#28 Why softball?

Plus: The kind of research we like to see (hugs, splashdowns)

Good morning! It’s Hannah and we have a softball-centric newsletter today.

My relationship to sports other than baseball has ebbed and flowed over the course of my life. I was a general Philly sports fan who gravitated toward baseball as a kid; I doubled down on that preference as it became more of a professional interest until it was exclusive; then I was an all-sports blogger at Deadspin, who relished the chance to focus on baseball but was equally drawn to non-mainstream sports like cricket and competitive marbles; then I had no time to think about anything but baseball from the broadest direction of the game to the daily minutia of 1,200 players.

One of the unexpected side effects of loosening that obsessive focus just a little (because of uh, losing my job) has been noticing other sports a little more. From a slight remove, I’m better able to take a wide-lens view of which storylines in baseball stand out — and also notice how they look in the broader sports landscape. I’m more interested in the parallels between I know and the analogous congruent cultures of other sports. And in a more literal sense, I don’t feel quite so beholden to only consuming baseball (because you can literally never keep up. They’re playing that shit constantly).

Softball is not exactly baseball — more on that below — but it seems pretty cool and like it’s about to have a moment. Maybe I’ll be a bandwagon fan.

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MLB is investing in softball. I’ve thought a lot about why it wouldn’t be women’s baseball instead

By Hannah Keyser

Yesterday, Major League Baseball announced what is reportedly an eight-figure investment in the Athletes Unlimited Softball League (AUSL), which is launching this summer with Kim Ng as commissioner. AU has its own history with a distinct player-forward individual tournament model that will that also take place after the inaugural softball season but the upshot here is pretty simple: MLB is partnering with a professional women’s sports league.

Rob Manfred told Sports Business Journal, “We went into the process kind of with two tracks in mind: Are we going to start up and run a league or are we going to make an investment and partner with somebody?”

From a sports business and media landscape, the decision to partner with AUSL is an interesting vote of confidence in the organization. But to me, that quote is telling because Manfred is making it clear that the league is not simply seizing an opportunity that arose or responding to an overture made by AUSL. MLB proactively sought to establish a softball presence. Or at least, some sort of women’s bat-and-ball sport presence. I wonder whether they considered women’s baseball. Even if they did, they likely still would have landed on softball.

via MLB’s press release

In January, I wrote for Front Office Sports about whether professional leagues for women’s baseball and softball can coexist. Because women’s baseball is buzzier, the story skewed more toward the forthcoming Women’s Professional Baseball League and how the “biggest hurdle to success may be its closest kindred, which has a head start on talent and audience.” That is to say: softball.

Baseball and softball are not inherently mutually exclusive along gender lines. But the modern reality is that they’re treated as such — the NCAA does not offer women’s baseball and the Olympics pair the sports so that Games with baseball for men feature softball for women.

Among people who want to support women’s sports, the dynamic between baseball and softball is nuanced and a little fraught. Women who play baseball or want to play baseball are justified in their frustration that often they’re pushed toward softball instead. Sometimes, someone will go so far as to assume a woman or girl was mistaken about her own interest or experience.

“People say, ‘Oh, do you mean softball?’” former Mets executive Liz Benn told me for the story. “Like, no, I mean the sport I said.”

That kind of adversity is a compelling origin story for the elite bat-and-ball female athletes who overcome the stereotypes to play baseball, often with boys and men. But the reality is, the opportunities — like college scholarships and the chance to compete with their peers — do inspire most girls to choose softball, either at first or eventually.

And because of the sheer participation disparity, the talent pool in softball is simply far greater than women’s baseball, at least for now. Even the women I spoke to for the story who work in baseball, like Benn and Veronica Alvarez, the coordinator of player development in Latin America for the A’s and the manager of USA Baseball women’s team, said that their biggest concerns for the WPBL was that there literally won’t be enough talent for a compelling product.

These quotes didn’t make the final cut, but Alvarez compared it to the chicken-or-the-egg conundrum: without a robust pipeline of amateur talent, can a women’s pro baseball league survive? Without a pro league to aspire to, will the pipeline ever be built? “I really believe we need the egg before the chicken,” Alvarez said. “But maybe the chicken forces the egg.”

But that pipeline already exists for softball.

In 2022–2023, 21,646 women played college softball while reportedly eight women played college baseball, only one at the Division I level. The same skew exists in high school; in the 2023–2024 school year, 345,451 girls played fast-pitch softball, while only 1,372 girls played baseball.

And increasingly, people are watching softball too.

The Women’s Baseball World Cup finals in Canada last summer, the final game between USA and Japan drew 2,121 fans. Meanwhile the final game of the Women’s College World Series—softball’s pinnacle event outside the Olympics, and one that regularly challenges or bests the Men’s College World Series for eyeballs—drew 12,324 fans in person. Television viewership of that game, which aired on ESPN, peaked at 2.5 million viewers, an all-time high and 24% up from 2023.

And yet, it’s not hard to figure out why, historically, people find softball less compelling — or at least click-y in a headline sense. All those women participants make it less cool precisely because it’s culturally entrenched as girly.

I grew up in the ‘90s and aughts, when it felt like feminism in sports meant imagining how badass it would be if a girl beat the boys at their own game. Cue: Anything you can do, I can do better. There’s still an outsized focus on women who are “firsts” in some male-dominated space, but increasingly — and here I’m directly referencing the WNBA and the NWSL — women’s sports are commanding media and fan attention in their own right.

I often say that the Olympics are proof that if you introduce women and men athletes at the same time on a relatively even playing field, the public is perfectly capable of emotionally investing in women’s sports. That’s not to say there’s no sexism at the Olympics, but every two years we watch a whole bunch of athletes we’re largely unfamiliar with compete in sports that we largely don’t follow and the women are just as likely to emerge as household names. And so it seems likely that part of what’s tipping the viability of women’s bat-and-ball sports towards softball is the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles, which are set to feature baseball for men and softball for women.

I spoke to Ng for the Front Office Sports story and a point that didn’t make the final piece was her crediting the 1996 Games in Atlanta — when Team USA won gold in the first Olympics to feature softball as a medal sport — as a turning point that kicked off what has now been 30 years of growth for the game to get to this point.

That growth has been happening steadily ever since, even as it’s been largely away from the spotlight of mainstream media attention. So while Ng said she’s “quite amazed” that the caliber of play in softball now approaches that of men’s baseball, she absolutely can believe it.

In fact: “I'm not surprised at all,” she said.

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Want to get excited about softball?

The AUSL launches June 7, but if you want to start watching softball literally yesterday (that’s when it started) the 2025 Women's College World Series is happening right now.

Friend of the ‘stack and Baltimore Orioles broadcaster Kevin Brown will be doing play-by-play on ESPN for the fifth year. He was (rightfully!) excited to see softball get a shoutout in our last issue and I (rightfully!) felt a little ashamed that said shoutout was in the form of a funny names tweet and not something more substantive.

I gave my substantive thoughts above, but I don’t know that I’m converting a bunch fans by musing on the whole culture’s internalized misogyny so here’s Kevin’s much more compelling pitch of who to watch and why to watch softball this summer: