Being a trailblazer in baseball is nothing new to Justine Siegal. In fact, it’s her MO.
Perhaps it’s because of her tenacity. When she hears ‘no,’ her knee-jerk reaction is to charge “full steam ahead” — as was the case when she was 16 and her coach told her she was wasting her time pursuing the same career.
“He just laughed at me and said, ‘No man will ever listen to a woman on a baseball field,’ said Siegal, now 50. “I started thinking, ‘Who’s he to decide what I’m going to do?’ So I went on this big pursuit.”
That “big pursuit” now finds Siegal as the co-founder of the Women’s Pro Baseball League, whose launch was announced last October. As part of Women’s History Month, she spoke to ESPN about the WPBL, her pioneering legacy in baseball and her passion for the sport.
“There’s something special about girls playing with other girls,” Siegal said about women’s baseball. “One, they’re no longer the girl, they’re just ballplayers. Two, there’s a lot of camaraderie. And three, there’s a pipeline that can be created. And that’s one thing that the WPBL provides: an end to that pipeline.”
