Four Cities Have Been Chosen for the Women’s Pro Baseball League’s Inaugural Season

By: Olivia Armstead

The Women’s Professional Baseball League has officially announced that Boston, New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco will be the cities representing its first four teams for the inaugural season. 

The league announced on Tuesday, October 21, on their social media platforms and website. 

“Each of these cities [is] storied sports cities and we can’t wait to connect with the fans who live there and baseball fans across the country,” said Justine Siegal, co-founder of the league. 

According to the official WPBL website, these four cities were chosen due to their “deep baseball roots and [passionate fanbases]”. Some other strong factors included their “market size  [and] media presence,” according to WPBL per Yahoo Sports. 

The WPBL will officially launch and begin its debut season in 2026, and will make history as the first active professional women’s baseball league since the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, which ran from 1943 to 1954, according to the AAGPBL Players Association website. 

The four teams debuting for the inaugural season will have 15 players each. 

According to CBS News and ESPN, top contenders include former Little League talent Mon’e Davis and USA Baseball’s Kelsie Whitmore. Both women are in the top 100 players after August’s tryouts held in Washington, D.C., and are expected to be eligible for selection in the WPBL draft. 

This breakthrough in women’s baseball has young aspiring female athletes jumping for joy and looking forward to what this means for their place in the industry. 

“As a softball player, it honestly feels inspiring to see women finally getting the chance to play professional baseball,” said Priscilla Michel, a softball player at Hampton University. “For so long, baseball has been seen as ‘off-limits’ for women, even though so many of us have the talent and passion for the game [...] I think it’ll motivate young girls to dream even bigger and realize that there’s space for them anywhere in athletics, not just where society tells them they belong.” 

The league has stated that its games will be played at a neutral venue in 2026, which will be revealed to the public at a later date. 

A regular-season schedule has not yet been released to the public, and it is unclear how many games each of the four teams participating will play, but it is confirmed that there will be playoffs and an all-star competition, per Yahoo Sports.