Exclusive: Kelsie Whitmore joins the WPBL
The IX: Baseball Wednesday with Howard Megdal, July 9, 2025
Happy Baseball Wednesday, presented by The BIG EAST Conference. We’ll be back to hoops next week, getting you ready for the WNBA All Star festivities. But in a development with ramifications that will reverberate for years to come in women’s baseball, Kelsie Whitmore has decided to join the Women’s Professional Baseball League. She will attend tryouts at Nationals Park in late August, and make herself available to the WPBL draft coming this fall.
Continue reading with a subscription to The IX
Get unlimited access to our exclusive coverage of a varitety of women’s sports, including our premium newsletter by subscribing today!
Already a member?
Login
Basketball Wednesday
It has been a tumultuous year for Kelsie Whitmore professionally, even by the always-uncertain existence that comes with the life of a women’s baseball player, forever building the plane as she flies it. Opportunities in men’s leagues often come with uncertainty, even outright explanations that either the chance to play comes alongside a marketing opportunity, or worse, that no matter how good she is — and she throws five pitches for strikes, plays elite defense in the outfield and presents as a five-tool hitter at the plate — there are people in positions of power who aren’t ready for her.
She is in the prime of her career. She just turned 27 this past Saturday. And as the months ticked by in 2025, she began contemplating whether her career was over.
“I started looking up nine-to-five jobs,” Whitmore told The IX in a phone interview. “I started thinking about when should I start hanging them up. Maybe I’m done, maybe I should start settling down… [but] the itch came back. And I was like, You know what? The WPBL, that could be something, and that is a new opportunity. And they want me, for me, and they want to help me grow as a player.”
Set against the experience in men’s baseball, Whitmore understands like essentially no one else, ever, just how rare an opportunity the WPBL has. And it is her choosing the WPBL — women’s professional baseball — over further opportunities in men’s leagues, or in softball, that offers the chance for a real road from dreaming of the game as a young girl to playing it at the highest level.
It is precisely the rationale for so much of the professional work done by Justine Siegal, co-founder of the WPBL and founder of Baseball For All. And Siegal, who first saw Whitmore dominate as a 15-year-old at an early Baseball For All event and told me back in 2022, when Whitmore signed with the Atlantic League’s Staten Island Ferryhawks, that Whitmore is “the one”, views this in the way Whitmore does, the way women in men’s baseball are virtually never viewed — part of the continued growth of the game. Not a sideshow.
“I feel Kelsie did the work and she deserves a pro opportunity,” Siegal texted The IX. “She is one of the best in the world! I’m just glad she will have a league that appreciates her, sees her value and is a place she can call home. Creating a pathway for Kelsie and other girls and women is just part of the work.”
That work, forever pushing against the winds built by systems from Little League to Major League Baseball to usher girls and women who love baseball into playing softball, a terrific sport but indisputably a different one, just got easier for Siegal and co-founder of the WPBL Keith Stein as they work diligently to build the WPBL in time for a summer 2026 league debut.
The IX Newsletter: Six different women’s sports in your inbox every week!
Subscribe now and join us, just $6 a month or $60 a year. It’s the women’s sports media network we all wished for, and now it’s here!
That work remains solidly on track relative to the timeline Stein and Siegal have shared with The IX dating back to last fall. The additions of Alex Hugo and Ayami Sato matter, as will many of the “other leading lights in the female baseball community”, as Stein put it to The IX back in February.
But Whitmore is a different category altogether, a player who has been described to me by many within the women’s baseball world as a signifier of the league’s seriousness and potential. It is a view Stein shares.
“I always recognized how critical it would be to have Kelsie playing in the WPBL,” Stein told The IX in an interview. “She is not only the best female player on the planet, she is the most consequential. Kelsie is a one of a kind trailblazer who has done things no one else has.
“That is why signing up Kelsie to play in the WPBL is a watershed moment for the Women’s Pro Baseball League. She will be foundational to the creation of an elite baseball platform and one of the country’s great leagues.”
