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Obviously, it’s a rarity in this space when MLB’s business activities are brought up and not immediately ripped apart for some deserved transgression. So hey, let’s enjoy something happening where I’m leaning far more toward, “huh, neat” than “what’s their goal, here?” with eyes narrowed.
I’m speaking of, as the headline already alerted you to, Major League Baseball’s significant investment in the Athletes Unlimited Softball League, or AUSL. Last summer, I wrote about the AUSL for Baseball Prospectus, in a piece titled “Athletes Unlimited and a New Model for Pro Sports.” Here’s a bit of that to get you up to speed on the league and my thoughts on it:
Athletes Unlimited Pro Softball formed in 2020, and it’s extremely player-focused in just about every way. The league has investors, not team owners, and those investors have a cap on their returns, with the athletes themselves sharing in the profits. The players are also involved in day-to-day decision making of the Athletes Unlimited women’s leagues, decisions like the introduction of a condensed season tournament in June, which was introduced in 2022. That tourney is known as AUX, the most recent of which was played last month in Wichita, Kansas, for 18 games. Also last month came the announcement that there are plans for a multi-city league beginning in 2025, though the first year will feature the league’s four teams traveling around to multiple cities, with ESPN as a national broadcasting partner.
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It’ll be fascinating to see how the city-based league works out, given it’ll have to be different than this week-by-week format for the Championship Season and AUX, but more opportunities for professional softball players to play, to be paid, to be recognized, and to get to be on television and play in front of fans, seems like it’s to the good in a vacuum. And we know city-based sports work, so that’s not an issue, but the thing that initially drew me to keep looking into Athletes Unlimited was certainly how different it all was. I saw part of last month’s AUX tournament while sitting in a bar that had an ESPN variant on one of their televisions, and was confused by the fact that, where a team name should be, there was what I was pretty sure was a person’s last name. A suspicion which was confirmed when I got a look at the back of one of the pitcher’s jerseys—she just happened to be the team captain, as well. My wife and I both took out our phones and started reading up on just what we were watching without sound in this bar, and now I’m here, awaiting the Championship Season, wondering how it’ll feel to pay attention to this from start to finish.
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AU’s whole format is not going to be for everyone, but there’s something here that drew me in almost immediately. And that Athletes Unlimited has had and will continue to have ESPN’s attention, that they’re now the home of former MLB executive Kim Ng—who kicked off July by joining the league as a senior advisor—and that they’re expanding to have a city-based league, as well, all seems like it’s to the good. This is the players’ show, in every aspect, and it’s hard not to take an interest in that considering how often I find myself complaining about everyone involved in sports leagues that aren’t one. The players are the reason we watch sports, aren’t they? Your chosen team is just a name, an idea, without them. AU seems to be taking that to the extreme, but it seems to be working for everyone involved to this point, and with promise left to fulfill, too.
MLB announced that it was a “strategic” investment, north of 20 percent, with the idea being that they would rather put money into an established product than start something from the ground up. Kim Ng’s presence as commissioner of AUSL seems to have helped MLB along in the decision to actually put money into the league, as well, which is not a surprise at all given that she used to work in the league office before she took over the Marlins’ front office (and subsequently left after disagreements with ownership over her wanting to do things like “try and improve the team.”)
Commissioner Rob Manfred told the Athletic that “This is one of the biggest investments that we’ve made in an outside entity, ever. Our goal is to get a softball league into the same position of stability that the WNBA has found.” While the NBA owns 60 percent of the W and invests heavily into it to aid it in its growth — which has escalated over the past few years to the point that the players have opted out of their collective bargaining agreement the last two times they were able to, in order to renegotiate terms that make more sense with the current realities — other men’s sports leagues have not followed suit to the same degree with their women’s sports counterparts (Hell, it was only after the 2021 NCAA Basketball Tournament that the women’s side was even allowed to call their version of it “March Madness” in branding, nearly two decades after UConn’s undefeated women’s team set ratings records on ESPN while also surpassing the men’s game’s own ratings.) There are good reasons to be skeptical about MLB’s involvement in… anything. But that they see AUSL as something worthy of investment is heartening.
Remember the note from the quoted text, that said that the AUSL doesn’t have owners, but investors, and that it’s heavily player-focused and player-driven? Those investments are capped, which means MLB can invest 20 percent, yes, but their return on that investment is not some hypothetical infinite figure. If the AUSL makes high revenues, they can surely make more, too, but the players basically only benefit if MLB is in a position where they’re making money on this investment.
I’m a little wary of how this all plays into the One Baseball initiative, because I’m also a person who assumes that, in the end, Diamond Baseball Holdings is going to sell their amassed collection of minor-league teams directly to MLB, permanently ending the idea that there’s any actual structural separation between MLB and MiLB, but MLB getting its claws into softball is overall probably a good thing, since one of the major issues with women’s leagues, historically, has been that the financial support sometimes isn’t there, and it keeps them from getting the kind of foothold they need for the permanency that something like the WNBA has. Even something as popular as women’s soccer in the United States has seen leagues rise and fall, which the sustained success of the women’s national team has sometimes obscured. A pro softball league that already has ESPN’s attention now has MLB’s, as well, and their money, too. There are far worse fates for a sports league trying to become a fixture.
Long-term, I do wonder if there’s a (positive) trickle-down effect here. Meaning, if AUSL can grow enough to be seen as a viable way to play softball professionally for a larger group of athletes than it is now, does that increase support for softball further down the ladder? I’m coaching my daughter’s softball team this season, and the difference in support from Little League for the girls’ teams and leagues vs. the boys’ teams and leagues is stark: the boys have more fields to choose from, they have far more equipment provided to them rather than being the responsibility of parents to acquire, they have more teams in town to play against — most of our schedule is made up of actual road games where we have to drive to different towns in Maine to play an opponent, and those opponents are not always age-appropriate, either, with teams made up of many second and third graders facing off against entire teams of fifth graders on occasion, but it’s what can be rallied as competition. If softball in the future is seen as a more significant deal than it is now, in no small part because the likes of ESPN and MLB got behind the AUSL, than it’s possible this reality changes a bit, and we see the sport, as a whole, taken more seriously at every level. This is anecdotal, but these softball-related problems do not exist for my daughter’s soccer and basketball leagues, which seem to be on par with the boys already.
Much to think about, but in a sincere, not ironic, way. AUSL is worth checking out, though, regardless of what might come next, so you should do so when it airs on ESPN this summer, or on MLB Network and MLB.tv, now that those will be options for games on occasion, too.
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