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
In this letter, I thought I’d take a crack at pitching names, iconography and vibes for the four teams of the upcoming Women’s Pro Baseball League season, to be held at Robin Roberts Stadium in Springfield, Illinois starting August 1st. I tried to vary my inspirations, moving from geography to mythology to baseball history to state symbols.
In case you didn’t know, the generic names of our four teams are WPBL New York, WPBL San Francisco, WPBL Los Angeles and WPBL Boston. My WBPL teams, meanwhile, are:
Chinese Taipei to host Group B; Team USA coaching staff announced; group stage composition analysis inside
In which I run down the team composition for this summer's Women's Baseball World Cup Group Stages.
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This field favors Team USA. They dominated the 2023 Group Stage with their hitting, mashing a 1.180 OPS and scoring 71 runs; going 5-0, the US defeated Hong Kong, Canada and Korea by scores of 29-0, 23-0 and 14-0, respectively. Australia threatened the US on the first day of play, nearly coming back from a three run deficit before a 3-2 loss, and though they were shutout, Team Mexico managed to hold the hard hitting Team USA to just two runs over five hits. Meanwhile, Canada won their four other group stage matchups, posting the second best hitting in the Group Stage at a 1.011 OPS and ultimately defeating Mexico in the 2024 bronze medal game.
Mexico’s first tournament appearances ever were 2023 and 2024, so this is a team that came out hot and may well return even more seasoned. Add Australia and, possibly, Canada, and Group A features multiple teams itching for an upset over the returning silver medalists, though it may take a calamity to shut down USA’s powerful bats.
theartofmadeline
dededos
origamiaround
kaledo-art
pixelskylines
tangentwithtanner
ellievsbear
