20 women will represent the stars and stripes at the in Rockford in July
USA Baseball announced this week the final roster that will represent the United States in the Women’s Baseball World Cup Group Stage A, held next month in Rockford, Illinois.
Per USA Baseball, the roster will be (by first listed position) —
C
Alexia Jorge
Denae Benites
INF
Alex Hugo
Kylee Lahners
Ashton Lansdell (OF)
Jamie Baum (OF) (RHP)
Remi Schaber (RHP)
OF
Ashanthy Marcano
Amira Hondras
Olivia Pichardo (RHP)
RHP
Elise Berger
Meggie Meidlinger
Bailey Brown
Jordan Andreas
Kate Blunt (INF)
Jillian Albayati (OF)
Kelsie Whitmore (OF)
Sarah Lessig (OF)
LHP
Naomi Ryan (INF) (OF)
Addy Wilson (OF)
This team features some proven vets of the program, some brand-new teenagers, future WPBL players, home run hitters and lights-out relievers. I’ve picked out a few I think will be interesting to watch during the tournament.
Before we get into stats, for those unfamiliar to better calibrate: in the World Cup, teams play five games of seven innings in both the Group Stage and in the Finals, plus the medal game. Games can end early after 5 innings in a mercy rule.
The Hitters
Women’s National Team veteran and captain Alex Hugo is the standout hitter on this 2026 roster. She has a (.508/.627/.905)1career slash line in 26 games and 56 at bats for the stars and stripes. The 32 year old second baseman was awarded Most Outstanding Player at the last Group Stage in 2023 and was named to the All-World team at second base after the Finals in 2024. Outside of playing, Hugo serves in an advisory role for player development for the WPBL and has been a coach in the Athletics minor league system, so she knows ball, and has likely already been a leader and coach for those players on this roster preparing for their WPBL debuts.Hugo on the basepaths.
Kelsie Whitmore, of course, needs little introduction to this blog. Whitmore has played for the WNT for over a decade, debuting in 2014 when she was just sixteen years old. Whitmore has accumulated a (.303/.405/.465) line in a table-leading 99 abs over the course of her national team career. One of the few women playing pro ball in the United States, she is arguably the best trained and most developed of any player on this roster, and at twenty seven she is at what is generally the peak age for baseball players, per Fangraphs. She is primarily known for pitching, however, something we will get to in the next section.
Two recent college grads round out a younger side to watch among the qualified hitters on this roster. 2024 Finals starting third baseman Ashton Lansdell (.383/.479/.753), in addition to her exceptional play, has become something of a media figure through Instagram, Banana Ball, and her work promoting the WPBL through their official podcast. Lansdell has 81 at bats in 25 games for Team USA; playing with distinction in both 2023 and 2024, she earned a hit and scored 2 runs in the Gold Medal game loss against Japan. From what I have seen, Lansdell always plays with a lot of verve, fun, and energy, signified best by her table leading 7 career triples for the stars and stripes. She is sure to be an ambassador for the team as they begin their next championship run, and her Instagram will be one to follow.
Right fielder and relief pitcher Olivia Pichardo (.226/.385/.387) is another I will be watching in July. Twenty-two year old Pichardo recently completed her tenure on the Brown University D1 baseball team, becoming the first woman to pitch in a D1 game, as relief with two outs in the ninth to close out a Senior Day win in just two pitches. In a highlight for Team USA, Pichardo got out the rye bread and mustard for a grand salami in 2023 against later bronze medal winner Team Canada. Last time as I was at the Hall of Fame, her helmet from Brown was beside Whitmore’s batting gloves, and I’ve had a bit of an interest in her since.
WBSC ⚾🥎@WBSC
💥🇺🇸💪 Olivia Pichardo GRAND SLAM! #BaseballWorldCupW
9:33 PM · Aug 10, 2023 · 21K Views
24 Reposts · 92 Likes
The Pitchers
Meggie Meidlinger is Team USA’s premier reliever, with a 2.86 career ERA2 in 31.5 innings lifetime. Meidlinger has been pitching for Team USA since 2006, and so of all the women on this team, she brings the most experience in international play. She pitched a clean 2.1 relief innings to close the USA’s unprecedented 4-3 win over Japan in the preliminary games of the 2024 Finals, ending Japan’s 39 game international win streak. If she’s coming out of the pen against in a high leverage situation against an opponent like Canada, Japan or Australia, I’d expect the dub.
