LIVERMORE — Growing up in Livermore, Arwen McCullough always had a love affair with baseball, even if she stepped away from the sport she had played since childhood for a two-year stint on the Granada High School softball team.
Upon arrival at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, inspired by all the student-run clubs on campus, McCullough turned her attention back to hardball. Three years after starting a women’s college club baseball team from scratch, McCullough is among 127 players in line to be selected in the inaugural Women’s Professional Baseball League (WPBL) draft Nov. 20.
The WPBL’s four founding teams — representing San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and Boston — are set to draft 30 players each during the 5 p.m. (PT) event that is scheduled to be streamed live on the league’s Instagram, YouTube and TikTok channels. Live updates are expected to be provided on the WPBL website at WPBL: Women’s Pro Baseball League, as well as on social-media site X.
With only 15 roster spots allotted for each of the teams that are scheduled to begin play in May on the East Coast, drafted players will still face significant odds to become inaugural members of the WPBL. That is not likely to faze McCullough, who reached into her own pocket to finance travel to Washington for the league’s Aug. 22-25 tryouts, where she survived two rounds of cuts from a field that included more than 600 players.
Named after a character from “The Lord of the Rings,” and having grown up in a home featuring cats named Luke and Obi-Wan after the “Star Wars” characters, McCullough learned baseball right along with her father, Steven.
A planned trip to her family’s native Scotland for McCullough’s 13th birthday never took place because she was busy playing baseball. A San Francisco Giants fan from childhood, McCullough played baseball with boys despite feeling the extra pressure of being the only girl. She never stopped dreaming of pitching, even during her softball sojourn.
When McCullough went to Cal Poly as a freshman, the club baseball team she started numbered only three players. Now there are enough to field a full squad of nine. McCullough runs everything, and “it has been absolutely worth it,” she said.
The Cal Poly’s women’s club team captured this year’s national championship by beating Southern California twice and UC Davis once in the Baseball for All college final in Petaluma.
McCullough recruited all the team members.
“When she wants something, she’s committed,” Cal Poly teammate Kendra Wise said. “Like coming here (to Washington), training for something, training for marathons. It’s very motivating, because sometimes I get stuck … on the idea of having to do this thing. Then she’s like ‘OK, so we have to go book our flights, go do this, start practicing once a day.’ It’s a good dynamic.”
On the field, McCullough looks the part, talks the part and means business.
During tryouts at the Washington Nationals Youth Baseball Academy, she wore a navy San Luis Obispo Blues baseball cap with the abbreviation “SLO” in yellow letters on the front. The cap covered most of her short, blonde hair. This summer, she interned with the Blues, a wooden-bat summer team that competes in the California Collegiate Baseball League, as part of her recreation, parks, and tourism administration major requirements. McCullough picked sports management as her concentration.
Her pink sunglasses featured bright, solid gold shades. She wears them outside most of the time, as well as a Christian cross around her neck.
While very serious and focused on the task at hand, McCullough was also quick to joke, compliment and help others. If she was nervous, it was impossible to tell.
On the first day of the WPBL tryouts, McCullough was there to help three other Cal Poly players get ready. Her own tryout wasn’t until the next day.
She hit fungoes to her college teammates on one of the side fields used for shared warm-ups. She found time to buy packs of Gatorade so that players and coaches could stay hydrated in the heat — and made sure the bottles remained in the shade. She used a spare bat to get balls unstuck from the top of the batting cages.
It was readily apparent that McCullough wanted to maximize everyone’s chances to succeed and have a good time, even if it had meant that she didn’t make the first round of cuts.
When McCullough’s tryout arrived, she gave it everything she had, on the mound, elsewhere on the field and at the plate.
One curveball she threw in the bullpen caused Japanese women’s pitching legend Ayami Sato to make the umpire’s strike call, in a sign of approval.
When McCullough’s pitching tryout was over, she sprinted from the bullpen on the right-field side to the third-base dugout to get the proper glove for the outfield. Then she raced to the outfield, looking very much the part of a ballplayer who belongs.
She fired a laser beam from center field to home plate. Had it been a real game, a runner trying to score from second base likely would have been out by a mile.
Against a pitching machine that had been giving hitters fits for two days, McCullough was one of the few to make contact with every pitch. She put five of the six pitches into fair territory, with four reaching the outfield.
The next day, pitching in a simulated game, McCullough retired the side while allowing one run and walking one.
At Nationals Park the following day, Arwen wore a red WPBL T-shirt, dressed in a full baseball uniform, ready to take the field.
“Play ball!” the public-address announcer cried. The crowd cheered, and somewhere in the first-base dugout, McCullough did, too.