Women in Baseball: The AAGPBL, Women in the Dugout and Women in Umpiring
How women have played, coached, owned, run and umpired baseball, from the 1943 to 1954 All-American Girls Professional Baseball League to the front-office and dugout firsts of recent years.
Women have played baseball for as long as the game has been organized, and the history of how often they were allowed to is a history of closed doors and side doors. For a dozen years in the 1940s and 1950s, a professional league of women drew crowds across the Midwest. For most of the rest of the century, the professional game was closed to them by custom and sometimes by an explicit ban, and women who wanted to be part of it found other ways in: owning a club, running a front office, keeping score, teaching the game to children, and fighting for the right to umpire.
This article follows that history in three parts. The first is the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, which ran from 1943 to 1954 and is the best-known women's league in the sport's history. The second covers the women who got into the dugout, the front office and the owner's box. The third covers umpiring, where the progress has been the slowest. Throughout, the article sticks to events that are well documented and says plainly where details are disputed.
Before 1943: women on the field when no one was counting
Women played baseball long before there was a league for them. Colleges for women fielded teams in the 1860s, and Vassar College is the one most often cited. By the late 1800s, traveling teams known as Bloomer Girls teams toured small towns, often playing against local men's teams and sometimes carrying a man or two on their own rosters. Those clubs were a form of entertainment, and they were also a demonstration that women could play the game competently.
A few women reached organized professional baseball in the nineteenth century. Lizzie Arlington is the name usually given for a woman who pitched in a minor-league game in 1898. Maud Nelson, who began as a pitcher in the 1890s, went on to manage and eventually own women's teams, a career that spanned several decades. Neither reached the major leagues, and the national game had no place for them.
One of the best-known stories of the next generation is that of Jackie Mitchell, a teenage pitcher who signed with the Chattanooga Lookouts and in an exhibition game against the New York Yankees in 1931 struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. The story is widely told. What is less clear is how much of the occasion was a promotion, whether the hitters were trying, and what happened to her contract afterward; accounts differ, and a careful writer reports the strikeouts and leaves the interpretation open.
The pattern repeated in 1952, when Eleanor Engle was signed to a contract by a Class B club in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The contract was voided, and baseball's officials responded with a rule against signing women. The significance of the episode is not that she played, since she did not, but that the door to the men's professional game was formally shut while the women's league was still operating.
1943: Why a chewing-gum owner started a league
The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League began in 1943, during the Second World War. Philip K. Wrigley, the chewing-gum magnate who owned the Chicago Cubs, is the figure most often credited with founding it. The practical background is plain: a large share of the men who normally played professional baseball were in the military, and club owners worried that the game would lose its place in the summer entertainment of the country if the ballparks went dark.
The league began as a softball league, and the early name reflected that. It opened with four teams, the Racine Belles, the Kenosha Comets, the Rockford Peaches and the South Bend Blue Sox, based in small Midwestern cities. Tryouts for the first season were held at Wrigley Field in Chicago in the spring of 1943. The Racine Belles won the first championship.
The league grew over the following years to as many as ten teams, adding clubs in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin. Roughly 600 women played in it over its life. They were paid, they were scouted, and they were traded. In every respect that mattered to the players, it was a professional league.
The game they played
What was played in the AAGPBL changed more than any other league's baseball has, and that evolution is the best way to understand what the league was.
In the first seasons the game was a hybrid. The ball was large, close to the size of a softball, and the pitchers threw underhand. Over the years the league's rules moved steadily toward the men's game: the ball got smaller, the pitching distance was lengthened, the base paths were stretched, and pitchers were eventually allowed to throw overhand. By the last seasons the players were playing something that looked a great deal like regulation baseball. The progression is the answer to the oldest dismissive question about the league, whether it was real baseball. It was a game that the players and the league's managers kept changing in the direction of the sport that men played, and the players adapted.
The point for this article is simple: the league's stars were recognized as stars in the cities where they played, statistics were kept, and the players who appear in the league's records had professional careers in every sense.
The charm school and the chaperones
Another side of the league's story is less comfortable. The league's founders were concerned that the public would not accept women playing baseball unless they were also seen as conventionally feminine, and the players were required to follow rules that reflected that concern. They wore short-skirted uniforms, a design that made sliding painful. They were expected to attend etiquette and beauty instruction, commonly called charm school, and they were given codes of conduct that covered their appearance and behavior off the field. Each team traveled with a chaperone.
None of this is in dispute. It is documented in the league's own materials and in the recollections of its players. What is debated is how to weigh it. Some players have described the rules as an unavoidable price for a chance to play professionally; others remember the restrictions as demeaning. Both views can be held at once. The league offered an opportunity that no other institution offered, and it attached conditions to it that men in baseball never faced.
The decline and the end in 1954
The league lasted twelve seasons, from 1943 through 1954. Several causes are commonly cited. After the war, the men returned and the major leagues reclaimed the national attention that they had temporarily lost. In the early 1950s, the league's structure changed, as teams passed from central control to local ownership, and some local operators could not make the economics work. Television and other entertainment options competed with a game played in small cities for small crowds. By the middle of the decade the number of teams had dropped, and the league played its last season in 1954.
The league is not a footnote because of how it ended. It showed that thousands of people would pay to watch women play baseball, that women could play the game at a high level, and that the economics of a women's league could be made to work for years in a country that was not set up to support it. The league's players went back to their lives, many to jobs and families, and for decades their accomplishments were remembered mostly by the communities where they had played.