Returning now to Kelsie Whitmore, the soon to be 28 year old right hander leads the pitching pack in starts and wins, going 8-2 over the course of her national career. Whitmore has a 3.43 era, a touch higher than fellow roster starters Elise Berger and Jillian Albayati, but she also leads with 33 career strikeouts to their 9 and 8. Whitmore wants it more than most and is not one to doubt in any case. Here she is notching her first strikeout in Bananaball:
Jillian Albayati is a two-way player of note in her own right, slashing (.393/.514/.571) in 28 career at-bats and holding a 2.54 ERA in 3 career starts and 14 innings pitched. Albayati pitched a clean 0 ER in her only game in 2023 against eventual bronze medal winner Canada, hit the go-ahead homer in the 2024 win against Japan, and started the 2024 Gold Medal game, where she picked up 4 hits and 4 earned runs in 3 innings. I’d expect the 22 year old to return stronger and hungrier this time around, serving as an essential compliment to the veteran Whitmore both in the rotation and in the lineup.
A pure pitcher and exceptional starter, Elise Berger has a 2.96 ERA in 15.2 career innings pitched. She held high ranked opponents Australia and Mexico at bay in the 2023 group stage, keeping the Aussies to just two runs in 5.2 innings and shutting out bronze medal contending Mexico through four; in 2024, she threw four against Chinese Taipei with no earned runs. Berger is only just twenty, and so like Albayati is sure to be coming into this tournament a stronger and more developed player than two years ago.
In my blog about the general group stage composition, I pointed out Team USA’s bats as their primary strength, and they sure are — in 2023 Team USA had a combined Group Stage .ops 300 points higher than the next most, gold medal winner Japan — but with Whitmore, Albayati and Berger starting and Meidlinger available to come in in relief, Team USA also has three proven aces and one killer closer on their side. They are just an overall good team.
The Debutants
High schoolers Ashanthy Marcano, Amira Hondras (also a WPBL 4th round draftee), Bailey Brown and Addy Wilson will be making their National Team debuts along with Princeton multi-sport basketballer and softballer Sarah Lessig. Wilson and Lessig are the only two of these newcomers with no National Team experience at all; Brown, Hondras and Marcano have attended the National Team Development program in the past. So far in their career, Marcano, Hondras, Brown and Wilson appear to have time in high school and/or travel baseball, while Lessig comes from organized softball. It takes remarkable willpower and considerable support to be able to train, try out and make a roster like this at an age as young as sixteen, and then go play high level baseball against adult women from across the world. I am very excited to see these girls deliver.
Of the newcomer group, I’d only been familiar with Amira Hondras pre herWPBL drafting, after she hit a double at Rate field in Chicago as part of the Double Duty Classic All-Star Game, a big intra-city high school game.
Organized baseball has a known — but improving — black player shortage. Hondras is not the first or only black woman on this team, but it’s still pretty cool to me that an exceptionally talented young woman like her can go out and represent the U.S. at home in this way, playing our game.
Though it may seem so distant now, after the USA Men’s Baseball National Team so embarrassed themselves in the March World Baseball Classic by being a bunch of no-fun goobers, these women are the next adult-level players to suit up for the U.S. and play our national pastime against the world. The defending silver medalists have a reputation now, by virtue of the general state of their home country, and it will be important for them, if nothing else, to have fun doing what they are doing, and to represent the U.S. as something more joyous than a pack of wraparound-sunglasses-selfie-in-the-truck freakazoids.
Per USA Baseball, this group will meet again to train from July 16th to the 20th in Chicago before the World Cup kicks off in Rockford on the 22nd.
For a longer view on Team USA’s roster history, including my fav all time legend Tamara Holmes, I made a zine a couple of years ago, posted on this blog. I used the spreadsheet I made for that zine to help compile career stats for this 2026 roster.
Rule the entire f*cking world
mary mustard
·
Feb 17
Read full story
1
(.avg/.obp/.slg)
2
The average runs scored by the opposing team, per inning, when this pitcher is pitching.
One difficult choice a prospective sports fan must make is their rooting interest. It’s like being a tourist: you’ve got to try on some unfamiliar clothes, stroll down the avenues and alleyways of strange, foreign cities, sample their coffee shops and try and find out if the barbarian inhabitants around you are always acting like that, in their peculiar way. Some people really enjoy traveling like that and will never quite pick a team, but other people move around only in search of a group to call their own.
