Justine Siegal, the first woman to coach an MLB team, is a co-founder of the new Women's ... More Professional Baseball League (Photo by Norm Hall/Getty Images) Getty Images For the first time in decades, women will have the chance to try out for a professional baseball league. The Women’s Pro Baseball League (WPBL) has announced its inaugural tryouts, offering athletes the opportunity to compete for a place on one of the league’s six teams. League games will start in 2026. Professional baseball hasn’t been available to women since the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL) was created in 1943, when male players like Yogi Berra and Joe DiMaggio left to serve in World War II. The league’s story was later fictionalized in the 1992 film and the 2022 Amazon series, both titled A League of Their Own. The disbanding of the AAGPBL in 1954 left women with no opportunities in professional baseball until now. The WPBL is the vision of Justine Siegal, the first woman to coach in Major League Baseball, and entrepreneur Keith Stein. WPBL tryouts will run from August 22 to 25 at Nationals Park and the Nationals Youth Baseball Academy in Washington, D.C. Over 600 women have registered to compete for 150 spots. Selected players will be drafted by teams in October, and the league’s first season is scheduled to launch in the spring of 2026, with teams based in the Northeast. Siegal predicts the WPBL will create new opportunities for younger girls who want to pursue baseball. “Once the WPBL launches next year, there'll be even greater exposure to the joy of women playing baseball, and that is going to trickle down into more girls’ baseball teams forming all around the country and frankly internationally as well,” she says. For Siegal, the desire to help girls and women play baseball is personal. “When I was about 12 or 13, I was told I should go play softball, because I'm a girl, and that's the day I decided I'd play baseball forever. So for me, the more people tried to take the game away from me, the more I loved it,” she explains. Even for girls who start out playing baseball, most opportunities disappear after they age out of Little League. Many are steered into softball and told, like Siegal, that baseball is not an option. There are no high school baseball programs for girls, forcing them to try out for boys’ teams or search for club teams. In 2023, only 1,462 girls played high school baseball, compared to 471,701 boys. Similarly, at the college level, a few schools have women’s club teams, but otherwise, women are typically required to play on men’s teams. According to the NCAA, only nine women played college baseball last year. MORE FOR YOU Despite the limited playing options, women are playing baseball at the highest levels. In 2022, Kelsey Whitmore became the first woman to sign with an MLB partner league, the Staten Island FerryHawks of the Atlantic League. Also in 2022, Olivia Pichardo made the team at Brown University and became the first woman to play Division 1 baseball. In addition, the U.S. Women’s National Team took home the Silver Medal in the most recent Women’s Baseball World Cup. While the number of female baseball players remains small, Siegal says that the WPBL will recruit players from around the world. Discussing the players signed up for tryouts, she explained, “A good percentage of them are playing for their national teams, whether that's here in the U.S. or Canada or Venezuela or Korea—there's a lot of interest.” In 2025, it’s surprising that women are still being steered away from participation in any sport. Professional women’s leagues now exist in soccer (NWSL), basketball (WNBA), tackle football (WFA), ice hockey (PWHL), and rugby (WER), all sports arguably more physically aggressive than baseball. Yet baseball, America’s pastime, has had no professional opportunities for women since the 1950s. Stein says he’s “perplexed” as to why it’s taken this long for women’s pro baseball to become a reality. When discussing the WPBL startup costs, he noted, “The funny thing is, it’s not so many millions that this shouldn’t have been done 100 times already.” (Although he wouldn’t reveal the first-year costs, he says they’re between $5 and $30 million). Each of the WPBL’s teams will have a player salary budget of $95,000 to cover their 25-player rosters. The league will also provide housing during the season and offer players a share of sponsorship revenue. The regular season games will span four weeks, followed by an all-star showcase and two weeks of playoffs. Teams that make it to the final round will play 18 games. Even after accounting for the shorter season, the WPBL salaries are still clearly nowhere near the multimillion-dollar contracts that many male MLB players receive. Women’s professional sports typically have smaller budgets and lower player salaries, largely because they are less profitable. But that is beginning to change. On Monday, the WNBA announced that it will expand by three teams, with each new franchise paying an expansion fee of $250 million. In addition, the Golden State Valkyries team was recently valued at $500 million, the highest valuation ever in the WNBA and women’s sports. And, Forbes now estimates the average team value in the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) is $134 million. Even though women’s pro basketball and soccer leagues have yet to turn a profit, it’s clear that investors are predicting long-term growth. Stein predicts the WPBL will follow a similar path. Still, some argue that women’s sports will never match the popularity of men’s sports because fans prefer the speed and strength of male athletes. When I asked Siegal about that belief, she responded, “Those people haven’t watched women’s sports.” Editorial StandardsReprints & Permissions