Mar 31, 2025, 07:10 AM ET
Being a trailblazer in baseball is not anything new to Justine Siegal. If truth be told, it is her MO.
Most likely it is as a result of her tenacity. When she hears ‘no,’ her knee-jerk response is to rate “complete steam forward” — as was once the case when she was once 16 and her trainer informed her she was once losing her time pursuing the similar occupation.
“He simply laughed at me and mentioned, ‘No guy will ever pay attention to a girl on a baseball box,’ mentioned Siegal, now 50. “I began pondering, ‘Who is he to come to a decision what I’ll do?’ So I went in this giant pursuit.”
Justine Siegal throws right through batting observe to Cleveland Indians minor leaguers right through spring coaching, Feb. 21, 2011, in Goodyear, Arizona. WPBL
That “giant pursuit” now reveals Siegal because the co-founder of the Girls’s Professional Baseball League, whose release was once introduced closing October. As a part of Girls’s Historical past Month, she spoke to ESPN concerning the WPBL, her pioneering legacy in baseball and her hobby for the game.
“There is something particular about women taking part in with different women,” Siegal mentioned about girls’s baseball. “One, they are now not the lady, they are simply ballplayers. Two, there is numerous camaraderie. And 3, there is a pipeline that may be created. And that’s the reason something that the WPBL supplies: an finish to that pipeline.”
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MLB lifted its ban of girls taking part on main league groups or their associates in 1992. Siegal was the 1st feminine trainer for a qualified crew in 2009 and in addition the 1st to be employed within the majors six years later. Now not handiest did she turn out her outdated trainer fallacious, she additionally opened the floodgates: An all-time prime 43 girls coached MLB groups in 2023.
“I felt like I might earned my spot, however I additionally knew that it was once more or less wonderful to be there on the similar time,” she mentioned.
Play ball, WPBL taste
Siegal is recently focusing her power into the 2026 WPBL release, operating intently with league co-founder Keith Stein, a legal professional and businessman who noticed worth in her legacy. She mentioned she welcomes the problem of establishing a league from scratch and is thankful that there are examples to apply.
“It is very heartwarming to be in a chance to construct a trail for others,” she mentioned
The WPBL, Siegal mentioned, is “development off the momentum of the ladies’s professional leagues which can be prior to us” and the “genuinely-earned second” that girls’s sports activities are taking part in.
The primary WPBL season is scheduled to run from overdue Would possibly thru overdue August of 2026. League officers are making plans on a regular-season time table of about 40 video games consistent with crew, adopted through playoffs to decide the champion.
The league is within the means of deciding on house owners for the six inaugural franchises, which might be positioned basically within the Northeastern U.S. The objective, Siegal mentioned, is to spot attainable house owners who’ve labored in girls’s skilled sports activities and perceive the luck of a franchise such because the NWSL’s Angel Town, which closing July was probably the most precious girls’s sports activities crew on the planet.
The WPBL will fill its rosters, with salaries “extra related to minor league baseball,” by the use of scout camps this spring and a draft later this yr. With reference to 700 gamers registered to take part by the use of the WPBL participant portal within the first week after the release announcement, in line with the league.
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“I feel there is a component of understanding who’re the most productive gamers and there is additionally that pleasure in that you need to search out that diamond in a coarse that you just did not find out about,” Siegal mentioned.
Regardless of the sponsorships the WPBL has secured and the hot spike in investments in girls’s sports activities — in particular in basketball and football — one preliminary problem for Siegal is how somewhat new girls’s baseball is to the panorama.
“Softball is a larger game in Mexico and Latin The us,” she mentioned. “There may be nonetheless an concept that boys play baseball and women play softball.”
Any other problem is discovering nationwide broadcast and streaming offers to interact with fanatics international.
“The next move [is] in point of fact figuring out that sources is this kind of key a part of now not simply creating professional sports activities, however getting women taking part in, getting women main, getting them training,” she mentioned.
Development a basis
Former All-American Ladies Skilled Baseball League pitcher Maybelle Blair, who became 98 in January, is an honorary chair at the WPBL’s advisory board. She helped encourage the movie “A League of Their Personal” together with her participation within the AAGPBL, which ran from 1943 to 1954.
