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New girls’s baseball league names 97-year-old AAGPBL alum honorary chair on advisory board


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Former baseball pitcher Maybelle Blair might be an honorary chair on the advisory board of the Ladies’s Skilled Baseball League, which final month introduced plans to launch in 2026 as a six-team circuit for feminine gamers.

The 97-year-old Blair, who helped encourage the baseball movie “A League of Their Personal” along with her play within the All-American Ladies Skilled Baseball League, will chair a board of girls who’ve labored in sports activities and enterprise. The listing features a chief from the upstart Skilled Ladies’s Hockey League, a longtime ESPN government, and baseball pitcher and six-time World Cup winner Ayami Sato.

“We now have been ready 70 years for a girls’s skilled baseball league,” Blair mentioned in a launch from the WPBL, “and it means a lot for the women. It’ll be our nice alternative and we should reap the benefits of it now.”

The WPBL aspires to be the primary professional league for girls because the All-American Ladies Skilled Baseball League dissolved in 1954. Co-founders Justine Siegal, who’s the primary lady to teach for an MLB staff, and Keith Stein, a lawyer and businessman, each mentioned the league’s objective is to ascertain a strong girls’s baseball tradition within the U.S.

In preparation for its first season, the league will maintain a scouting camp in spring 2025, adopted by a participant draft later within the yr. The league plans to play a daily season, playoffs and championship in the summertime of 2026.

Blair plans to throw the primary pitch within the WPBL opener.

“I’ve a lot respect for Maybelle and the entire All-American Ladies Skilled Baseball League gamers,” Siegal mentioned in a launch. “The All-American Ladies Skilled Baseball League set a precedent on what’s attainable in girls’s skilled baseball.

“It is very important me, and the WPBL, that we honor the legacy and impression of their League whereas constructing a brand new future for at this time’s gamers who dream of enjoying skilled baseball.”

The remainder of the board consists of Nona Lee (former Arizona Diamondbacks chief authorized officer), Laura Gentile (former ESPN CMO and founding father of espnW), Kate Childs Graham (speechwriter/communications strategist), Dr. Kat Williams (Founder/CEO of Worldwide Ladies’s Baseball Middle), Dr. Leslie Heaphy (chair of Society of American Baseball Analysis’s (SABR) Ladies in Baseball Committee) and Digit Murphy (President of Toronto Six hockey staff).

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AP MLB: https://apnews.com/hub/MLB


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The Impartial


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Alanis Thames , 2024-12-03 18:00:00