Before she ever held a baseball bat, Brittany Apgar fell in love with a sound.
It started in the backyard, where her dad and brother played catch as the North Carolina light thinned into the evening. Pop! Pop!
“I remember hearing that pop in the glove,” Apgar says. It echoed through the house like a knock on the door. But would she—a girl born with limb difference—ever learn to play catch and make that same sound?
Apgar had 11 surgeries before the age of four to build the limb she has today. Surgeons removed bone from her left fibula to lengthen her right arm, crafted fingers from bones in her toes, and constructed a wrist joint that could hinge and flex. They didn’t build a prosthetic solution. They built possibility, giving Apgar enough range of motion to claim one throw, one catch, one swing at a time.
By age 11, she’d found her way onto a Greensboro rec league pitching mound. By adolescence, she’d survived every cut of a week-long baseball tryout and made her high school baseball team. Then the coach pulled her aside.
“You’re an amazing player,” he told her. “But you’ll never be strong enough or tall enough to play with men.”
The oft-quoted phrase says there’s no crying in baseball. But she cried anyway.
“It broke me,” Apgar says. “I felt humiliated. Like I had earned it, and it was taken away.”
It didn’t end her love for baseball, but it rerouted her path. She was heavily recruited by Greensboro College’s softball coach, and she excelled in her first season: 31 games, 13 runs, 13 stolen bases. The numbers added up, but the feeling didn’t.
“Softball is a great sport,” she says. “But baseball was my first love, and I missed it at the core of my heart.”
She reunited with her true passion in the most unexpected way, via a post on someone’s Instagram story.
Last spring, Justine Siegal—the first woman to coach for a Major League organization—announced the upcoming draft for the newly formed Women’s Pro Baseball League. Professional women’s baseball hasn’t existed in this country in more than 70 years. Not like this, with teams in four cities, full rosters, salaried players, and a commitment to prove what has been true all along; women belong here.
Apgar decided to register for the draft. She didn’t think she would get an invite to the tryout camp last August, figuring she was a forgotten name in a pool of thousands. Then the email came: She would have six months to get into shape.
“I put myself through hell to get my body ready,” Apgar says. “I hadn’t played [baseball] in years, and I thought there was no way I’d be able to keep up with the other competitors.”
She threw herself into the challenge. Weighted vest mornings. Hill sprints on her lunch breaks from the gym where she works as a personal trainer. Outdoor workouts after work in 101-degree heat. Nights in the gym with a former college wrestler pushing her limits—triceps dips and weighted pull-ups. Batting cages at midnight.
Every part of her body hurt, and on the days she questioned her own sanity, she dug deeper and leaned on the people who had always had her back. There was Joe, showing up to run the miles with her no matter the conditions (including a hurricane); Courtney, bringing food to work so she wouldn’t skip meals; Logan sneaking her into the batting cages; and her dad, working a 6-to-6 shift and still throwing batting practice until the sun disappeared behind the trees.
“There were days I was ready to throw in the towel,” says Apgar. “I was done. So I changed my phone’s lock screen to rotating pictures of everyone I loved. I want to be living proof that if you want it bad enough, you can have anything you want. You can overcome any obstacle as long as you want it bad enough.”
There were the inevitable comparisons to Jim Abbott, the big-league pitcher who, before Apgar was even born, proved it could be done with one hand. Apgar knows he was great, but what she’s doing is different. She’s doing it as a woman, in a world where the bar is higher and the margin for error is razor-thin, and where she’s been told in a hundred small ways she shouldn’t even be here.
Somewhere inside the soreness and the sweat, something shifted. The limitation didn’t disappear, but her relationship to it did. She wasn’t training to meet a standard anymore. She was training to meet the version of herself who believed she belonged.
“The training to get myself ready made me realize I have been putting myself in a box,” Apgar says. “The human body and mind are capable of amazing things if you can just change the way you view things. What you believe about yourself is what you are. That’s what going through this process has taught me.”
Making a Name for Herself
By the time Apgar reached Washington DC for tryouts, belief wasn’t a concept—it was muscle memory. Nationals Field didn’t feel like a dream. It felt like the address she’d claimed for half a year.