Even Whitmore’s attitude about coming to tryouts reveals what drives her, why the non-baseball barriers to her ability to play the game professionally are so profoundly cruel, even as Whitmore has rationalized them as what led her to this moment. She wants to go out to Nationals Park in August and prove herself. Besides, as she pointed out: why on earth would she pass up the opportunity to play on a major league field?
This has always been the point. When offers from men’s teams this year came with more marketing duties than chances to prove herself on the field, Whitmore knew they weren’t for her. When Athletes Unlimited Softball received an investment from MLB, it didn’t pique her interest. Never mind that Whitmore had to prove herself as an elite softball player — and did — just to earn a college scholarship playing something adjacent to the game she’s loved since she was six years old.
Whitmore, like every girl or woman who plays or ever has played baseball over the past half-century, has an involuntary response to being asked, when she says she plays baseball, whether she meant to say softball.
“Now this opens the door for for us to not have to repeat ourselves saying no,” Whitmore said. “I didn’t say softball, I said baseball. My goodness, people questioning. They’re questioning us, questioning what we do. Don’t make me question what I do. I know what I do, and I want to say that sometimes, but I don’t. I don’t mean to give people dirty looks, but my natural look when they ask me that, some of my friends are like, ‘Kelsie, you just gave me the dirtiest look.’ Oh, I didn’t realize. Sorry. It’s a question that makes me completely frown immediately.”
It’s also a question that fundamentally misunderstands who Kelsie Whitmore is. This is a woman who already thinks of the WPBL of a place where she can mentor those who came just behind her. Many of those players received opportunities to play youth baseball, thanks to Baseball For All, even younger than when Whitmore joined the program. She also possesses the sense of history to understand that she is part of a long line of players who preceded her, including WPBL board member and former AAGPBL player Maybelle Blair, followed by decades of players like Siegal, who had nowhere to display their talents.
“I think she and I both have something in common in different ways,” Whitmore said of Siegal. “Where it’s like she’s had this vision to start a league and open up opportunities for women, right? And my vision has always been to be a part of a league and to be a player that can compete in that. And both of us haven’t had that, and now we’re finally coming to a place where we can have that in different roles.”
That role, too, is existential for a new league which needs to find eyeballs. Whitmore intends to play as a two-way player, giving the WPBL its Shohei Ohtani. The new league just added a hitter who can do this:
And a pitcher who can do this:
And every single woman who comes to Nationals Park next month knows that with the opportunity to try out is a chance to measure herself against Whitmore, and work for a chance to play against or alongside her in 2026.
But as usual, Whitmore’s vision extends well beyond that moment, to the promise of the WPBL for her young students — 10 girls she is giving baseball lessons to in her hometown of Temecula, California. Some drive as long as two hours each way for the chance to learn at the feet of this generation’s best women’s baseball player, one who finally has a professional home that seeks her on her own terms.
Whitmore always asks these young girls a simple question: what are your goals in baseball? And then she tells them something she wished she’d been able to hear as a child, something that would have taken “so much weight off of me”. She tells them about the WPBL.
“You have something now to work for, to look forward to,” Whitmore tells them. “You now have something that you can train and and dream about, and it’s there for you. By the time you’re my age, you’re going to have something that you can make a career. And then you can play this game forever.”
Want women’s hockey content? Subscribe to The Ice Garden!
Here at The IX, we’re collaborating with The Ice Garden to bring you Hockey Friday. And if you want the women’s hockey goodness 24/7? Well, you should subscribe to The Ice Garden now!
| Mondays: Soccer |
| By: Annie Peterson, @AnnieMPeterson, AP Women’s Soccer |
| Tuesdays: Tennis |
| By: Joey Dillon, @JoeyDillon, Freelance Tennis Writer |
| Wednesdays: Basketball |
| By: Howard Megdal, @HowardMegdal, The Next |
| Thursdays: Golf |
| By: Marin Dremock, @MDremock, The IX |
| Fridays: Hockey |
| By: @TheIceGarden, The Ice Garden |
| Saturdays: Gymnastics |
| By: Lela Moore, @runlelarun, Freelance Writer |
Written by Howard Megdal
Howard is the founder of The Next and editor-in-chief.
