are. If they know names of others trying out, or even if they don’t, they’re encouraging them every step of the way.
During breaks in a drill for catchers, Ginger tries to give another prospective catcher a pep talk to keep going after the prospect gets a minor injury and starts to doubt whether she can continue.
Players from different countries are talking to one another, learning one another’s names, and sometimes trying to learn tiny parts of the other language.
No one seems to be upset, angry or complaining for very long in the open, if at all.
Saturday comes, and with it a ton of player cuts.
Multiple players mention to me and other observers how shocked they are that hundreds of Friday prospects were already told they weren’t picked. They say they never thought it would be that high that soon.
Ginger, Kendra, and Kathren are all out of the running. Arwen is the only Cal Poly player remaining in the hunt for a spot in the draft pool.
Arwen believes that Kendra pitched and played well enough to make the cut. She makes sure Kendra knows that, and also has some suggestions.
“They [the league] want people to have a name for themselves. They want publicity—more known people that are all over the Internet,” Arwen tells Kendra.
Kendra smiles sheepishly. “I gotta work on my branding,” she says.
“Yeah,” says Arwen. “Work on your branding, apply to the [networking] events…any USA national team identifiers, sign up for those. All you gotta do is just sign up, get out there, make your brand name, and then come back next year, make connections.”
“Anything you go to, let me know. I’ll go with you.”
“Sounds good,” says Arwen. “No, I think if you do that, and you keep your skills up on like a men’s team or something, you can make it out here.”
By the next day, Kendra resolves to work on her own online branding, even though she says posting pictures about herself isn’t something she likes to do much.
Arwen has a game plan for getting ready before her tryout starts at 3pm.
She gets to the batting cages during the lunch break to get in some more swings while no one else is there.
She stretches on the practice field using resistance bands she brought with her gear. She plays catch with her teammates moving farther and farther away from them to prepare for the outfield tryouts. Although Arwen’s primary position is pitcher, she is also trying out at outfield—her secondary position. Every player has the chance to try out at up to two positions.
Lastly, she throws a full bullpen.
Her food intake was planned in advance—two bananas, a few tomatoes, and two protein bars. Arwen believes she’ll do better on a lighter stomach.
3pm comes. Siegal gives the same welcome speech she’s given to all the tryout groups for the eighth and final time. At last, Arwen gets her opportunity on the main field.
She waits for her turn to sprint from home to first base, but not for long. Arwen is the third in her group to go.
“Ready? Go!” a coach barks.
Arwen sprints as fast as she can, showing off good running form and using her arms to give her every extra inch of speed.
She touches first base, and then walks to the back of the line to get ready to sprint from the base, round second, and slide into third base.
After a lengthy wait, Arwen is finally in position.
“Ready? Go!”
Again Arwen is off to the races. She touches second base cleanly and never lets up on speed. The slide into third looks perfect.
I catch up with her outside the third base dugout to ask how she’s feeling.
“Good,” she smiles. “I was worried about where to slide on the turf cause I’m not used to it. I went…early, just went like a water slide and got that pop slide in, just used that momentum to stay up.”
There’s little time for her to take a breather. The coaches want Arwen in the bullpen for the pitching tryout.
As luck would have it, Japanese pitching legend Ayami Sato is evaluating Arwen and another pitcher in the first base bullpen, and also helping them out as catcher.
Sato is arguably the best pitcher in women’s baseball of all time—dead or alive. Some experts would argue that she is also the best women’s player, period. A Team Japan veteran and winner of four Women’s Baseball World Cups, Sato knows what it takes to win.
When her fastball is at its best, you can hear the ball zip through the air with a buzzing noise, just like an MLB pitcher.
Now she will be watching Arwen, to see if Arwen also has pitching prowess.
Arwen doesn’t disappoint. She shows good form the whole way and has solid speed on her fastballs and off-speed pitches. Not as fast as Sato’s heat, but solid nonetheless.
At one point, Arwen throws a curveball. Sato makes the umpire’s strike call.
Since English isn’t Sato’s first language, this is her way of showing Arwen she approves.
Next, Arwen throws pitches to a net that looks like a Tic-Tac-Toe grid of 9 squares. Many of the pitchers don’t like the net—they are used to a catcher—and this is by design. The coaches want to see if the pitchers can still throw strikes without a catcher framing for them.