Recognition: the Hall of Fame and the movies
Recognition came late. In 1988 the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown opened an exhibit honoring the women of the AAGPBL, and a 1992 feature film, A League of Their Own, introduced the league's story to a much larger audience than the league itself ever reached. The film took liberties as films do, and it is better as an introduction than as a source. What it did was send a generation of readers and viewers to the real history, and it gave surviving players a public that wanted to hear from them.
The Hall of Fame's own site, baseballhall.org, is the place to look for the museum's current exhibits and its collection on women in the game.
Women in the Negro Leagues, and one owner in the Hall of Fame
The Negro leagues deserve their own mention here. In the early 1950s, three women played for the Indianapolis Clowns: Toni Stone, who played second base and is the first woman documented to have played regularly in a major Negro league, Connie Morgan, and the pitcher Mamie Johnson. They played in the last years of the Negro leagues, when the leagues themselves were fading as players moved into the integrated major leagues, and their careers are among the best-documented examples of a woman playing in a men's professional league at that level.
Women also appear as executives in the history of Black baseball. Effa Manley was the co-owner of the Newark Eagles and ran the business side of the club. In 2006 she was elected to the Hall of Fame, the first woman to be elected to it. Her case rested on her work as an executive.
Further back, the first woman to own a major-league club is usually identified as Helene Britton, who inherited the St. Louis Cardinals in 1911. In the modern era, Joan Payson, a founder and owner of the New York Mets in 1962, was one of the most visible women in the game's ownership history.
Little League and the girls who wanted to play
For many families, the question of women in baseball is not about the major leagues. It is about the local field. For decades, Little League Baseball was open only to boys. That changed in the early 1970s after a legal challenge: Maria Pepe, a girl from New Jersey, had played in 1972 and was forced off her team after the organization objected. In 1974 Little League opened to girls, and the charter was changed accordingly.
The change has been visible in the Little League World Series. In 2014 Mo'ne Davis, a pitcher from Philadelphia, threw a shutout in the tournament and became a national story. In most communities, girls now play on mixed teams or, increasingly, in separate girls' baseball and softball leagues. The youth section of this site covers the age divisions in detail, and the softball section covers the sport that many girls choose instead.
Another route in is college. Julie Croteau played first base for a men's team at a Division III college in 1989 and is generally credited as the first woman to play men's NCAA college baseball. Ila Borders pitched for men's teams in independent professional leagues in the late 1990s. Women's baseball has also developed its own international structure, including a Women's Baseball World Cup run by the sport's world governing body, and the sport is described further in the international section of this site.
Women in the dugout and the front office
The most visible changes at the top of the game in recent years have come in coaching and management. In November 2020 the Miami Marlins hired Kim Ng as general manager, the first woman to hold that job for a major-league club. Ng had worked in front offices for many years before that, and the hiring was the end of a long climb, not a sudden break.
On the field, Alyssa Nakken joined the San Francisco Giants' coaching staff in 2020 and in 2022 became the first woman to coach on the field in a regular-season major-league game. Rachel Balkovec had worked as a hitting coach in the Yankees' system, and in 2022 she became the first woman to manage a team in affiliated minor-league baseball, leading the Tampa Tarpons, a Yankees affiliate. These are the firsts as of the 2025 season, and readers should check MLB's own site for what has happened since.
Why do these firsts keep arriving in the 2020s and not earlier? Part of the answer is the nature of the modern front office, where analytics, player development and medicine are the work, and hiring is based more on training and results than on a playing career. A coach does not need to have played professionally to teach a swing, and a general manager does not need to have been a ballplayer to build a roster. The old route into baseball, through a long playing career, was closed to women. The newer routes are open to anyone who is willing to work for years at the bottom of the ladder.
Women in umpiring: the slowest door
Umpiring has been the hardest door of all. In 1972 Bernice Gera became the first woman to umpire a professional baseball game, in the New York-Penn League. She had won a long legal fight to be allowed to work, and she left the job after a single game. Her case is the foundation of every account of women in umpiring.
The next major name is Pam Postema, who worked as a professional umpire in the minor leagues from 1977 until 1989, reaching Triple-A and working major-league spring-training games, but never being promoted to the majors. She has said that she was denied the promotion because of her sex and later brought a lawsuit; the case was settled. Ria Cortesio worked in the minors from 1999 to 2007, reached Double-A, and worked a major-league spring-training game in 2007 before she was released.
The barrier fell in 2025. On August 9 of that year Jen Pawol became the first woman to umpire a regular-season major-league game, working first base in the first game of a Braves-Marlins doubleheader in Atlanta. She had worked in the minor leagues since 2016 and in spring-training games in 2024. The path she followed, years of minor-league assignments, evaluations and promotion decisions, is the same one every umpire follows, and readers can find that process described in the article on how umpires are trained and assigned.
Common questions
When did the AAGPBL play? From 1943 through 1954, with teams in small and mid-sized cities in the Midwest. Roughly 600 women played in it.
Was it a softball league or a baseball league? Both, in sequence. It began as a softball-style game and changed through the years toward regulation baseball, with a smaller ball, longer distances and overhand pitching.
Is a woman in the Baseball Hall of Fame? Yes. Effa Manley, who ran the Newark Eagles of the Negro leagues, was elected in 2006 and was the first woman elected.
Has a woman ever played in the major leagues? Not as of the 2025 season. Women have played in the Negro leagues, in independent leagues and in the AAGPBL.
Who was the first woman general manager of a major-league club? Kim Ng, who became general manager of the Miami Marlins in November 2020.
Where to go next
The history of how players gained rights is told in the articles on the history of baseball salaries and collective bargaining. For the other communities whose route into the major leagues was long and contested, read about Latin American players and Asian players in the majors. To read a scorecard or a box score yourself, use the box score guide, and for the sport's wider story browse history and the Hall of Fame.