Women’s Baseball Does Not Need a Smaller Game

Seven innings. Metal bats. Shortened fences.

WPBL player Ashton Lansdell described the league’s main differences from men’s professional baseball this way: seven innings instead of nine, metal or composite bats, and an outfield fence brought inward. Public descriptions differ on the exact fence distances, but they agree that the outfield is intentionally shortened.

Those choices follow conventions that exist elsewhere in women’s baseball. They are still choices.

DAO Baseball League is making a different one.

Baseball is bigger than the home run.

A professional league does not need to manufacture more home runs to prove that its athletes are worth watching.

Baseball is pitching, defense, baserunning, plate discipline, situational hitting, endurance and strategy. A ball that stays in the park can create a better baseball play than a ball that leaves it. Fewer home runs are not evidence of a lesser game.

Elite sport is supposed to set a demanding standard and give athletes the opportunity to rise to it.

Different athlete category. Same sport. No diminished version of it.

Our women will play the full professional game.

DAO Baseball League will play nine innings, use wood bats, keep 90-foot bases and the 60-foot-6-inch pitching distance, and use full professional baseball outfields. There will be no women-specific temporary fence brought inward.

Major League Baseball’s rulebook states that professional parks constructed after June 1, 1958 generally require at least 325 feet down the foul lines and 400 feet to center, although approved exceptions exist. Our fields will be built to professional baseball geometry, not a reduced women’s version of it.

That creates another practical advantage: interoperability. Our women should be able to walk onto a professional men’s baseball field and play without altering the stadium. A men’s professional team should be able to use ours the same way.

The standard is the standard.

Women’s baseball does not need to imitate men’s baseball culturally, commercially or institutionally. It can build its own teams, traditions, governance and identity.

But the dimensions of excellence do not need to be lowered simply because the athletes are women.

Train for the field. Build strength. Develop power. Run the bases. Turn doubles. Throw runners out. Pitch deep into games. Make the complete sport the spectacle.