There will be a new entity in the sports cosmos starting on August 1, 2026. The Women’s Pro Baseball League (WPBL) will begin play with four teams:
- The Boston Hunters
- The New York Heights
- The Los Angeles Queens
- The San Francisco Firebells
The regular season will run from August 1st through September 6th, and games will be played in Springfield, IL. Playoffs will commence on September 9th. From what I read, there will be broadcast coverage of PWBL games, but the league has not yet identified its media partners or streaming services; with “Women’s Opening Day” three weeks hence, I would expect some sort of announcement and roll-out soon.
Women’s baseball has a history that goes back to the start of men’s baseball in the US; there were barnstorming women’s teams often based on factory workplaces even before 1900. The high-water mark for women’s baseball came in the 1940s and 1950s when there were two competing women’s baseball leagues:
- The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL). This league was founded and supported by Phillip Wrigley of chewing gum fame; this is the league that inspired the movie A League of Their Own. At its peak, there were 15 teams in the AAGPBL and it existed from 1943-1954.
- The National Girls Baseball League (NGPL). This league was founded in 1944 by a group of men including Charles Bidwell who owned the Chicago Cardinals of the NFL at the time. It had 6 teams in the league, and they were all located in the greater Chicago area. Red Grange was the Commissioner of the NGPL.
Both leagues folded in 1954; the increasing audiences for MLB games on television is often blamed for serious declines in attendance for women’s baseball games. Back in the 1940s, women’s games were well attended, and some reports say that NGPL teams outdrew the Chicago White Sox in some seasons. Even if that claim is exaggerated, it probably means that women’s baseball was a decent draw prior to the rise of telecast MLB games.
Justine Siegal is the Commissioner of the soon-to-arrive WPBL and she had this to say about the new league:
“Across the USA and around the world, women have always played baseball. From backyard games with older siblings, to rec leagues across the country, women have found ways to play the sport they love. Baseball is America’s pastime, but the professional game hasn’t evolved to reflect the diversity of those who play, watch and love this sport. That’s about to change.”
Tickets for PWBL games start at $22; for folks who can conveniently get to Springfield, IL, that is a price-point one notch above men’s AA minor league baseball games and men’s AA teams routinely draw crowds of five to six thousand fans per game. By obviating travel expenditures and playing games in a single location, the economics of this fledgling entity just might make it…
Staying with baseball, two pitchers have been removed from games where they were working on a “perfect game” late:
- Over the weekend, Marlins’ pitcher Eury Perez had a perfect game after seven innings. He had thrown 92 pitches and was pulled by Marlins’ manager, Clayton McCullough.
- Last night, Pirates’ pitcher, Jared Jones, had a perfect game after six innings. He had thrown only 77 pitches and was pulled by Pirates’ manager, Don Kelly.
Perfect games are rare birds; there have been more than a quarter-million MLB games to date and there have been a total of 24 perfect games. I have seen two of them on TV; I have never seen one in person. Given the actions of the last week, perfect games may become rarer than they are today; the analytics and pitch-count dominance of MLB strategy works against perfect games.
To be fair to the managers in these recent pitching change decisions, the two pitchers involved had both already had Tommy John surgery and both are in their early 20s. The less benevolent interpretation of those pitching decisions is that those managers are slaves to the computer probabilities and have no sensitivity to baseball history. Pick the side you like …
Finally, since today was about baseball, let me close with this from Babe Ruth:
“Every strike brings me closer to the next home run.”
But don’t get me wrong, I love sports………