It never fazes Arwen. She continues to throw well, never faltering.
When her pitching tryout is over, she sprints from the first base bullpen to the third base dugout to get the right glove for outfield. Then she sprints out to the outfield.
Arwen looks like a ballplayer who belongs. She wants the opportunity.
In the outfield, Arwen does relatively well. At one point, she throws a laser beam from center field to the plate. If it were a real game, the runner at second base trying to score would have been thrown out by a mile.
During another play, she appears to make a diving backhand grab just above the grass, but she admits afterwards that the ball took a small hop, and that she wasn’t sure if the coaches saw it.
After some work in the batting cages and bunting drills on the alternate field, which is also part of the tryouts, Arwen returns to the main field for batting practice against a pitching machine.
This pitching machine has been giving the hitters fits the last two days. The women are shocked at how slow the setting on the machine is. They only get six pitches to hit, and most of them can’t hit half of them into fair territory, if they make contact at all.
Of course, there are differing opinions.
“I don’t know what you guys are talking about,” one hitter says to the others in the dugout on Saturday after her turn. “It’s too fast.” But she is in the minority.
Arwen is in the batter’s box, wearing her green and gold Cal Poly batting helmet. Jorge, one of the coaches, puts a baseball into the machine. Surrounded by the portable netting at home plate, Arwen lets the first pitch go to gauge the speed.
Then the rest of the coaches stop Jorge—the rest of Arwen’s hitting group hasn’t gotten onto the field yet.
But Arwen was ready to go. Her confidence is sky high.
When she goes back into the batter’s box after the group arrives, she stays calm.
The first pitch comes. Arwen makes contact, but the ball hits the upper part of the portable netting.
Second pitch hit out to left field immediately.
Third pitch—more distance.
Fourth pitch—even more distance to left field.
Fifth pitch—crushed to dead center field.
Sixth and final pitch is a line drive to third—a tough play for the woman at third base shagging anything that comes her way per the coaches’ instructions. She makes the play, but it’s not easy.
After watching most of these women try their luck with the six pitches, it is hard to think of more than four others that have hit every pitch from this machine and had most of them go into fair territory.
Arwen seems to be on her way to surviving to tomorrow.
When everything is over, Arwen finds me and her teammates. She feels like she gave everything she had. Then she checks the Cal Poly women’s club baseball team’s TikTok page. Ginger, Kendra, and Kathren were gathering video clips of Arwen trying out and posting them online.
Arwen’s face lights up. One TikTok clip has 1,645 likes and 33 comments. She is excited and starts reading all the comments aloud:
“A League of Their Own: Season 2.”
“They need a documentary crew. Please keep documenting.”
“I went to school with Justine Siegal. I used to catch for her in the gym. So happy to be seeing behind-the-scenes of this. How exciting.”
“I’m excited for more women’s sports, especially my favorite sport. Could not love this more.”
“Can’t wait for a SoCal team to be established.”
“Bro, there’s so many. Whoa, there’s so many comments,” Arwen says.
“Look at you, Miss Popular,” Ginger jokes.
“Wait, we just went from 60 followers to 182 followers,” Arwen points out.
“Let’s go!” they all exclaim. They are blown away by all the sudden attention.
“Okay, we need to keep documenting this stuff, then, to get those likes and followers,” says Arwen.
“You have a lot of photos,” says Kendra.
“Okay, sick…wait, can one of you guys voice narrate it? I don’t want to voice narrate my own tryout,” says Arwen.
I tell them that they can use my audio narration that I got earlier, which makes them happy.
Arwen then shifts back to thinking about her tryout. “I feel good about that tryout. I think I did as well as I could’ve. I mean, I wish my pitch location was a little bit better.
“I’m ready for that water therapy—Marco Polo,” she jokes with a smile.
As usual, I arrive at the field by 8am. It’s Sunday—the third and final day at the Nationals Youth Baseball Academy.
Only a small handful of Friday and Saturday’s players were invited back to today’s next round. They will join many national team members who got to skip the first couple days of tryouts due to their advanced skill level.
There are only two groups that will try out today—one in the morning and one in the afternoon.
Arwen and her teammates aren’t here yet. I don’t know yet whether she made it. So I start covering the morning group’s activities. Half are on the main field playing a simulated game, and the other half do drills. They will switch about two hours later.
