What? Women cannot play baseball in the US? We are talking about one of the main sports in that country- and there isn't a women league?? That sounds idiotic. The US is so weird, oh my god. I mean, I had no idea about the specific case, but I just assumed there had to be a women league for all major sports (except perhaps for handegg, which is violent enough for men as is, but still, I wouldn't be surprised if there was a women league too). I do know they have a women football team that has won several world cups, but I guess it's because they think football is a "girly" sport? So women are only allowed to play it and they can't even play baseball? I'm all sorts of amazed.
Women can, they just don't, usually. Softball is predominantly played competitively by women instead for whatever reason (I take a guess at the cause in my reply to Harley Quinn below), which is baseball with a larger, softer ball and aluminum bats being the standard rather than the exception. Also old people get kind of weird about baseball, as it's still "America's Pastime" in the eyes of many older people. Younger baseball fans would have no problem with a women's pro league backed by the MLB for either softball (since that's what the US has infrastructure for) or baseball.
Major women's leagues in the US tend to not be a thing unless someone deems a major level league to be potentially financially viable. The sports that have them are American football (Legends Football League, though it used to be branded as "Lingerie Football League" since that was the gimmick to get people to pay attention at the time), soccer (though the league that was in place for most of the '90s and 2000s, the WMLS, folded and was replaced a couple years later with another league), basketball (WNBA, quite possibly the most viable one because it's being backed by the NBA), and ice hockey (a major pro women's league started this year).
Lots of misinformation and blind rage in this thread.
1.) Nobody is banning women from playing baseball.
2.) There are absolutely women's baseball leagues.
3.) The United States doesn't suck at men's soccer because it's "girly", we suck because men in this country are mostly raised on basketball, baseball, hockey, and American football. Football is a way of life in other countries like Brazil, Germany, and England.
4.) The United States is great at women's soccer because women in this country are mostly raised on football and softball. The latter being the reason why we don't have a WMLB, but other smaller leagues. That doesn't mean they can't or aren't being raised on other sports.
5.) The reason why the WNBA is so derided is not because of the product on the court. The product is great. It's because the teams move every other year. Or they fold. You can't keep up with all the movement.
6.) Baseball is not the "quintessential American sport" anymore. American football is. Ratings and attendance for baseball have been declining across the board, while the NFL keeps on going up up up in popularity. We are even taking it on the road, to Canada, England, Mexico, and even China soon.
1. True.
2. Largely semi-pro, and town ball leagues, I'd imagine. There's not really any in my area, but hockey is much more popular in my area of the US than baseball.
3. Yeah. North American flavors of sports caught on more readily with the US population in the past. Though soccer is catching up to hockey because it's a dramatically more affordable sport to play.
4. Well, it's more because we were one of the first countries to let women play sports and soccer is a cheap sport to play and fairly easy to pick up the basics physically, in the same way basketball is. Baseball, American football, and hockey are all much more expensive in terms of equipment.
5. I've met a handful of people who say it sucks "because they can't dunk". It is certainly derided for the product, even though the product at this point, especially among the best teams, is arguably considerably better than your average major conference men's college basketball game at this point (so fringe NCAA tournament teams), though that may be bias from having watched the Lynx on and off the past 5 years.
Also, that level of movement is normal in a league that's just getting off the ground. There have only been 4 relocations. There were 6 folded teams compared to MLS's 3 (WNBA started play in '97 and MLS started play in '96), but there haven't been any folded teams in the WNBA since 2009, and the WNBA's volatility is probably tied into the NBA attempting to be very aggressive with expansion initially (the league went from 8 teams in 1997 to 14 teams in 2000, around the time the MLS was strongly considering contracting from 12 teams back down to 10 teams). Hell, the NBA, NFL, NHL, and MLB all had comparable levels of volatility when they first started out, the NBA and NHL arguably having dramatically worse stability than the WNBA of present, since 9 of the WNBA's 12 current teams are still playing in the market they were started in, while only 18 of 30 in the NBA do (only Portland, Phoenix, Denver, Minnesota and Dallas play in their original market in the West, while only the 76ers and Wizards do not play in their original markets in the East). 11 of 17 WNBA franchises created thus far have survived, while only 8 franchises of 23 total even survived the NBA's first decade in existence, and the NHL spent a couple decades with only 6 members after many teams kept joining and then subsequently folding.
6. Baseball is the "quintessential American sport" because it's traditionally been culturally the most important sport in America. That means something different from most popular sport right this second, which happens to be American football.
The only reason I can imagine why there's not a league currently is because it's not considered financially viable, as lord knows how often any kind of women-centric version of a sport is popularly derided. Wiki says that the original league collapsed after the inevitable decline of interest following WWII and the relegation of women into housewife roles and what not.
But that being said, there's a league for women's American football, basketball, soccer etc. So it kinda beggars belief for there to not be a women's league for what is the quintessential American sport. Very weird. It'd be like New Zealand not having a women's rugby team at a national level.
Well, it's kind of a money thing, kind of baseball having a lot of older fans and not being as popular with younger Americans, and also because for whatever reason the sports infrastructure in America focused on softball for girls/women, which is basically just a variant of baseball with a larger, softer ball and aluminum bats being standard. Most public schools and universities won't bar a girl or woman from playing baseball for fear of being in violation of Title IX athletic opportunity standards, and violating those standards opens up the school to a lawsuit. Softball was probably created so donors for schools could still keep baseball as "for the boys" since these changes would have happened in the 1970s when many wealthy old men viewed sports as being for boys and men to play and they wanted to keep their precious baseball "pure". Career baseball people that run pro teams and older baseball fans have a reputation of being extremely resistant to change, earned over the past century.