So much hay is made on talk radio and Reddit-type circles about fandom loyalty. Deeply adding to the stress of choosing one’s team, one is lead to believe that they were meant to be born into their fandom and die with it, e’er to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous lost championships. I don’t think that’s how it works in real life, though, and it is rarely even possible in the fragile relative newness of women’s sports leagues.
Fandom is less like nationality and more like falling in love. It comes on quick and may leave you just as unexpectedly. Doris Kearns Goodwin, historian and author of Wait Til Next Year, a memoir about her life in early 1950s Brooklyn and her love of the Dodgers, spoke in an interview (for I have not read her memoir) about how her Dodgers love was tied more to her father and her upbringing in Brooklyn than the team itself. So rooted in a place, it left her when she (and the Dodgers themselves) left Brooklyn, for college and adulthood. Later in life, she didn’t quite return to baseball, but was led back into it by love:
(…) a boyfriend took me to Fenway Park. And, you know, there it was again: that small stadium, you know, so impossibly crowded. You’re sitting on top of the players. The fans are crazy, and they’re yelling and screaming. And I fell in love and became a passionate Boston Red Sox fan. The fact is that the Dodgers had been my childhood love. But I actually ended up being married to the Boston Red Sox, because my husband had been a Red Sox fan.
Fandom is an experiential, continual practice. It is not (always) bestowed upon you before you are born. It will shift and change as you move, and grow, and become something other than what you were. That’s life!
Practice will be key here in season one of the WPBL. Our first four teams (NY, SF, LA and Boston) are centrally owned by the league and will play in Springfield, Illinois, essentially isolating them from any real geographic connection to their name. There’s also been no word yet on team specific general management or coaching to give us an indication of how teams will be run. The only thing that will differentiate these teams at first, then, as Jerry Seinfeld once said in a standup spot, is the uniform: "You're rooting for clothes, when you get right down to it. We're screaming about laundry.”
As such, who to root for is a question that cannot be answered until we are well on our way into the inaugural season. A culture will emerge. Every league has their underdogs, their juggernauts, their lovable losers and their forgettable also-rans. But as I’ve been writing often, cultures take time to develop, particularly among this group of players, who will have never before played in this configuration of teammates, for this new organization, in an unfamiliar ballpark smack in a rural part of the state in what will, for some, be a new and unfamiliar country altogether.
Writing recently on Substack about attending a Brooklyn Football Club (albeit, the men’s) away day, Brendan O’Connor notes that the trip, not the game, was the highlight:
What seemed most significant to me about the day was the time spent with other supporters on the bus to and from Paterson. (…) Going away means going away together: into enemy territory, as it were. (…) There is still a sense of (a) being somewhere you’re not supposed to be and (b) doing it together, which, (c) in turn, produces not only a feeling of collectivity but an actual collective.”
Like a closed experiment in a lab, these players and teams being far from home, and the resulting travel some intrepid folks will have to do to see them, may end up supercharging a new fan environment.
You really can’t emphasize enough, especially with women’s sports — it’s all just so very new, and very hard to pin down. Women rarely get to coast on precedent and inheritance. They usually have to fight for every little thing. There was no team legacy to look back on when the Liberty tipped off against the Sparks in 1997, or when the very cool and Y2K sounding San Jose CyberRays kicked off against the Washington Freedom in 2001.12As a women’s sports fan, you’re supposed to love the concept above the teams, be thankful that this is happening at all — and yet instead of this diluting fandom, I think it amplifies and democratizes it.
In women’s sports communities, online personalities work basically for free producing guides to the data insights of the WNBA or the rule quirks of the PWHL, doing work that ESPN does on primetime and other leagues produce in-house. I have seen so much more homemade gear for women’s sports than I ever have for any male sport, something that goes beyond filling a lack of official merch and towards forming an altogether new sporting community type, as recently covered by The Athletic:
“I just didn’t realize people were gonna get so excited about this [a craft meetup during a game],” [Rysa] Ruth said. “I thought I was someone at this intersection in a bit of a silo, like I was a weird person who had this crossover interest… I cried the first time because I just didn’t realize that this was a need and a want.”
This is not to say there aren’t friendly, free, passionate communities for men’s sports out there, but if we take, say, the difference of discourse between the WNBA’s previously paltry salary cap and MLB’s long quest to institute one, the average fan of the WNBA seems to recognize and identify with the human realities of the players far more than the average baseball fan, who seems to regard most players as overpaid buffoons to throw peanuts at and call names from the bleachers; who fashions themself as the simply fiscally-conscious colleague of folks like one Mr. Bob Nutting rather than another working stiff, like the people on the field, whose backs are always snapping and hamstrings bursting.
