KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Alex Hugo has grown accustomed to the reaction when she tells people she plays for the USA Baseball Women’s National Team.
“Usually, they try to correct me and say, ‘Oh, softball,’” Hugo said with an easygoing smile, “but obviously not everybody knows about it.”
Hugo, a 2012 Olathe South graduate, has an impressive softball résumé.
She was the Sunflower League Player of the Year as a high school senior and went on to become a two-time All-American at the University of Georgia, where she hammered a school-record 25 home runs as a sophomore in 2014.
After college, Hugo played professionally for the Akron Racers from 2016-17, but she’s also been building a remarkable baseball résumé.
Hugo led Team USA to a gold medal at the 2019 COPABE Women's Pan-American Championships and earned MVP honors after slashing .652/.742/1.391 with four home runs, 18 RBIs, 20 runs scored and six stolen bases in seven games.
She also won the 2019 USA Baseball Sportswoman of the Year Award, but the transition from softball to baseball wasn’t always smooth.
“I played professionally for softball right after Georgia, but that league actually ended up folding,” Hugo said. “Obviously, there are other professional leagues, but one of the girls that played in the league messaged me on Instagram and was like, ‘Hey, you should try out for USA Baseball.’”
Hugo decided to give it a shot despite a relatively steep learning curve, given that she had never played baseball until the tryout.
“It was like a whole other world,” Hugo said. “I haven't played (baseball) since I was young, so it's not like that second nature feeling still as softball would be. But I think I’m easing into it.”
Just as in Major League Baseball, the bases are 90 feet apart and the mound is 60 feet, 6 inches from home plate in the women’s game, making it feel like a different game altogether from softball.
“The biggest transition was timing-wise for hitting and also you have to run a lot further, which is terrible,” Hugo said with a laugh. “... The distance portion of it was really kind of trippy to me.”
After overcoming some initial struggles and becoming a masher in her second year with Team USA, Hugo said she felt like she “found my groove within baseball” before the COVID-19 pandemic largely canceled the last three years of international play and stalled that progress.
That makes the WBSC Women's Baseball World Cup — which started Tuesday and continues through Saturday with Group A action in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada — a special event as it marks Hugo’s return to competitive international play.
The USA Baseball Women’s National Team opened Tuesday against Australia and has four more games this week — South Korea (Aug. 9), Canada (Aug. 10), Mexico (Aug. 11) and Hong Kong (Aug. 12) — as it tries to qualify for next year's WBSC World Cup.
“We want to rule the entire world, in our minds, so anything I can do to help get us to that goal and qualify for next year for the World Cup would be ideal, in my mind,” she said.
As part of her baseball journey, Hugo also has made a name for herself on the Home Run Derby circuit, teaming up with former major-league players for competitions.
“The Home Run Derby has been so much fun,” Hugo said. “I went into it feeling a little pressure on myself, but those guys — especially Nick Swisher and Johnny Gomes, they were the OGs with us last year when they started this — they are so supportive of us. ... I think it's kind of like we can intermingle the worlds [of men’s and women’s baseball] a little bit, and it was really fun.”
Hugo’s even developed a signature move as she walks into the box — turning her hat backward before dropping prodigious bombs.
“One, because if I keep it forward, it's really hard for me to see,” Hugo said. “Two, now it's kind of like my thing, so I have to do it. ... It's like — you go into the cage, you're trying to hit some bombs, you’ve got to have the swagger with it.”
Nearly 70 years after the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, made famous by the 1992 Penny Marshall movie “A League of Their Own,” Hugo is part of a new generation of female baseball players still hoping to establish the sport as more than a curiosity.
“As many people as I can tell, hopefully we can draw them to watch what we're doing,” Hugo said. “I think then we could get more momentum behind it and then it won't seem like such an abnormal thing that we play baseball.”
Perhaps it will even become an Olympic sport in the future.
“Maybe one day,” Hugo said. “Maybe not my time, but hopefully soon.”
Despite only playing three seasons with the Bulldogs, Hugo graduated with the second-most bombs (56) in program history.
She also hit 15 as a freshman at the University of Kansas before transferring to Georgia, where she owns career records for slugging percentage (.779) and sacrifice flies (12) and also remains in the career top 10 for runs scored (179), RBIs (184), total bases (395), walks (133), on-base percentage (.482), extra-base hits (103) and assists (295).
Hugo married her former Bulldogs teammate, Taylor Schlopy, and the couple has a son, a left-handed toddler named Finn.
—
