jen pawol's path to making mlb history

the first woman to umpire a major league baseball game has been a long time coming

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I published a piece on the WNBA and dildogate at Andscape this weekend. You can read it here: “By using the sex toy to make their point, the stunt becomes more than just an annoyance or a danger during play — it becomes a sexualized threat to the women on the court, an allusion to violence that can keep them in their place.”

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jen pawol’s path to making mlb history

On Saturday, Jen Pawol made history by becoming the first woman to umpire a Major League Baseball game. She donated her cap to the Baseball Hall of Fame. The fact that it has taken this long at all is shameful, and I thought it would be useful to contextualize this achievement. Pawol has worked in pro baseball for a long time, working her way through the minor league system before being promoted to The Show.

But Pawol is one in a long line of women who fought against baseball’s glass ceiling for nearly a century. Back in 2018, I wrote several stories on the challenges that women faced in breaking into umpiring, which I want to share again now. One of those stories, a feature for Bitch Magazine (RIP) that I traveled to umpire school to write, is no longer online, so I am reprinting it here.

• On February 26, 2008, an all-female crew umpired a game featuring a major league team for the first time. It was a Spring Training game between the New York Mets and the University of Michigan’s baseball team. For the 10th anniversary of that game, I spoke to three of the four women on that crew, Perry Barber, Ila Valcarcel, Mona Osborne and Theresa Cox Fairlady. Here’s how I contextualized that game at the time, in 2018:
  
  “It’s been 10 years since those women became part of baseball history. In the time since that game, there hasn’t been another an all-female crew at a game featuring a major league team. There has still never been an all-female crew at an official major league spring training game (“Because this was an MLB vs. non-MLB game, it is considered an exhibition game and did not count against spring training stats and standings,” Cory Schwartz, VP of Stats for MLB.com told me). A woman has yet to umpire in the majors. Eight women have umpired in affiliated leagues (Fairlady is one of them), and there are currently two women umpiring in the minors — the most there has ever been at one time.”
  

• I had met Perry Barber and Ila Valcarcel while reporting the feature for Bitch that is re-printed below. That’s how I learned about that all-female umpire crew. But as I was also going to umpire school as part of my reporting, Valcarcel told me a story that I thought was wild: each year, she would call each of the two accredited umpire schools, both in Florida, and see if either had any women in that year’s class. If they did, she would drive to the school(s) and teach the women how to take apart and refit the chest plates and re-form their shin guards using a heat gun—because despite MLB going on about wanting to add gender diversity to the field, they didn’t make umpire equipment for women. That anecdote led to this story for The Atlantic about how most sports don’t make clothing or equipment for officials in women’s sizes, or to fit women’s bodies (here is an archived version for folks without a subscription).
  
  “It’s hard enough being a female and walking out on that ball field and giving everybody the impression you belong there,” Ila Valcarcel, a baseball umpire, told me. “They don’t know you, so your impression is what they get to see and if what they see is equipment and clothing that don’t fit, you already have one strike against you.”
  

• Re-printed below, a story from 2018 about the lack of pipeline for women trying to break into umpiring, which includes Jen Pawol’s promotion to Minor League Baseball.
  

• Finally, if you’d like to read more about women in baseball umpiring, I’d recommend a few books: You've Got to Have Balls to Make it in This League: My Life as an Umpire by Pam Postema; Breaking Into Baseball:

  Women and the National Pastime by Jean Hastings Ardell; and Stolen Bases: Why American Girls Don’t Play Baseball by Jennifer Ring

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100 Years After Amanda Clement, Baseball Still Can’t Recruit Female Umpires

Originally published on February 12, 2018 at bitchmedia.org.

Perry Barber Umpiring a New York Mets spring training game in 2008 (Photo credit: Perry Barber/Illustration by Margot Harrington)

At the Minor League Baseball Umpire Training Academy (MiLB) in Vero Beach, Florida, 99 students stand in rows in the outfield of a ball field. Over a loudspeaker, an instructor yells, “Call it!” In unison, the students respond, “You’re out!” They punch their fists straight ahead, looking more like martial artists than umpires. From behind, it is impossible to tell one from the other—each wears the standard school uniform of a black polo shirt, gray slacks, black cap, black sneakers. But out of the back of one of the ball caps, a long ponytail hangs down a student’s back. Danni Proenza is the lone woman in the 2018 class.

It’s been over 100 years since Amanda Clement umpired semiprofessional baseball games in a full skirt and white blouse embroidered with the letters “UMPS” on the front, with players referring to her as “Miss Umpire.” Bernice Gera, the first female umpire in professional baseball, earned her spot through a sex discrimination lawsuit in 1972, but quit after her first game. Only a handful of women have umpired the predominantly male sport, with the most well-known being Pam Postema, who spent 13 years in the minor leagues. There has never been a woman to umpire at the major-league level. Systemic sexism has affected baseball at all levels, from who can play it to who can coach and call games. Now people are determined to change that. The sport is trying to recruit more women into the field of umpiring—but despite those efforts, it’s not really working.