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You read it right. There is a women’s professional baseball league forming as you read this, and much of the foundation is being poured right now. There’s currently 4 teams set up in different cities and ready to host a team. Naturally, these womens professional baseball cities are all big, and are known to be baseball towns the way it is. New York, Boston, San Francisco, and Los Angeles to start.
Mo’Ne Davis The Most Notable To Represent The Brand
Who doesn’t remember Mo’Ne Davis in her Little League World Series run? “You play ball like a girl!” but…literally. Mo’ne Davis was a star pitcher for the East squad in Pennsylvania where she became the first female to win a Little League World Series game and the first female to pitch a shutout in the tournament. She was highly marketed, as one would expect, and then went on to play collegiate softball at Hampton University.
Mo’ne Davis was much better at baseball in her youth than she ended up being at softball in her young adulthood. She slashed a disappointing .219/.298/.272 *SLG in 2022 where she called it quits. To be fair to her, her specialty was always pitching, and it’s a much different game over there playing softball than it is baseball. Might she make a return to fame with this new league coming out? We’ll see.
According to this article on The Athletic, Mo’Ne Davis is one of the only notable athletes to try out for this league that’s coming in 2026. There was, however, 600 or more women that showed up to try out. Major League Baseball, as we know, fields 26 men per roster, but one would assume it could be less for this women’s league that’s trying to make its way.
Women’s Professional Baseball History
The history of women’s professional baseball in the United States traces its roots to the mid-19th century, when the first organized women’s team, the Vassar Resolutes, formed at Vassar College in 1866, marking the sport’s early adoption in women’s colleges and later through “bloomer girl” barnstorming teams that toured in the late 1800s and early 1900s, often disguising male players to skirt gender norms. The pinnacle of organized professional play arrived during World War II, when chewing gum magnate Philip K. Wrigley founded the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL) in 1943 to fill the void left by men serving overseas, starting with four teams in the Midwest and expanding to ten by 1948.
Over its 12-season run through 1954, the league showcased more than 500 players in a hybrid softball-baseball format that evolved to full overhand pitching, enforcing strict feminine dress codes and etiquette classes to appeal to audiences, while delivering high-caliber competition that drew crowds rivaling minor league men’s games. The league folded amid postwar baseball’s resurgence, the advent of television, and shifting social attitudes, though its legacy endures through films like A League of Their Own and ongoing efforts to integrate women into professional baseball, including rare instances of female players in men’s minor leagues since the 1970s.
Sports Illustrated writer, Emma Baccellieri wrote this awesome article on Mo’ne Davis and we think you should check it out.
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