Being a trailblazer in baseball is nothing new to Justine Siegal. In fact, it’s her MO.

Perhaps it’s because of her tenacity. When she hears ‘no,’ her knee-jerk reaction is to charge “full steam ahead” — as was the case when she was 16 and her coach told her she was wasting her time pursuing the same career.

“He just laughed at me and said, ‘No man will ever listen to a woman on a baseball field,’ said Siegal, now 50. “I started thinking, ‘Who’s he to decide what I’m going to do?’ So I went on this big pursuit.”

That “big pursuit” now finds Siegal as the co-founder of the Women’s Pro Baseball League, whose launch was announced last October. As part of Women’s History Month, she spoke to ESPN about the WPBL, her pioneering legacy in baseball and her passion for the sport.

“There’s something special about girls playing with other girls,” Siegal said about women’s baseball. “One, they’re no longer the girl, they’re just ballplayers. Two, there’s a lot of camaraderie. And three, there’s a pipeline that can be created. And that’s one thing that the WPBL provides: an end to that pipeline.”

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MLB lifted its ban of women participating on major league teams or their affiliates in 1992. Siegal became the first female coach for a professional team in 2009 and also the first to be hired in the majors six years later. Not only did she prove her old coach wrong, she also opened the floodgates: An all-time high 43 women coached MLB teams in 2023.

“I felt like I’d earned my spot, but I also knew that it was kind of amazing to be there at the same time,” she said.

Play ball, WPBL style

Siegal is currently focusing her energy into the 2026 WPBL launch, working closely with league co-founder Keith Stein, a lawyer and businessman who saw value in her legacy. She said she welcomes the challenge of building a league from scratch and is grateful that there are examples to follow.

“It’s very heartwarming to be in an opportunity to build a path for others,” she said

The WPBL, Siegal said, is “building off the momentum of the women’s pro leagues that are before us” and the “well-deserved moment” that women’s sports are enjoying.

The first WPBL season is scheduled to run from late May through late August of 2026. League officials are planning on a regular-season schedule of about 40 games per team, followed by playoffs to determine the champion.

The league is in the process of selecting owners for the six inaugural franchises, which will be located mainly in the Northeastern U.S. The goal, Siegal said, is to identify potential owners who have worked in women’s professional sports and understand the success of a franchise such as the NWSL’s Angel City, which last July became the most valuable women’s sports team in the world.

The WPBL will fill its rosters, with salaries “more comparable to minor league baseball,” via scout camps this spring and a draft later this year. Close to 700 players registered to participate via the WPBL player portal in the first week after the launch announcement, according to the league.

“I think there’s an element of knowing who are the best players and there’s also that excitement in that you want to find that diamond in a rough that you didn’t know about,” Siegal said.

Despite the sponsorships the WPBL has secured and the recent spike in investments in women’s sports — particularly in basketball and soccer — one initial challenge for Siegal is how relatively new women’s baseball is to the landscape.

“Softball is a bigger sport in Mexico and Latin America,” she said. “There’s still an idea that boys play baseball and girls play softball.”

Another challenge is finding national broadcast and streaming deals to engage with fans worldwide.

“The next step [is] really understanding that resources is such a key part of not just developing pro sports, but getting girls playing, getting girls leading, getting them coaching,” she said.

Building a foundation

Former All-American Girls Professional Baseball League pitcher Maybelle Blair, who turned 98 in January, is an honorary chair on the WPBL’s advisory board. She helped inspire the film “A League of Their Own” with her participation in the AAGPBL, which ran from 1943 to 1954.

“There’s definitely a lot of respect and also an obligation or desire to make [former AAGPBL players] proud of this league and to launch it before they all pass and let them know that it’s still going,” Siegal said. “We’re going to keep it going.”

The rest of the board includes team Japan pitcher and six-time World Cup winner Ayami Sato, former Arizona Diamondbacks executive and chief legal officer Nona Lee, former ESPN CMO and espnW founder Laura Gentile, communications strategist Kate Childs Graham, International Women’s Baseball Center founder/CEO Kat Williams, Women in Baseball Research Committee at Society for American Baseball Research chair Leslie Heaphy, and United Women’s Sports NIL Agency owner Digit Murphy.

The 35-year-old Sato is widely considered the best female baseball pitcher in the world. This year, the right-hander will become the first woman to play on a men’s professional baseball team in Canada when she suits up for the Intercounty Baseball League’s Toronto Maple Leafs, which are owned by Stein.

“She’s one of those people that has made the game grow bigger in her country,” Siegal said. “I remember when she first started and now she’s in her 30s. She has teammates who watched her when she was young, when they were young and now they’re on the same team as her.”

In addition, the WPBL has two special advisors on hand. Team USA Women’s Baseball star Alex Hugo will be in charge of player development and recruiting, and former Toronto Blue Jays manager Cito Gaston, the first Black manager in MLB to win a World Series with titles in 1992 and 1993, will lend his expertise.

Siegal considers that true baseball fans have space in their hearts for the WPBL.

“It’s not just because women are playing,” she said. “It’s good competition. It’s fun. It’s eating hot dogs. We want them to come out [to the park] for our games.”

Going to bat for equity

Siegal began to build her vision of girls’ and women’s baseball started two decades ago, when in 2003 she created the Sparks, an all-girls baseball team that competed against boys. It was the only girls team that participated regularly in one of the largest boys’ baseball tournaments in the country, played at Cooperstown Dreams Park near the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

Six years later, while working as an assistant at Springfield College, she made history as the first woman to coach a professional men’s baseball team with her position as the first-base coach of the Brockton Rox of the independent Can-Am League. The Rox won a franchise-record 56 games that season, best in the league, before losing out to the eventual champion Quebec Capitales in the first round of the playoffs.

In 2010, Siegal founded Baseball For All, a national non-profit that provides girls with the opportunities and resources to coach, play, and lead in baseball.

The following year, Siegal became the first woman to throw batting practice for an MLB team — and for none other than for her beloved Cleveland Indians during spring training.

“My dream was to play for the now Cleveland Guardians,” she said. “I went to all the games. I slept with my baseball bat right next to me. I would wake up and I would take swings in my bedroom and go back to bed. That was for sure my dream.”

Her ground-breaking MLB hiring came four years later, when in 2015 she became a guest instructor for the Oakland Athletics in their instructional league.

Siegal’s list of firsts isn’t limited to the U.S. She is also the first woman to coach professionally in leagues in Japan and Mexico.

“I definitely felt like I made history, because I worked so hard just to get to that point … but it also just felt gratifying,” she said.

For the moment, Siegal said she is embracing the “humbling” role of clearing a path for girls and women that she did not have available to her.

“I dreamt of being Orel Hershiser, Nolan Ryan. But now you can dream of being Sato or [fellow women’s baseball stars] Gabby Vélez or Kelsie Whitmore,” Siegal said. “There are now role models to look up to and that’s so important.”