The Women’s Pro Baseball League will take the field for its first season in August. And while none of the initial four teams are based in Northeast Ohio, the league still has a connection to the region. The league’s co-founder and commissioner, Justine Siegal, discovered her love for the game in Cleveland Heights.
“Cleveland Heights is a wonderful place to live,” Siegal said. “I think there’s more opportunity via attitude, right? Like let’s provide opportunity for our kids and remove barriers.”
Growing up, Siegal would watch Cleveland baseball games alongside her dad, grandpa and brother, which fueled her love for the sport.
“My earliest memory of baseball is watching my dad celebrate after the Guardians beat the Angels and seeing how excited he was about the game and then getting signed up for T-Ball,” Siegal said. “I just remember all of it. We felt like a baseball family.”
When Siegal was 13 years old, she said she started getting criticism about being a girl playing baseball. Coaches and teammates told her to switch to softball.
“I had wonderful coaches,” she said. “It was really just when I moved into the bigger field, as they say, that I was told that it was time to switch sports.”
The criticism made Siegal dig her heels in more, she said, deciding she was sticking with baseball.
Using her childhood experience as typically being the only girl on the team, Siegal began a non-profit based in Cleveland in 2010 called Baseball For All.
Last year, Siegal’s organization teamed up with the Cleveland Guardians to host baseball clinics, specifically aimed at girls interested in playing baseball.
“It just makes total sense that would be the next that that these girls could have a future,” Siegal said. “A future that I was told didn’t exist and now it does.”
That wasn’t the first time Siegal collaborated with the Cleveland Guardians. She made history with her hometown team in 2011, when she became the first woman to pitch batting practice for a Major League team.
“The Dodgers wanted me to make history with them. I was like ‘no, Cleveland’s my team,’” Siegal said. “It was just something that was an idea I had in high school, and I was able to fulfill in my thirties.”
Though the WPBL is starting off with teams in Boston, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles, Siegal thinks a team in Cleveland would be a dream come true.
“I can just say that I would love to see a pro team of women’s baseball here in Cleveland,” Siegal said. “That would be a wonderful dream that we could make possible.”
Opening day for the WPBL is August 1.
