Finally, a new professional league of their own for female baseball players

3 months ago 18

The 1992 movie A League of Their Own catapulted the little-known All-American Girls Professional Baseball League on to the world stage. But by the time Madonna, Geena Davis and Tom Hanks re-enacted America’s first professional women’s baseball league for the silver screen, the real thing had long ceased to exist.

Until now. For the first time since the All-American Girls league shut down in 1954, a professional league for women has been established in the US. Among the inaugural draftees for the Women’s Professional Baseball League are nine Australians vying for the chance to play for teams in four of the nation’s biggest cities – New York, Boston, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

Ticara Geldenhuis at her childhood club, the Comets, in Jannali, NSW.

Ticara Geldenhuis began playing baseball because of her dad, Trevor, whose father had been advised that the easiest way to keep your children out of trouble was to get them involved in your own hobbies. Regardless of their gender, Trevor’s children would play baseball.

Now 24, Geldenhuis’ earliest memories are of her dad playing: “I was pretty much born next to a baseball field,” she said. “My mum took me down there when I was only a few days old.”

Not everyone shared her father’s opinions on female participation in baseball.

“I grew up playing with the boys, and the boys would always use it against me, like, ‘Oh, you’ll never be a professional baseball player, but I will be’,” she said. “When I was younger, I just remember thinking it’s so unfair, I just couldn’t really wrap my head around it.

Ticara Geldenhuis is one of three women from NSW and nine from across Australia to be part of the inaugural WPBL draft.

The new league was founded by Justine Siegal, the first woman to coach a Major League Baseball team. It will be the first professional women’s league in the US since the All-American Girls was created to keep baseball parks afloat while the men fought in WWII. It ended in 1954 when funding ran dry.

The inaugural draft for the league will take place on November 20 (US time), when 120 players will be selected from more than 600. The first pitches will be thrown next year.

By the time Geldenhuis saw the league announced on social media, she had already been representing NSW for 10 years, played for Australia in a World Cup, and played professionally in Japan – home to the most competitive women’s league in the world. She’d begun to wonder what was left for her to achieve.

“You’re training so hard and working so hard, and you just sometimes think, ‘What am I working for?’” she said. “Like playing for Australia, and hopefully, I get to play more and stay healthy, but there’s nothing greater at that point. Now there is, and it’s exciting – it’s almost like I’ve got a breath of fresh air.”

Geldenhuis will watch the draft over a livestream from her couch at home, with her dad sitting next to her.

Sisters Claire (30) and Elodie O’Sullivan (32), meanwhile, have spent their entire careers in the game fielding comparisons to A League of Their Own – for many, their only reference point when it comes to women’s baseball. Claire has even been nicknamed “Bev” after a tall and lanky character in the movie to whom she bears a resemblance.

“I think people recognise the movie and definitely draw connections to the movie as well, which is good, but I do also think hopefully some things have changed between the movie and reality,” she said.

In the original All-American Girls league, players had to wear skirts, were obliged to wear make-up and were made to attend charm school to learn how to dress and speak like ladies.

But worse than rules on how to look while playing was not being allowed to play at all. In 1952, as the league was ending, a formal ban was put in place preventing women from playing in either minor or major league baseball. It was lifted the year A League of Our Own was released in 1992.

“Hopefully, this is just the start of women becoming equal with men in the sport because we’re far from that,” Claire said, despite progress since.

Both Claire and Elodie have represented Australia and, like Geldenhuis, played in the All Japan Women’s Baseball Championship. Both are excited at the prospect of helping create a reference point for women’s baseball.

“It’ll be really cool to see things shift,” Elodie said, “Hopefully, in a few years time, people aren’t associating women’s baseball with A League of Their Own, which was a long time ago, they can associate it with this new WPBL.”