“There may be unquestionably numerous admire and in addition a duty or want to make [former AAGPBL players] pleased with this league and to release it prior to all of them go and allow them to know that it is nonetheless going,” Siegal mentioned. “We are going to stay it going.”
At age 98, former pitcher for the AAGPBL’s Peoria Redwings Maybelle Blair — observed right here attending the 2022 ESPY Awards, on the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles, California — is an honorary chair at the WPBL’s advisory board. EPA/CAROLINE BREHMAN
The remainder of the board comprises crew Japan pitcher and six-time Global Cup winner Ayami Sato, former Arizona Diamondbacks government and leader criminal officer Nona Lee, former ESPN CMO and espnW founder Laura Gentile, communications strategist Kate Childs Graham, World Girls’s Baseball Heart founder/CEO Kat Williams, Girls in Baseball Analysis Committee at Society for American Baseball Analysis chair Leslie Heaphy, and United Girls’s Sports activities NIL Company proprietor Digit Murphy.
The 35-year-old Sato is extensively regarded as the most productive feminine baseball pitcher on the planet. This yr, the right-hander will develop into the 1st girl to play on a males’s skilled baseball crew in Canada when she fits up for the Intercounty Baseball League’s Toronto Maple Leafs, which can be owned through Stein.
“She’s a kind of folks that has made the sport develop larger in her nation,” Siegal mentioned. “I take note when she first began and now she’s in her 30s. She has teammates who watched her when she was once younger, once they have been younger and now they are at the similar crew as her.”
As well as, the WPBL has two particular advisors available. Staff USA Girls’s Baseball celebrity Alex Hugo might be in command of participant building and recruiting, and previous Toronto Blue Jays supervisor Cito Gaston, the 1st Black supervisor in MLB to win a Global Collection with titles in 1992 and 1993, will lend his experience.
Siegal considers that true baseball fanatics have area of their hearts for the WPBL.
“It isn’t simply because girls are taking part in,” she mentioned. “It is just right festival. It is a laugh. It is consuming scorching canines. We wish them to come back out [to the park] for our video games.”
Going to bat for fairness
Siegal started to construct her imaginative and prescient of ladies’ and ladies’s baseball began twenty years in the past, when in 2003 she created the Sparks, an all-girls baseball crew that competed towards boys. It was once the one women crew that participated frequently in probably the most biggest boys’ baseball tournaments within the nation, performed at Cooperstown Goals Park close to the Nationwide Baseball Corridor of Status.
Six years later, whilst operating as an assistant at Springfield Faculty, she made historical past as the 1st girl to train a qualified males’s baseball crew together with her place because the first-base trainer of the Brockton Rox of the unbiased Can-Am League. The Rox received a franchise-record 56 video games that season, very best within the league, prior to shedding out to the eventual champion Quebec Capitales within the first spherical of the playoffs.
In 2010, Siegal based Baseball For All, a countrywide non-profit that gives women with the alternatives and sources to train, play, and lead in baseball.
The next yr, Siegal was the 1st girl to throw batting observe for an MLB crew — and for none rather then for her liked Cleveland Indians right through spring coaching.
“My dream was once to play for the now Cleveland Guardians,” she mentioned. “I went to all of the video games. I slept with my baseball bat correct subsequent to me. I might get up and I might take swings in my bed room and return to mattress. That was once evidently my dream.”
Her ground-breaking MLB hiring got here 4 years later, when in 2015 she was a visitor trainer for the Oakland Athletics of their tutorial league.
Siegal’s listing of firsts is not restricted to the U.S. She may be the 1st girl to train professionally in leagues in Japan and Mexico.
“I unquestionably felt like I made historical past, as a result of I labored so arduous simply to get to that time … however it additionally simply felt fulfilling,” she mentioned.
For the instant, Siegal mentioned she is embracing the “humbling” function of clearing a trail for women and girls that she didn’t have to be had to her.
“I dreamt of being Orel Hershiser, Nolan Ryan. However now you’ll be able to dream of being Sato or [fellow women’s baseball stars] Gabby Vélez or Kelsie Whitmore,” Siegal mentioned. “There at the moment are function fashions to seem as much as and that is the reason so essential.”