All that, I would venture to say, is that one of the special joys of women’s sports is about discovering the fans around you just as much as it is about celebrating the product on the field. It sounds reductive, but at all the women’s sports events I’ve been at, I’ve been most excited about simply how many women there are in one place. Friendly people, too. At WPBL games, whether now or later, there will be sticker trades in the bleachers, and to you it won’t matter what color team hat they have on; you’ll swap a self-printed New York logo for a homemade Kelsie Whitmore and make a new friend. Folks will make zines, videos, memes. Folks will start as fans of each other and find their way home.
In my own life, I really enjoyed the concept of pro women’s hockey from the start. I watched the PWHL’s first game live, though at home, something I was proud to do as a lifelong hipster. But I couldn’t quite connect with a team until I visited Montreal to see the Victoire play in early 2025. I went in softly neutral, hoping to root for both the Victoire and my native New York, but left with a burgundy jersey on and an abiding love for Ann-Renee Desbiens in my heart. Montreal won me over as a fan because, like Kearns Goodwin, I sat in that barn as it shook with cheers and I looked around and I thought god, I want to be a part of this.
Sometimes it’s as simple as that. You’ll know it when that feeling comes.
I was looking for references and stumbled across a series of paintings from 1930s by Soviet painter Alexander Samokhvalov called "The young women of metro construction"
WPBL New York will take on WPBL Los Angeles on a first-of-its-kind August 1st Opening Day
Women's Pro Baseball League schedule released
The schedule for the WPBL’s inaugural season has been released, seen here:
WPBL New York will kick off the season against WPBL Los Angeles on Saturday, August 1st at 5pm. If I had to guess, it will be WPBL LA’s first-round pick Meggie Meidlinger or Ayami Sato (if she signs her contract) on the bump against WPBL New York’s first rounders Rakyung Kim or Jaida Lee.
WPBL San Francisco and WPBL Boston will follow on Sunday night. They will also close off the regular season on September 6th.
All regular season games will be held Wednesdays through Sundays, with about one game a day (on game days), plus a couple of weekend double headers scheduled between all four inaugural teams. Each team will play a modest 15 games, rounding out to a 60 game total season.
The odd number per team means New York and LA will only have seven games as the home team, while Boston and SF get eight. New York and LA fans ought to put that in the chamber to whine about if their team loses in the playoffs to Boston or SF.
The season will run through the month of August and culminate in a two round playoff series, with two best-of-three semifinals feeding into a best-of-five championship that will run at latest to September 22nd.
With all four teams playing on the same field, and nobody missing the playoffs, I wonder if the league ought to adopt the PWHL’s exciting first-seed-picks-their-opponent rule to incentivize climbing the standings. Still, being the home team has its own advantages - the psychological benefit to batting one more time in the bottom of the ninth and walking off the other team is real, if you ask me.
This is the most tangible bit of news we’ve gotten in a while from the league since the first stop of the pre-season Countdown Tour in early March. While some WPBL players recently got to tour and take batting practice at Yankee Stadium, no additional barnstorming stops have been formally announced for the public. Nor has the opportunity to buy jerseys, which I would LOVE to DO PLEASE.
At any rate — New York Mets, your days are numbered on my television.
Details on tickets will be released later, through the league’s own newsletter, per the league’s website. Personally, I just can’t justify the trip all the way to Springfield. Among other plans, I have a season of baseball to coordinate for my own team, including some interstate travel, and if you ask me, playing beats watching each and every time.
Today's my birthday and I'd like to share a new comic with you, it's called Marginalia. It's a love letter to all the weirdness of medieval manuscripts, and you can read it by unfolding a single sheet of paper!
Risograph print editions are also available in my shop.
My online store has gotten a big influx of orders in the past week because of it. Please be patient with extended processing times while I fulfill all of them--rest assured that all your weird little medieval freaks are making their way to you!
intricately decorated, full-page initial letters (F, I, I) for the gospels of luke, john, and mark, from the richly illuminated (and written entirely in gold ink) gospels of john of opava (evangeliar des johannes von troppau). manuscript produced in prague, bohemia, c. 1368
source: Vienna, ÖNB, Cod. 1182, ff. 92r, 149r, and 56r
theartofmadeline
yousharknotpass
pixelskylines
amandla
gummygunk
prguitarman
jacobvanloon
kianamaiart