Midway through the first game, I get a text from Arwen.
She made the final cuts and will be here this afternoon. I texted her back that I just knew she would.
If Arwen didn’t make the cuts, the four Cal Poly players talked about spending Sunday sightseeing around the capital.
That didn’t happen. They slept in until 10am—still on California time—and got here around noon.
Arwen says she isn’t too sore—just a little bit of soreness around the quads from all the running. She goes right into the 1pm start time for her group trusting that she will get warmed up enough in the hot weather.
She is selected to play in the first simulated game of the afternoon—and pitch. Pitchers are limited to only one inning. For Arwen, it will be the bottom of the 1st. Later on, she will have at least one chance to bat and play in the outfield.
If she impresses enough, she will make the draft pool—and take the field at Nationals Park for the last day of tryouts tomorrow, which the public can see. It will be two scrimmages.
She warms up in the bullpen with a catcher while coach Bruce Chen, a former major league pitcher, looks on.
While this is going on, her team gives her a 3-0 lead.
Arwen calmly jogs onto the mound. Despite the stakes, she looks as loose and confident as ever. She picks up the baseball left there.
The coaches then let her know that her catcher will be a different player than the one she warmed up with in the bullpen. They had this planned in advance.
Initially confused, Arwen gets the explanation and then settles down. It may not be what she wants, but she understands that this is the situation. She moves on and throws a few warm-up pitches. Each one looks better than the last.
The first batter for the other team comes to the plate. On a 1-0 pitch, she flies out to center field. One out.
The second batter takes an off speed pitch on the outside corner for a strike. Excellent pitch from Arwen. The next offering is a fastball high and inside.
On the 1-1 pitch, a ground ball hits the mound. Arwen can’t field it due to the speed. The second baseman struggles fielding it but eventually grabs the ball. Her throw to first is too late.
The third batter hits the first pitch for a single to right field. Now two runners are on second and first, but a chance for a double play to retire the side remains.
The cleanup batter takes a curveball on the outside corner. 0-1 count. After a wild pitch, the runners advance to second and third eliminating the easier double play chances. The next pitch is hit out to shallow center field. The runner from third scores. Behind her, the runner from second tries to score, too. However, the center fielder throws well back to the plate. Arwen’s catcher makes the tag for the second out.
So Arwen’s team still leads 3-1, and she only needs one more out to end the inning.
Arwen’s change-up to the next batter doesn’t miss by much. She turns around and cracks a joke to the coach playing the role of umpire just behind the mound, who called it a ball. She smiles and keeps going. Apparently this umpire is calling a tight zone.
The next pitch is a routine fly ball to right field. However, the right fielder drops what should be an easy catch. The side continues.
Arwen’s catcher comes out to the mound to talk things out briefly and make sure Arwen is fine. The next pitch is a filthy change-up that gets the hitter to swing and miss.
However, Arwen throws four straight balls and walks her. She isn’t missing by much, and some fans sitting by me think the umpire is being too tough on her.
The coaches announce that no matter what, for time’s sake, this next hitter will be the last batter of the inning.
She flies out to left-center field. It isn’t a perfect frame, but Arwen is able to retire the side. Not every pitcher is able to do that today. It just might be good enough.
Arwen’s team ends up winning the game. She gets one at-bat. After she is hit by a pitch, the coaches bring on Mo’ne Davis as a pinch runner so that Arwen can get a proper at-bat.
In 2014, Davis became known as the first girl to win a game on the mound in the Little League World Series. She got on the cover of Sports Illustrated in her Little League uniform, and tons of media attention. The WPBL signed her, so Davis will be on a roster next year. This is her first day participating in field activities.
Arwen hits a line drive straight to the first baseman, who has to make a tough play to complete the groundout. This moves Davis up a base, and eventually Davis scores. When the game ends, Arwen jokes with her about how much she made Davis run and they laugh.
Davis says to reporters the following day that this is her first time playing baseball with other women, and that she feels much more at ease.
Later on, in left center field, Arwen makes a solid catch on a routine fly ball.
As the game goes into the 5th inning, Arwen is on deck, but the side is retired and the coaches call the game over before she can come back to the plate. They have seen enough from everyone.
Arwen is happy with what she did, but of course wishes she got another at-bat so that she might get a hit.
