Main League Baseball is investing in Athletes Limitless to assist its softball league that can debut subsequent month, its first complete partnership with knowledgeable girls’s sports activities circuit.
MLB mentioned Thursday it was making a strategic funding within the Athletes Limitless Softball League of an undisclosed quantity for operational prices and a dedication to assist it acquire visibility. MLB will help with content material, advertising and marketing and gross sales, occasions, distribution, editorial, and digital and social platforms.
Assist will embody advertising and marketing the AUSL and its athletes throughout MLB’s All-Star Sport and all through the postseason together with broadcasts on the MLB Community and streams on MLB.TV.
“That is one thing we’re actually enthusiastic about,” MLB commissioner Rob Manfred advised The Related Press. “We studied the house arduous. We predict it is an actual alternative and we’re excited to be concerned.”
Athletes Limitless has featured softball since 2020, when it unveiled a singular format that topped a person champion. The corporate will launch a four-team league beginning June 7 with the Bandits and Talons opening with a three-game collection in Rosemont, Illinois, and the Blaze and Volts a three-game set at Wichita, Kansas. The 4 groups will play 24 video games every, touring to 12 cities, and the highest two groups will compete within the best-of-three AUSL Championship from July 26-28 in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. A 21-game AUSL All-Star Cup will comply with in August.
A conventional city-based league will begin in 2026, when the AUSL plans to increase to 6 groups, in accordance with AU co-founder Jon Patricof.
“That is actually one thing that’s going to be sustainable and other people will be skilled softball gamers and that’s all they do,” U.S. nationwide crew infielder Sis Bates mentioned. “This may be your full-time profession, which is unbelievable.”
Athletes Limitless Softball League gamers Sharlize Palacios of the Talons and Sis Bates of the Bolts attend Main League Baseball’s headquarters in New York, Could 29, 2025.
(AP Picture/Richard Drew)
Manfred mentioned MLB thought of launching its personal softball league.
“We thought quite than beginning on our personal and competing, that discovering a spot the place we might make investments and develop a enterprise was a greater alternative,” Manfred mentioned.
Former Miami Marlins common supervisor and MLB senior vp Kim Ng joined AUSL as an adviser and was promoted to commissioner in April.
MLB’s involvement might drive softball towards superior analytics in the identical method because it has in baseball.
“TrackMan is in a number of the stadiums that we will be in,” she mentioned, referring to the radar system behind MLB Statcast. “We have signed on with various completely different analytics teams.”
MLB was inspired by development of the WNBA, Nationwide Girls’s Soccer League and NCAA girls’s basketball. MLB hasn’t dominated out later involvement in girls’s baseball.
‘What’s actually thrilling about that is us committing not only a monetary funding however sources and our time and form of the facility that’s MLB,” MLB chief advertising and marketing officer Uzma Rawn Dowler mentioned.
Patricof mentioned MLB’s help to spice up the AUSL’s visibility is as essential because the monetary funding.
“They’re dedicated to essentially elevating the AUSL,” he mentioned. “It is most likely about one of the crucial tough issues for any sports activities league to do which is to get visibility and break by means of to new audiences, and I feel MLB is already doing that for the AUSL, and there is going to be much more to return.”
Girls’s professional softball leagues and unbiased groups have come and gone through the years. The AUSL hopes for stability and has softball greats Cat Osterman, Jennie Finch, Jessica Mendoza and Natasha Watley as advisers.
MLB already helps a number of girls’s softball and baseball initiatives, together with a partnership with USA Softball and operation of the MLB Develops women baseball pipeline. It isn’t concerned with the Girls’s Skilled Baseball League, which plans to launch in 2026 as the primary professional baseball league for ladies because the All-American Ladies Skilled Baseball League – of “A League of Their Personal” fame – folded in 1954.
“I feel it is extra long-term factor,” MLB chief improvement officer Tony Reagins mentioned of girls’s baseball. “The expertise pool, the infrastructure, the organizations on the softball facet was forward of the baseball facet.”
Manfred sees a vibrant future forward for AUSL.
“We hope that we’ll find yourself with a league that’s sustainable by itself, an excellent funding for us, and a associate in rising diamond sports activities internationally,” he mentioned.
Patricof mentioned the partnership with MLB and the already current relationship between AU and USA Softball will mix to assist in giving the AUSL stability.
“As we announce MLB coming into the fold formally into what we’re doing with the AUSL, you actually see a full alignment of this sport behind this league, and that I feel is thrilling for everybody,” Patricof mentioned. “Individuals who have sat on the sidelines or possibly have watched professional softball from a little bit little bit of distance – all people’s now jumped in, and I feel that’s an thrilling second for individuals who’ve been round this sport.”
AP Baseball Author Ronald Blum contributed to this report.
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