Ashton Lansdell is debuting for the Los Angeles Queens in the Women’s Pro Baseball League, and Martha and the Vandellas is part of how she frames the moment. The league is the first women’s pro baseball league since 1954, and Lansdell enters it as the Queens’ captain before Saturday’s opener.
Drafted seventh overall in December, she brings a résumé that already includes the Savannah Bananas, the U.S. women’s national team in 2018, and a regional title in 2019 at Wheeler High School in Marietta, Ga. She also has a large leg tattoo that reads “dream until it’s your reality,” a line she got at 19 and has carried into this start.
Lansdell’s 7th-overall path
At Wheeler High School in Marietta, Ga., Lansdell was the first girl to pitch at the 7A level and led the school to a regional title in 2019. She later made the U.S. women’s national team in 2018, then played junior college ball her freshman year before tearing an anterior cruciate ligament.
She has said she always believed she would become a professional baseball player. “I’ve always trusted my gut and my intuition, and I always knew that I was going to be a professional baseball player of some sort.”
From softball to back to baseball
Lansdell switched to softball because it was the only way to get a college scholarship, then played two seasons at Florida International before finishing her career at Mississippi. That route kept her in the game, but it also pushed her away from the one she says she wanted first.
“So like, once I think I felt that at a very young age, I was like, this is what I’m gonna do,” she said. “I don’t care what anyone says. No one’s gonna stop me.”
Brittany Apgar on the Queens
Brittany Apgar, a Queens outfielder, said she was honored to learn from Lansdell. “She has D1 college experience, and even though it’s softball, that’s huge,” Apgar said. “I’m honored to learn from someone like her; like, getting the chance to be around an athlete like that is amazing.”
Lansdell was 11 for 15 with two doubles and two home runs for the tournament-winning U.S. at a women’s baseball World Cup, and that kind of production gives the Queens a player who can carry a lineup in a league trying to prove itself fast. The opener on Saturday is the first real test, and the more useful question is whether the Queens can turn her return to baseball into early wins.
“The fact that this all is coming true just goes to show that I’m on the right path,” Lansdell said. “But the fact that we now have our own league for women in baseball again is just so special.”
