Baseball video game will feature women for the first time

For the first time, women will don Major League Baseball jerseys in MLB The Show, the long-running hit video game.

MLB The Show 24 introduces the ability to create and play as a female player in a reinvented version of the game’s career mode, Road to the Show, in which gamers follow the ascension of a custom character from the minors to the major leagues to steer. The game’s developer, Sony San Diego Studio, announced the new mode Tuesday.

The game, which will be released on March 19, calls the new career mode Road to the Show: Women Pave Their Way. It features a storyline that follows the rise of two women in the big leagues and delves into the unique challenges they face, according to Sony San Diego Studio.

MLB The Show joins other high-profile sports video game franchises that have transitioned to women, such as FIFA (now EA Sports FC) And NBA2K. But the gender dynamics in baseball are much more complicated, because most women and girls play softball.

Some hoped MLB The Show 24 would change that.

“I think especially in the United States, we’ve been brainwashed into thinking that boys play baseball and girls play softball, when in reality both exist in both worlds,” said Veronica Alvarez, manager of the USA Baseball Women’s National Team, which is competing this year Women’s Baseball World Cup.

Ms. Alvarez, herself a former national team player, and some of her players provided Sony input into the game’s development.

Women playing baseball isn’t exactly new: Toni Stone is credited with being the first woman to play alongside men in the Negro Leagues, and women’s baseball leagues have come and gone in the United States over the years. The movie “A League of Their Own” popularized a women’s professional league that emerged during World War II.

Despite societal expectations to pursue softball, women are staking a greater claim in the male-dominated sport of baseball.

There are no women in the major leagues, but a growing number of girls are playing the sport, whether or not alongside boys totally girl ploughing. A few even went on to play on men’s teams in college.

Some, like Ms. Alvarez, have found a career in… Coaching minor league teams. In 2020, Kim Ng became the first general manager of a Major League team.

The Atlantic League, an independent minor league affiliated with Major League Baseball, recently welcomed its first female player, Kelsie Whitmore, a 25-year-old pitcher. Her personal story is used in Road to the Show: Women Paving Their Way.

“It’s becoming more and more common for women to get further and further into the sport,” says 20-year-old Olivia Pichardo, who last year the first woman to play NCAA Division I college baseball.

Ms. Pichardo, who grew up playing MLB The Show and shared her personal experiences with the developers, hoped it would give young girls the opportunity to see baseball as a viable option.

Lisa Fernandez, a UCLA coach and softball pitcher whose three gold medals earned her a place in the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Hall of Fame, said the representation of women in a baseball video game showed how far they had come since Title IX opened the doors to them in college sports in 1972.

“I think it just makes a statement,” Ms. Fernandez said, although she noted that women still have a long way to go to have the same professional opportunities as men, whether they play baseball, softball or another sport.

Ms. Alvarez, 40, said the Colorado Silver Bullets, an all-female professional team that briefly competed against men in the 1990s, was the only example of women in baseball she could remember from her childhood.

“I saw one game on TV, and that was the only representation I ever saw growing up of a girl or woman playing baseball, other than me of course and the only girl in Little League that I played in,” said madam. Alvarez said.

She didn’t know there was a women’s national team until she was an adult, when it happened to pop up after she searched Google for the Silver Bullets. “And that brought me to USA Baseball, which meant I got to play eight more years and extend my career,” Ms. Alvarez said, adding, “It shows you how important it is to see someone who looks like you do.”

A more inclusive video game can have that kind of power too.

Jillian Albayati, 19, a baseball pitcher and national team member, said MLB The Show was wildly popular among young players. It’s one of the few video games she’s played, she said.

“It shows me how far I can really go,” Ms. Albayati said, imagining her thoughts if she had seen women in the game as a child. “It gives me even bigger dreams that I already have.

“It makes me believe they can become a reality.”