Olivia Pichardo is the first woman to make the roster for an NCAA Division I baseball team. The 18-year-old freshman will play for Brown in the 2023 season.

Yet her accomplishment, while inspirational, also highlights the dearth of opportunities in women’s baseball.

Pichardo started playing baseball since she joined Forest Hills Little League in Queens, N.Y., as a 5 year old. While she, like many girls, repeatedly was pushed toward softball, she stuck with her first love.

When she went to college, she wanted to continue with her sport. So she participated in walk-on tryouts in her first semester at Brown, and she earned a place on the squad.

Baseball for All, a nonprofit working to improve gender equity in baseball, tracks women playing college baseball. While at least eight others are on track to play in 2023, none of them play at the Division I level.

“I’m just really glad that we’re having more and more female baseball players at the collegiate level, and no matter what division, it’s just really good to see this progression,” Pichardo said. “It’s really paving the way for other girls in the next generation to also have these goals that they want to achieve and dream big and know that they can do it.”

Baseball and softball often have been treated as equivalent — the former as the boys’ game, and the latter as the girls’ — though they are different sports that require different fields, different balls and different rules.

While progress has been made toward opening up both sports, legally and socially, much work remains to be done. During the 2021-22 school year, 1,156 girls played high school baseball compared to 481,004 boys, per a participation survey from the National Federation of State High School Associations. In the same year, 536 boys played fast pitch softball, compared to 341,459 girls.

“Telling a girl that she shouldn’t play baseball because she’s a girl is a social issue,” Baseball for All founder Justine Siegal told The Athletic. “We’re talking about gender rights.”

Siegal supports girls and women playing on boys’ and men’s baseball teams. She also wants to create a pipeline for girls and women within the sport, which would include teams and leagues specifically geared toward them.

Baseball for All has hosted several women’s college baseball events, including several Women’s College Baseball Invitational showcases and the Women’s College Club Baseball Championship in March.

“NCAA women’s baseball isn’t much of a thing in our country the same way other women’s sports are,” Centenary University men’s baseball coach Scott Kushner told Sports Illustrated.

Centenary hosted the Baseball’s first Women’s College Baseball Invitational in August 2021.

“Other women’s sports are well supported and have an infrastructure, so it seems odd that there isn’t the same for baseball,” Kushner continued. “The end goal is not that baseball at the collegiate level should be co-ed.

“It is wonderful that we have some girls playing college baseball. They are trailblazers, and we should be very proud of them. But it isn’t like that in other sports. We don’t expect a women’s college basketball player to compete with a men’s college basketball player. If we can at least build up the infrastructure at the college level, whether it begins at the club level and then eventually turns into varsity, I think people will see that it is great for baseball as a whole.”

Maybelle Blair, one of the women’s baseball players who helped inspire the 1992 film “A League of Their Own,” still seeks to pave the way for other girls and women in sports.

At 95 years old, Blair came out as gay for the first time in June during a promotional event for the upcoming Amazon Prime series reviving the story of “A League of Their Own.”

“I think it’s a great opportunity for these young girl ball players to come to realize that they’re not alone and you don’t have to hide,” she said at the time. “I hid for 75, 85 years, and this is actually, basically the first time I’ve ever come out.”

Blair, who pitched for one season with the Peoria Redwings in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, told the New York Times that the admission brought relief.

“I could see their struggles and little eyes and love of the game,” Blair told the New York Times. “I said: ‘You know, Maybelle, at 95, maybe it won’t be so bad. Maybe your family won’t disown you. You got to do it.’”

Since retiring, Blair has dedicated her life to furthering opportunities for women and girls in baseball. For example, she met with participants in the first Women’s College Club Baseball national championship put on by Baseball for All in March.

Blair also is the founding director of the International Women’s Baseball Center in Rockford, Ill. The IWBC hosts several events and is raising funds to open a museum and activity center.

“These girls deserve it; they need help,” Blair said. “For some of these girls, there’s no place for them to play baseball. We will be running a league of our own again.”

The University of Washington won the first Women’s College Club Baseball national championship with a 19-3 victory over Occidental College on Sunday.

Four teams gathered at the MLB Urban Youth Academy in Compton to take part in Baseball for All’s inaugural event, where the Huskies went undefeated on their way to winning the title.

In addition to winning the championship, Washington participated in a series of events hosted by the Los Angeles Dodgers Training Academy. While there, the Huskies met Maybelle Blair, a former pitcher for the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League.

Washington was led by Katie Firestone, who helped start the team, and Maggie Gallagher, a former Gatorade Softball Player of the Year who now coaches the team.

“My story is similar to many other girls who decided to play softball in high school because there wasn’t a women’s baseball team,” Firestone said. “Providing more opportunities for women in baseball is something I’ve always been passionate about … and I think this is the time, now more than ever, for women to get involved in baseball.”

