Brittany Apgar is playing professional baseball later this summer in the Women’s Pro Baseball League with the Los Angeles team. Ahead of opening day, she took to social media with her mission that commenters dubbed “protect the nub.”
With a video where she explained how she can’t hit a pitch over 80 MPH or the tip of the nub of her arm splits open, she asked for suggestions on how to prevent that from happening or ways to protect it. The support and response to the video were not what she expected.
“As someone who has grown up on social media as a disabled person from when the internet was not so friendly, I feel like my biggest fear was posting my disability on social media because I feel like I haven’t grown out of what Instagram used to be in 2016,” Apgar told The IX Sports.
The centerfielder, whose Instagram bio says “personality 10/10, hands 1/2,” said she had worked on the project for about a month before she took it to social media. After some friends suggested seeking help from others, she posted her first video and received dozens of comments with ideas.
For Apgar, the positive reception was encouraging, especially for someone who felt like she had to hide her disability or work 10 times harder.
“Especially when I was growing up,” she said, “it was like my disability always felt like a liability to the team.”
This hasn’t been the case with the WPBL, where she’s received tremendous support in her efforts to find protective gear and quelled any fears she had about being seen as a liability for Los Angeles. An investor for the league even helped Apgar get the first prototype of a protective gear piece developed ahead of the Cooperstown Military Classic. The game ended up getting rained out before her first plate appearance, but she later got to test it out in a game environment with Wounded Warriors.
“The WPBL is a community and we want to do all we can for our players,” league commissioner Justine Siegal said in an email statement. “Brit is an elite baseball player, but she’s an even better person. I’ve known her since she was a teenager and I’m so proud of her and what she accomplished.”
The camaraderie in women’s sports is something Apgar noted as a system of support. They can compete on the field, but they’re all still friends at the end of the day, and now with an opportunity to play at the highest level, the vibe remains the same — they all still have community because of the journey they all took, a lot of them together, to get to the WPBL.
Recently, Apgar flew to New York City, with the support of the WPBL, to meet with the Hospital for Special Surgery to be fitted for a prosthetic to be made before the season begins. She said that league investors helped her get connected with the Hospital for Special Surgery. Momentum from the video might be dying down, she said, but the support keeps growing.
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If there’s one thing the support has shown Apgar, it’s that she can see more acceptance for disabilities and disabled people on the horizon. The level of accessibility in all spaces, especially in sports, keeps growing, and she thinks that’s for the benefit of future generations.
“I think the thing that really pops into my head is that someone had mentioned that future generations of athletes with disabilities, or just people with disabilities — we get to show that this world is more accommodating for them now,” Apgar said.
“And even if it’s not accommodating yet, the willingness that it is to accommodate now is just … I wish we had this when we were growing up, and it really heals me because I know that kids nowadays aren’t going to have to go through some of the same problems.”
