Former Dodgers exec Kim Ng is taking softball to

There’s no crying in baseball, but Kim Ng works in softball now. And as commissioner of the Athletes Unlimited Softball League, the previous Dodgers assistant common supervisor has been fielding heaps of tearful suggestions from followers overcome by the fact that softball gamers finally, finally have a big league of their own.

“I can’t even tell you the number of people that have approached me, just openly sobbing with happiness,” she said. “It’s been incredible, experiencing all of that and understanding how long people have been waiting for something like this.”

It actually is like that. Ask Lisa Fernandez, softball pioneer and complete boss: “I’ll be watching and get emotional, just looking at how far this game has come.”

With MLB backing the Athletes Unlimited Softball League, or AUSL, for a second season and Ng back to steer it, sustainable skilled softball is beginning to really feel real.

Fernandez remembers when it was a enormous deal to get one softball sport on TV, and now ESPN will broadcast 50 AUSL video games and ABC will carry the championship. And after last yr’s four-team 10-city barnstorming tour, the league will add two groups and anchor itself to areas in North Carolina, Illinois, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas and Utah.

The ball will get rolling on Tuesday, just days after the conclusion of the Women’s College World Series — which last season averaged a file 1.3 million viewers on ESPN, including pulling 3.9 million for UCLA’s thriller against Tennessee.

Big steps, child steps. All going the correct direction.

“I would hope that we are the major league baseball of softball,” Ng, 57, said in a telephone dialog. “That is a good number of teams, spread out across the country, with a huge following, all of our games televised.

“That’s the goal. To be the MLB of softball.”

Ng spent more than 30 years in the MLB, including a decade-long stint with the Dodgers. She was also the first lady to serve as a big-league common supervisor, main the Miami Marlins from 2020 through the 2023 season. She declined her option after the staff made its first full-season playoff look in 20 years and then announced plans to introduce a president of baseball operations place that would’ve siphoned away some of her say-so.

Miami Marlins common manger Kim Ng, left, sits in a golf cart and talks with supervisor Marlins Skip Schumaker during a 2023 spring training workout.

(Lynne Sladky / Associated Press)

“Breaking that glass ceiling, that’s special to me,” Ng said. “But I think in a different way, this [work with the AUSL] is for sure one of the more meaningful things I’ve done.”

She said a former MLB colleague not too long ago requested her about the AUSL: “I said, ‘I’m working for the women now.’”

The former co-worker corrected her: “You were always working for the women.’”

Before that, as a child, she was a softball infielder in Long Island and then at the University of Chicago. “I was scrappy,” Ng said, “which is definitely how I describe my personality and the way I approach most things in life.”

It’s served her effectively. And now it’s serving softball, a sport that for a long time has been among the most in style for ladies in America, even without long-term taking part in prospects or professional gamers to try to emulate.

Compare it with basketball: About three-quarters of the WNBA’s current gamers have never even lived in a world without an established skilled girls’s basketball league in America.

UCLA star hitter Megan Grant will play in the Athletes Unlimited softball league after wrapping up her record-setting school profession.

(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)

The NBA-backed WNBA is celebrating its thirtieth season this summer season with a profitable new CBA and 15 groups, two of them growth franchises, including one in Canada, and the Bay Area-based Golden State Valkyries valued at $850 million.

The AUSL is about to embark on Year 2.

There have been makes an attempt to start up skilled softball leagues before. Those weren’t just long pictures, more like Megan Grant moonshots.

But now we have now Bryanna Lopez, a 12-year-old catcher from Alhambra, sitting in the Easton Stadium stands at UCLA, watching her heroes play and telling me, without hesitation: “I want to play professional softball. It’s a really big dream.”

And a actually big deal.

For gamers and a growing viewers of people like Kaitlyn Laabs, the superfan in a chef’s hat at UCLA video games, who need to watch the home run queen Grant continue to mash. To see her teammates Jordan Woolery keep flaunting her flashy slash line and Taylor Tinsley sharpening her depraved arsenal of pitches.

UCLA beginning pitcher Taylor Tinsley and first baseman Jordan Woolery are poised to start their skilled softball careers this week.

(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)

“A lot of times, seniors come in their last year thinking it’s the end of their career, and that puts a lot more pressure,” UCLA’s Woolery said earlier this month, before the Bruins superior to the Women’s College World Series for the third straight season. “So, for me, Megan, Tins, [the AUSL] opens us up a little bit to play free, knowing it’s not the end of the road.”

Ng’s presence, first as an adviser and beginning last season as commissioner, is serving to legitimize the new league.

“She’s the right person at the right time,” said Fernandez, the UCLA affiliate head coach, who is also the overall supervisor of the defending champion Utah Talons. “Knowing Kim’s background in baseball, having her know the business of how to run a league, a no-brainer for me.”

Ng’s team-building acumen is serving to her coach up first-time common managers. Her expertise at MLB’s league workplace, working to grow the sport internationally, ensures she’ll be affected person, methodical — which is to say, the AUSL is not dashing to be part of the Sparks and the National Women’s Soccer League’s Angel City FC in the difficult, aggressive L.A. market until it’s good and prepared.

“Softball just has had its ups and downs in terms of creating a solid foundation,” Ng said. “Why has it taken so long? It’s hard to say, but obviously the revenue is a huge piece of it. Now, with MLB as a major investor, they’re understanding of the idea that we’re complementary.”

MLB has invested a reported $10 million in the AUSL — in addition to offering its large promotional platform. So after Grant hit an NCAA record-extending thirty ninth home run, the No. 4 total decide was interviewed by Harold Reynolds on “MLB Tonight.”

Beside Grant, who is certain for the Portland Cascade, there will probably be 12 other former Bruins sprinkled among the league’s six rosters. Woolery and Tinsley will staff up with a few other former Bruins on the Talons.

“You’d lose a generation of players if the growth is capped,” said Laabs, the softball fan. “But right now, softball is on a rocket ship. Let’s keep on cooking, let’s keep on flying, let’s show that if you build it, they will come.”