When Gallagher was growing up, she was told to switch to softball, and many players on the club team had the same experience.

“[People] told me, ‘Baseball is not a women’s sport. You shouldn’t play this.’ And I’ve gotten that many times,” Gallagher told the Seattle Times. “We were told that we can’t play baseball and it’s only for boys. So we stopped. And they lost the love of the game, in a sense, where now they have this club. It’s just awesome to see their faces light up.”

Following their win, the team was congratulated by the Seattle Mariners.

The tournament was hosted by Baseball for All, an organization with the mission to establish women’s baseball as an NCAA Emerging Sport. The event was a key step in helping to secure the sport’s status.

The first intercollegiate women’s baseball tournament in over a century will kick off on Friday. Four teams have gathered at the MLB Urban Youth Academy in Compton to take part in Baseball for All’s inaugural event.

The winner will take home the first-ever Women’s College Club Baseball Championship title.

The University of Washington, Montclair State University, California State University of Fullerton and Occidental College will each compete in a three-game series to win the title.

As part of the event, the teams will also be hosted by the Los Angeles Dodgers Academy at a series of events, including a meet & greet with players from the original All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, Maybelle Blair and Shirley Burkovich. Coaching sessions with the academy coaches will also take place.

The event comes during Women’s History Month.

“We are proud to contribute to the long history of women playing baseball while redefining what is possible for them at the college level,” said the foundation’s founder Dr. Justine Siegal. “We are honoring the past women’s baseball clubs from over 100 years ago by paving a way today for the students of the next 100 years.”

Part of Baseball for All’s mission is to establish women’s baseball as an NCAA Emerging Sport. In 2021, they partnered with college students at colleges like the four attending the inaugural tournament to help start women’s college club baseball teams. Additionally, the event is a key step in helping secure the sport’s status.

Last August, the organization hosted the first collegiate invitational at Centenary University in New Jersey.

The first all-women’s college baseball invitational is set to take place this weekend.

The Women’s College Baseball Invitational, hosted by Baseball For All at Centenary University in New Jersey, will take place over two days. The event is focused on the development of women and girls who are interested in playing college baseball.

“Women have been playing baseball in college even before we had the right to vote,” says Dr. Justine Siegal, PhD, founder of Baseball For All. “We are thrilled to introduce this program to demonstrate the immense amounts of talent we currently have at the high school and college levels-and show their love for the game and desire to play college baseball.”

Thirty women are set to attend the invitational. Four of them are committed to play at colleges in the spring 2022 season and are part of a record-breaking number of women to be included on the rosters of “men’s” college baseball teams.

The invitational is one historic step in the larger mission of Baseball For All, which aims to establish women’s baseball at the collegiate level. Those efforts will continue this fall, when the organization partners with 12 colleges across the country to host a Women’s College Club Baseball season.

Major League Baseball is back, making it a great time to remember Jackie Mitchell, who in 1931 struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in succession. (The stars are seen above watching Mitchell pitch.)

The backdrop: the New York Yankees were passing through Chattanooga, Tennessee as part of an exhibition tour to play the Chattanooga Lookouts.

  • The Yankees, at the time, were the best team in baseball, and would go on to set the Major League record for runs scored in a season that year.
  • Joe Engel, the president and owner of the Lookouts, had signed 17-year-old Jackie Mitchell to his squad as part of a publicity stunt after seeing her pitch at a baseball camp.
  • Mitchell’s neighbor growing up was Dazzy Vance, a Hall of Fame pitcher who taught the promising leftie how to throw a wicked sinker.

The game: Mitchell was called into action on April 2nd after the Lookouts’ first pitcher gave up back-to-back hits. The first batter she faced was “The Sultan of Swat.”

  • Babe Ruth took a ball, then swung and missed on two of Mitchell’s sinkers. Her fourth pitch was called a third strike, leading Ruth to verbally abuse the umpire before his teammates pulled him away.
  • Lou Gehrig was up next, swinging and missing on his first three pitches. Mitchell had officially struck out two of the greatest players in the history of the sport.

The aftermath: it wasn’t great!

  • Babe Ruth told the local paper that women were “too delicate” to play baseball everyday.
  • Baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis also voided Mitchell’s contract while declaring baseball was “too strenuous” for women.
  • Mitchell continued to play professionally, however, barnstorming the country with other men’s teams. She ultimately retired at age 23 after growing tired of being treated like a sideshow.

Mitchell died in 1987, but not before delivering an incredible quote about her 1931 performance.

  • “Hell, better hitters than them couldn’t hit me. Why should they be any different?”

Go deeper: listen to a Legendary Bites episode covering Mitchell’s exploits.