As she and her Cal Poly teammates leave the facility for the last time, Arwen finally feels some fatigue from carrying her duffle bag with all the equipment.
“Bro, I can’t do this anymore. It’s getting dragged,” she says.
Her teammates have none of it. They pick up one side of the bag and order an Uber back to their hotel.
As the day ends, two kids get a foul ball signed from one of the players. The mom says to the woman ballplayer that the boy, her son, caught his first foul ball.
The player smiles and makes the boy feel welcome. She talks to him for a while as she signs the ball and thanks him for coming. He is in awe.
When I head to Nationals Park Monday morning, I run into Kathren, Kendra, and Ginger asking where the media entrance is. They assure me that there is only one entrance for everyone, to the left.
Arwen is not with them.
When I find the entrance, the ballplayers who made the draft pool are there waiting for security to open the doors.
I see Arwen wearing a red WPBL T-shirt dressed in a baseball uniform like the rest of them. We wave at each other, and I get the message.
Arwen made the draft pool.
She is one of the lucky 150, and is excited to see if she will be one of the luckier 90 women who will play in the WPBL’s first season. There will be six teams playing at locations to be determined on the East Coast.
As it turns out, Arwen will not play in either of the public scrimmages. These are just for publicity, and the cuts are over until the October draft, she says during the lunch break by the concession stand.
However, Arwen does get to toss some warm-up throws to the right fielder from foul territory during the morning game.
Everything goes well for the WPBL’s debut. The weather stays gorgeous—not too hot, not too chilly, not humid. Maybelle Blair, a 98-year-old veteran of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, throws the ceremonial first pitch to Davis. The Red squad takes the first game 5-3, and the Gray squad gets revenge winning the second game 7-5. All the national team stars suit up and shine.
Several hundred people show up and love what they see, cheering at all the great plays like an over-the-shoulder catch in the outfield and a line drive that is only a few feet away from being a home run. Two of them are a mother and daughter wearing matching T-shirts that both say “Our Time is Now.”
Two boys in attendance talk about how much fun they’re having watching these games. They find Team USA pitcher Kelsie Whitmore in street clothes during the second game and get her autograph.
Even though I don’t get rosters with jersey numbers and pronunciations, I feel the need to still provide play-by-play commentary so that there is a historical record of everything. That goes on my audio recorder, warts and all. Multiple people come up to me and ask where they can find the audio. Apparently they can hear me since there aren’t many in attendance compared to an MLB game, and they love what they hear. I let them know I will post the audio online as soon as I can, and tell them where to look.
As I call the second game, Arwen finds me and says goodbye. I can’t help but feel like it’s only goodbye for now, although it isn’t said out loud. I thank her again for everything.
Two quotes over the public address before the games sum up everything well.
“The Women’s Professional Baseball League is here, it’s now, and it’s never leaving,” Siegal says. “This is our game, too.”
CJ Silas, the public address announcer who wasn’t allowed to play baseball as a girl in high school several decades ago, adds in another thought over the loudspeakers.
“I just want everyone to take a moment, and look around,” Silas says. “Look at this community that we are building. This is the first of the inaugural Women’s Professional Baseball League, and this is our first time in a major league baseball stadium. Take a moment.”
She pauses, letting everyone take the surroundings and emotions in.
“Play ball!” Silas says. The crowd cheers.
“The future is now!” a woman exclaims on Saturday, one day earlier.
She has gray hair and wears sunglasses and a brown shirt that says “Be You!” on the front.
Gradually, everyone else in the spectator seating sees what she sees.
A girl no more than three years old is toddling and running on the grassy infield on the main field at the youth academy during a break in the tryouts.
The documentary crew from the company Fremantle is ready. They are taking photos and videos of the girl doing what she wants in this moment.
And the crowd goes wild.
Max Chase is a freelance journalist. He lives in Astoria, Oregon, but is open to relocating to the East Coast in time for the WPBL’s 2026 opener. He graduated from Linfield College and has broadcasted Division I sports, but has always been a huge women’s baseball fan. Max hosts “The Happy Chasers” podcast on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and hopes to broadcast WPBL games and cover the league starting next year for as long as possible. You can find him on Instagram (maxchase52) and on happychasers.com.
Photo credits: Arwen McCullough, AP, Getty Images
Comments