Main League Baseball is buying an fairness stake within the Athletes Limitless Softball League, partnering with the fledgling league that’s making ready for its first four-team season and plans to increase additional in future years.
With annual girls’s sports activities revenues now in extra of $1 billion a yr, the imprimatur of MLB helps set up the AUSL as a viable long-term entity in a sport that has seen a number of skilled leagues fold. MLB’s stake within the AUSL is greater than 20%, based on a supply, and the league will help the AUSL in advertising and marketing and content material distribution along with the monetary part.
“It is a watershed second for professional girls’s softball, professional girls’s sports activities,” Athletes Limitless CEO and co-founder Jon Patricof informed ESPN. “It is a monetary funding but additionally about a variety of issues that cash cannot purchase.”
Whereas the NBA launched the WNBA in 1996 and owns round 60% of the league, no main males’s North American skilled sports activities league had made a major post-creation funding in its girls’s counterpart. The AUSL is owned by Athletes Limitless, which additionally runs girls’s basketball and volleyball leagues and has hosted softball occasions for the previous 5 years in suburban Chicago. The AUSL will characteristic 4 groups and play in 12 places this summer season, and in 2026, it plans to determine groups primarily based in cities.
“We predict the time is true to get into the house with a reputable associate,” mentioned Tony Reagins, MLB’s chief baseball growth officer. “We wish this to be not good however nice. We need to create extra alternatives for younger girls. Now they’ve one thing to try for that is going to be round.”
Already the AUSL struck a cope with ESPN to broadcast 33 video games this summer season, and the partnership with MLB will air video games on MLB Community — together with one on June 7, the league’s opening day — and MLB.television. All 72 of the AUSL’s video games, Patricof mentioned, will probably be on linear TV. Moreover, AUSL gamers will attend MLB’s All-Star Sport and postseason to assist develop consciousness about girls’s skilled softball.
In 2002, MLB partnered with Nationwide Professional Fastpitch — a league that existed for 18 years with restricted media distribution — however didn’t make a major funding because it has with the AUSL.
“Clearly they imagine within the alternative that exists within the enterprise of girls’s sports activities,” Patricof mentioned. “But additionally clearly see how essential it’s to help the game in any respect ranges. Hopefully, in some unspecified time in the future, the AUSL can profit MLB, however within the brief time period, it’s totally a lot about how MLB can profit professional girls’s softball.”
Discussions on a deal began in 2024, when the AUSL was related with MLB commissioner Rob Manfred and deputy commissioner for enterprise and media Noah Backyard. In April 2025, the AUSL employed Kim Ng — the previous Miami Marlins basic supervisor who spent practically a decade working beneath Manfred — because the league’s commissioner.
“We watched how they went about their enterprise,” Reagins mentioned. “Very inventive. They took some dangers. And the management group was stable.”
Although MLB will proceed to help applications encouraging women to play baseball, Reagins mentioned, the scale of softball audiences was unattainable to disregard. The Ladies’s School World Collection has drawn sturdy rankings lately, and with AUSL drafting gamers from this school season to enhance among the sport’s largest names becoming a member of the league as advisers — amongst them Jennie Finch, Cat Osterman and ESPN analyst Jessica Mendoza — the AUSL hopes bringing collectively previous and current results in a greater future for the game.
“That is simply getting began,” Patricof mentioned. “We have put all these items collectively, we launch June 7, however it’s nonetheless extremely early days in the place we envision the AUSL going. We have got all the suitable items in place, and now it is a query of us executing, rising alongside our companions, the gamers, and actually constructing what we predict followers and athletes deserve.”