The double-edged sword of Athletes Unlimited’s new softball league for baseball — See Her, Be Her offer

Basketball Wednesday

Presented by The BIG EAST Conference

I think we have a fairly well-established record of support here at The IX for further investment in women’s sports, on both a business and moral/ethical basis. But the announcement on May 29 that MLB would be making a “strategic investment” in AU Women’s Softball — since reported as somewhere in the eight figures — set off every alarm bell for me about how in women’s sports, process and outcome are conflated or confused, with enormous consequences.

Let’s start with the history of softball itself. Little League Softball began in 1974, and you might think that’s a delightful offshoot of Title IX, signed in June 1972. But you’d be wrong! What Little League Softball actually served as was a diversionary technique which responded to Maria Pepe’s successful lawsuit to force Little League Baseball to let her play.

I’ve had the privilege of meeting and getting to know Maria. Her fight was not for herself — by the time she won, she was too old to play. But it was to help ensure that other girls and women who wished to play baseball could do so.

Softball, let us be clear, is a fantastic sport. It’s just a different sport. It isn’t baseball. Look, I love baseball and basketball, but at no point as I sit here on Tuesday night at Citizens Bank Park, watching the Phillies and Cubs, am I confused about why I’m not seeing Sabrina Ionescu bury a three-pointer.

And in more than a decade writing about women in baseball, I have heard countless times about just how hard that struggle is — that a half-century of entrenched power structures pushing girls and women from baseball to softball has created resentment. You won’t hear from these folks, especially now, because no one wants to denigrate investment in women’s sports, and what’s more, there’s every chance that AU Softball will become a dominant force in allowing women who excel at baseball to make a living instead playing softball. At the very least, it is a significant option no one capable of slashing line drives into the gap or tracking them down wants to alienate. I’ve talked to many, but I won’t put them on the spot here.

The reasons given by MLB and AU alike when asked the question why softball over baseball are nothing less than echoes of the choice — neglect — MLB has made for years about girls in baseball. While Justine Siegal has been busy building Baseball For All, a pipeline introducing girls to the game and giving them opportunities, it has been an article of faith for the girls and women’s baseball community that MLB need only to turn a small portion of its billions of dollars in annual revenue toward helping that development push and the ability of girls to play baseball would change virtually overnight.

It’s also always struck me as a comically idiotic decision by MLB not to do this, since the great majority of young boys who play baseball do not become major leaguers, but instead serve as MLB’s future customer base. Girls baseball would be no different, but MLB is constitutionally incapable of spending a dollar today, even if it could earn them $20 over the long-term.

So Siegal’s had to bootstrap this thing. And she’s made remarkable progress. I’ve seen the players through her system start young, eventually reaching college, even the professional ranks. A primary reason I am so optimistic about the WPBL is Siegal’s early involvement.

And now, as that league ramps up toward a 2026 start date, MLB’s backed a league that threatens to siphon talent out of a pipeline that already suffered from a half-century of active sabotage.

I gotta be honest: it’s hard to get excited about that!

MLB’s Tony Reagins was asked, point-blank, why softball and not baseball.

“I think it’s more long-term thing,” Reagins said of women’s baseball. “The talent pool, the infrastructure, the organizations on the softball side was ahead of the baseball side.” Hearing MLB proclaim this — an outcome predetermined by a lack of MLB investment! — at the exact moment it is investing the kind of money that could alter the trajectory of women’s baseball forever was hard for a lot of people in the women’s baseball space to take.

And lest you think MLB looked carefully at the two sports and chose the one that its own employees don’t play, fear not: Mike Mazzeo of Sports Business Journal reports that MLB’s previous consideration before investing in AU Softball was… creating a softball league of its own.

MLB was not entirely absent from the women’s baseball space, particularly over the past few years. As trailblazers like Rachel Balkovec, Veronica Alvarez and Kim Ng occupied spots previously off-limits to women — Ng, most famously, as general manager of the Miami Marlins — programs like MLB Develops began to gather steam.

Ng spoke to a group of girls at an MLB Develops event in 2022, and said this:

“Some of you have been told you’re not supposed to play baseball, right? You’re not allowed to play baseball. You shouldn’t play baseball, you can’t play baseball. Because why?”

The chorus answered. “We’re girls.” Kim went on to explain to them that simply by playing baseball, they were an implicit answer to that challenge. And that challenge, as any girl or woman in baseball will tell you, is usually formulated this way: “Why aren’t you playing softball?”

I don’t begrudge Ng anything that’s happened since. The Marlins foolishly let her get away after she built a playoff team in 2023, and haven’t approached the postseason since. Ng signed on, first as an advisor at AU, and now as their commissioner of a shiny new softball league, one with MLB investment and a place where more women will get the opportunity to play professional sports. Kim Ng should have been an MLB GM 20 years ago and frankly still should be one now. And if she had? We probably don’t see her make the connections within MLB which will absolutely hamper the ability of girls’ baseball to get attention and buy-in.

Colleagues of mine I respect, like Lindsey Adler and Hannah Keyser, have written about why this is such a great opportunity on balance. But my goodness, if women’s sports history is a process of hurry up and wait, who has had to wait longer than the people who have built and played women’s baseball? They have had to do it themselves while every entrenched body with power in the space is actively working against them.

MLB does not lack for resources. A forward-thinking organization that treats softball as a “yes, and” product after baseball would be seeding its future fandom in multiple ways, an argument that is economic, not just ethical. A forward-thinking organization would recognize that yes, even girls can tell the difference between baseball and softball, and gaining the allegiance of both groups will pay off down the road. A forward-thinking organization wouldn’t view the WPBL as something to counter-program, but would instead welcome the effort, would have built its own a long time ago, frankly. A forward-thinking organization which had the foresight to start a women’s league out of the hype and success of A League of Their Own would now be presiding over a league older and more established than the very entities MLB says it views as proof it can succeed with AU Softball, such as the WNBA and NWSL.

Then again, an organization which cannot even recognize the competitive advantage the minor leagues provides it — an existing structure advertising its game to markets all over the country which MLB has reduced in size once and hopes to do so again — cannot be expected to realize the value in tomorrow’s customers playing its own game instead of (or, again, in addition to!) a related but different one.

And so, in this moment of triumph for softball — and truly, there are countless people I know and have covered who will derive the benefit of it, will taste the sweetness of playing professionally, within an AU structure that I remain bullish on in ways large and small across women’s sports — it is hard for me, just as for so many in girls and women’s baseball, to enjoy the sweetness of the fruit as we consider the tree it came from. It turned out to be too late for Maria Pepe. It’s been too late for countless girls and women in baseball since.

I wish AU Softball well. But when is it Maria Pepe’s turn to bat?

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See Her, Be Her offer

In lieu of links and Five at The IX this week, I’m going to urge you to go watch See Her, Be Her instead, Jean Fruth’s incredible film on women’s baseball which premiered last year. It’s $2.99 to rent. Email me the receipt at Editors@thenexthoops.com if you rent it, along with your Paypal or Venmo, and I’ll send $3 to the first 100 people who respond. Here’s the link to it on Amazon Prime.

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