Women’s Pro Baseball League Will Play First Season in Springfield, Illinois

The Women’s Pro Baseball League has a home. 

The new upstart professional women’s baseball league will not play in the cities its teams are named for—New York, Boston, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Instead, the entire inaugural season will happen at Robin Roberts Stadium in Springfield, Illinois. 

“Our sport is for everybody,” WPBL co-founder Keith Stein told Front Office Sports. “It’s for middle America, everybody. We thought our teams are on these two coasts, it would be good to be in the middle of the country.” 

The league considered an independent ownership model. Stein said they fielded considerable interest from parties looking to own a franchise. Ultimately, the WPBL opted to operate as a single-entity league to prioritize parity. 

Stein told FOS the league’s Series A investment has been oversubscribed. Their plan was to raise $2 million, but the WPBL expects to close a $3 million raise.

The league plans to do another raise as they get closer to its August 2026 launch. 

It evaluated 200 venues across the country in search of a stadium for the inaugural season. Stein said they had 10 offers, but most of them included shared facilities. At Robin Roberts Stadium—which has a capacity of 5,200—the players will have ownership of the space from the time the league moves in until the season concludes, which was a priority. (The stadium is named for the Hall of Fame Phillies pitcher.)

The stadium is operated by Golden Rule Entertainment—a sports and entertainment group that owns a number of minor league baseball teams—which is partnering with the WPBL to manage all baseball operations for the league in 2026. The deal will also include Golden Rule Entertainment launching and managing a developmental league in 2027.

The seven-week season, which begins in August, will also feature barnstorming games in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and Boston but the plans have not been finalized yet, Stein said. 

The league had originally planned to launch with six teams, but landed on four and will expand to six in 2027.

Over 600 athletes from 10 different countries attended the league’s open tryout in August. That list was cut to 120 players eligible for the first draft on Thursday.

Each team will get five picks per round in the six-round snake draft; the teams will operate under a $95,000 salary cap in the league’s first year. A league spokesperson said that it will cover living costs over the six-week season and give players a percentage of sponsorship money.

Mo’ne Davis and Kelsie Whitmore—who joined the Savannah Bananas in August—are both available in the draft.

Davis, the former Little League baseball sensation and Hampton softball player, first heard about the league on Instagram. (She hasn’t played competitive baseball since 2020.) She originally believed the posts announcing the league were fake and that a fan with hopes that there would one day be a professional baseball league for women was behind the account. After seeing Alex Hugo, a U.S. women’s national baseball team star, interviewed about the league, Davis knew it was real. 

“As a collective we’re making sure the younger generation has something to look forward to when they get older,” Davis said. “You’ll hear a lot of women in the league say they transitioned to softball because there wasn’t anything baseball wise for them. This allows those younger girls, other women to have another outlet.”