For the first time, women will wear Major League Baseball jerseys on MLB The Show, the long-running hit video game.
MLB The Show 24 will debut the option to create and play a female player in a revamped version of the game’s career mode, Road to the Show, in which players direct a custom character’s ascent from the minors to the major leagues. The game’s developer, Sony San Diego Studio, announced the new feature on 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 story that follows two women’s rise to the major leagues and touches on the unique challenges they face, according to Sony San Diego Studio.
MLB The Show joins other high-profile female-turned sports video game franchises, such as FIFA (now EA Sports FC) and NBA 2K. But the gender dynamic in baseball is much more complicated because most women and girls play softball.
Some hoped MLB The Show 24 would help change that.
“I think in the United States especially, we’ve been brainwashed into thinking that boys play baseball and girls play softball, when in reality they both exist in both worlds,” said Veronica Alvarez, manager of the US National Baseball Team. USA, which will participate in this year’s Women’s Baseball World Cup.
Ms. Alvarez, a former national team player, and some of her players provided Sony with input on the development of the game.
Women playing baseball is nothing new — Toni Stone is credited with becoming 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 professional women’s league that emerged during World War II.
Despite societal expectations to follow 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, either alongside boys or even on girls’ teams. Some have even played on men’s teams in college.
Some, like Ms. Alvarez, have found careers coaching small 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 based on Road to the Show: Women Paving Their Way.
“It’s becoming more and more common for women to go farther and farther in the sport,” said Olivia Pichardo, 20, who last year became the first woman to play NCAA Division I college baseball.
Ms Pichardo, who grew up playing MLB The Show and shared her personal experience with developers, hoped to see it empower young girls to see baseball as a viable option.
Lisa Fernandez, the UCLA coach and softball pitcher whose three gold medals earned her a spot 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 the Title IX opened the doors to college sports in 1972.
“I think it just makes a statement,” Ms. Fernandez said, though she noted that women still have a long way to go to have the same career 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 with men in the 1990s, was the only example of women in baseball she could recall in her childhood.
“I saw a game on TV and that was the only representation I ever saw growing up of a girl or a woman playing baseball outside of me obviously and the only girl in Little League that I played in,” Ms. Alvarez said.
She didn’t know there was a women’s national team until she was an adult, when it came up by chance after Googling the Silver Bullets. “And that led me to USA Baseball, which meant I got to play and extend my career for another eight years,” Ms. Alvarez said, adding, “It shows you how important it is to see someone who looks like does”.
A more immersive video game can also have this kind of power.
Gillian Albayati, 19, a baseball player and member of the national team, said MLB The Show was extremely popular among young players. It’s one of the few video games he’s played, he said.
“It lets me see how far I can really go,” Ms. Albayati said, picturing 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 come true.”