More than 600 players from 10 countries arrived for the chance to make history. The field included standouts like Kelsie Whitmore, a two-time Women’s Baseball World Cup silver medalist and Pan-Am Games gold medalist, and Ayami Sato, a five-time World Cup winner and three-time tournament MVP, whose velocity and command have made her one of the sport’s most feared pitchers. There was also Mo’ne Davis, who competed at the 2014 Little League World Series at 13 and became the first girl to win a game and pitch a shutout.
That’s the caliber of competition Apgar was up against. She arrived as what coaches call a “no-name”—a walk-on without collegiate headlines or media buzz, just an iron will and something to prove.
As groups were assigned, Apgar got sent first to the baserunning station—one of her best skills. When the drill began, she was the first to go.
“I love setting the tone,” she says. “High energy. High intensity. We’re here to ball. And being fast is my specialty.”
She took off on a home-to-first sprint. Apgar barely remembers touching the base, but she remembers hearing a coach with a stopwatch saying audibly: “Oh my god. Write that down!”
Next were the outfield drills: fly balls, one-hoppers, transfers. At one point another coach pulled her aside and told her, “Your transfer was so smooth I didn’t even realize you didn’t have a hand.”
Then came the batting cage. She’d spent six months working on her swing because she knew it made her uncomfortable. The first pitch was slower than she wanted, but she timed it, turned on it, and roped it down the third-base line—a one-hopper to the fence.
Not the pop of childhood, but the crack of arrival.
Every night, Apgar checked her email to see if she’d made it to the next day. Apgar watched as group after group got cut and started packing their bags. As it turns out, there is a lot of crying in baseball. But while some players were realizing the end of their dreams, Apgar’s phone kept buzzing with good news: You’ve survived another day.
Sunday brought run-throughs and sprint work so intense that players were getting visibly sick. Not Apgar. “I felt like I had more in the tank,” she says.
Sprints turned into cage work, which turned into outfield work, which turned into scrimmages. Just as she thought she didn’t have much to show for the day, someone hit a line drive. Apgar dove, and the ball found her glove. It was the first of four diving catches she made on the day.
“I was standing in the outfield looking up into the stands,” she remembers. “There was the smell of the grass, and it was just full circle. I felt like that little girl again—the girl that just fell in love with the sound of the game, hearing my dad in the back yard playing catch.”
She had stamped her ticket to draft day.
Welcome to the Show
When the WPBL held its draft on November 20, Apgar didn’t have to wait long to get selected. She went in Round 3 to Los Angeles, joining a roster that included the more heralded Sato and Davis.
As she heard her name called, Apgar was overcome with emotion. “It’s a feeling so hard to put into words,” she says. “It felt like it was always meant to happen, but getting to share my accomplishments with the people I cherish deeply who pushed me to get to this point, it was the best celebration. They say when you share joy, it doubles, and when you share sorrows, it cuts them in half. That couldn’t be more true. We jumped for joy. My mom cried. My dad was beaming with joy. My friends were all hugging me and picking me up. We made it!”
For Apgar, this story isn’t just about baseball. It’s about what people assume when they see difference. It’s about how much power there is in proving the premise wrong. She’s finally getting to play the sport she loves, at the level she grew to believe she could.
“I don’t think people mean to do this, but whenever somebody sees someone with a physical disability, they go to a place of sympathy,” Apgar says. “They assume I can’t swing a bat or catch a ball. Everywhere I go, I’m underestimated.”
But she isn’t trying to change minds by arguing with anyone. She changes them by stepping onto the field and playing with the best of the best, at a level that forces people to reconsider what they believe a person with limb difference—and a woman—can do on a baseball diamond.
“For the longest time, women have been severely underestimated,” she says. “To be a part of this sport again and to be paving the path for future generations of girls—it means more to me than I can comprehend.”
And for anyone who has doubted their own capabilities, Apgar offers this: “You are not meant to fit a mold. You are meant to bring something different to this world. You are valuable—more valuable than you could comprehend. Make mistakes. Make friends. Do things that scare you. You got this. I believe in you.”
Welcome to The Show, Britt.
