WATCH: Nothing will prepare you for the National Anthem at the first Women’s Pro Baseball League game

Absolutely nothing could have prepared me for the national anthem at the first-ever Women’s Pro Baseball League game tonight.

I’ve heard some rough anthems in my day, but this was a special kind of brutal, and I feel comfortable saying that if I ever got up there and sang it myself, it would somehow still come out better than what we all just witnessed.

Women’s Pro Baseball National Anthem

Absolutely nothing could have prepared me for the national anthem at the first Women’s Pro Baseball League tonight pic.twitter.com/3lEYRYNQTi

— Kendall Baker (@kendallbaker) August 2, 2026

Doesn’t get much worse than that, right? The whole thing was a disaster.

The sound was off, there was some inexplicable walking around happening, and the entire performance just felt bizarre and awful from start to finish. My personal favorite part was the broadcast cutting to a closeup of one of the players clearly trying not to completely lose it on camera. Honestly, I don’t blame her. It was that bad.

Part of This Is on the Performers, but the Bigger Blame Is on the League

Look, some of this obviously falls on whoever was up there singing. When you accept the responsibility of performing the anthem, especially at a historic first-ever game for a brand-new league, you’ve got to deliver.

That’s not the moment to fall apart.

The bigger share of the blame here goes to the league itself and the ops directors who signed off on this. You simply cannot let something like that represent your league on the single most important night of its existence.

This was the debut and the first impression. This was the moment where baseball fans were tuning in to see what the Women’s Pro Baseball League was all about, and the very first thing they got was an anthem that made everyone watching cringe.

Side Note: Okay no one was actually tuning in anyways, however if the first video from your new league is this one, then you’re in trouble. A viral video of three women butchering the anthem to kick things off? Come on lol.

Seriously though, how did this happen?

I have so many questions. Did they not hold auditions? Did somebody have the ops director by the balls and call in a favor? Did nobody in the entire organization listen to a single rehearsal beforehand?

If you knew ahead of time how this was going to sound and you let it happen anyway, that makes zero sense and if you didn’t know how it was going to sound, then that’s an even bigger failure on the operations side.

Maybe it was some kind of marketing scam, an intentionally bad performance designed to go viral and get people talking about the league. I honestly don’t know. If that’s the play, then I guess mission accomplished, because here I am writing about it.

If it wasn’t intentional, then it was just a flat-out embarrassing way to kick off what’s supposed to be a landmark moment for women’s sports.

A Rough First Impression for a League That Needs Good Ones

Here’s the thing that actually matters. A brand-new league needs every advantage it can get when it comes to attracting fans, and first impressions are everything.

The Women’s Pro Baseball League is trying to build something, trying to draw an audience, trying to prove it belongs. And a debut that has people talking about how terrible the anthem was instead of the actual baseball is not the way you do that.

That’s not going to attract fans to the league, you know? You want people walking away from the first game buzzing about the talent on the field, the atmosphere, the historic nature of the whole thing.

Instead, the conversation is about a genuinely rough anthem performance that overshadowed the moment. That’s a self-inflicted wound, and it’s exactly the kind of avoidable operational stumble a new league can’t afford in its infancy.

I want this league to succeed. Women’s baseball getting a professional platform is a great thing. I won’t be watching, obviously, but maybe I will next year when Major League Baseball is locked out? The time to attract fans is now and you can’t do that without tightening up the details.

You only get one debut, and tonight’s got hijacked by an anthem nobody’s going to forget for all the wrong reasons. Do better next time. The league, the players, and the fans deserve a cleaner first impression than that.

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