How Jessica Mendoza started in baseball TV and her advice for young women
Mendoza moved into baseball broadcasting with ESPN in 2014, then the following year working on the national network’s College World Series output before becoming the first woman to broadcast an MLB game from the commentary booth for the network.
“I was doing college softball and I had been doing that for a long time and then ESPN started asking me to become a sideline reporter for some of their other sports,” she said. “So they brought me into college football, I was doing college volleyball, in a totally different capacity as a sideline reporter.
“Then naturally, it was like, softball is my sport, so if I’m gonna be reporting on football and volleyball — sports I did not play — baseball is so close to home for me. And so I started doing college baseball. ESPN was great, and they gave me the flexibility to do things that were a little different for reporters since I was a player.”
College baseball led to sideline reporting on MLB games. From sideline reporting, Mendoza went to calling games from the booth as an analyst. And the reaction came thick and fast.
“The fact that I had a headset on, and no woman at our company had ever done that, it just blew people’s minds, good or bad. There was no middle: people freaked out,” she recalled. “I think that took me off guard. I’m doing what I was doing before, but now I’m up here… it was like ‘whoa, this is like sacred territory, why is there a woman, women don’t belong there.’
“It was all about my gender at first, which is what kind of caught most of the attention for the first few years I was doing the job. I think it really surprised me, and it also gave me gratitude for all of the women who were doing it in a multitude of sports, you know, being the first.”
Mendoza has since gone on to break more barriers in becoming the first woman to commentate on an MLB postseason game on TV (2015) as well as the first woman to serve as a World Series analyst nationally when she did so for ESPN Radio in 2020.
So what advice does she have for young women looking to follow in the footsteps of not just her, but others, including fellow broadcasters like Shane, Cavnar, and Lauren Shehadi; umpires such as Postema and Pawol; statistician Sarah Langs; coach Nakken; or general manager Ng?
“First of all, do it. I don’t think you should think about it as ‘I don’t see a female in this specific position or there’s not a lot of them’. We’re never going to change the gender piece of this if we’re thinking ‘but I’m a woman and there’s no women’,” she said.
“Do your job the best you can and apply and push forward and challenge people. I always tell young girls, if you’re trying to get into this field, the right people are gonna find you because you are different, not avoid you because you are.”