The thing to understand about 23-year-old Kelsie Whitmore’s path to signing a contract with the Atlantic League’s Staten Island FerryHawks—the highest level attained by a woman in professional baseball in more than a generation—is that there is no path. Not for women to play baseball.
From a young age, girls are asked, then gently nudged, then usually forced to switch from baseball to softball. Only this year did a women’s collegiate baseball championship, created by Justine Siegal’s Baseball for All, even exist, and the sport at the college level is in its infancy. A game that requires reps to succeed has long denied them to women, a self-fulfilling prophecy keeping them from advancing on the field.
And yet: Siegal said she knew Whitmore would do important things in baseball the first time she saw Whitmore pitch back in 2014, as a 15-year-old at a Baseball for All tournament.
