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Atlanta – When Jen Pawol walks on the track in Truist Park this weekend, she will not just make history-she gets into a decades long grinding through the most thanksgiving job in sports.
On Saturday afternoon, Pawol will be the first female referee to work with a major-season baseball match in regular season, handling the bases in Game 1 in Atlanta Braves-Miami Marlin’s doubleheader before moving behind the record for Sunday’s series final.
She sat in a hotel room at Nashville on Wednesday when the news came down.
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File – Home Plate Umpire Jen Pawol takes his position during the first lap of a spring training baseball match between Houston Astros and Miami Marlins Sunday 10 March 2024 in West Palm Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson, File)
“I was overcome by emotions,” Pawol told the Associated Press on Thursday. “It was super emotional to finally live the phone call that I had hoped for and worked courage for a while and I just felt super full – I feel like a fully charged battery ready to go.”
Her path here was anything but fast. Pawol began umpire baseball in 2016 in Rookie Ball, after years calling NCAA Softball Games. Since then, she has worked her way methodically through the minor-New York/Penn League, Midwest League, South Atlantic League, Double-A and finally Triple-A in 2023. That season she became the first woman to be Umpire in Triple-A for 34 years and the first to work her championship game.
“This has been over 1,200 smaller league matches, countless hours of video review trying to get better, and underneath it all has just been this passion and this love of the baseball game,” Pawol said. “This started in my play days like Catcher and transformed into a judge, and I think it has become even stronger as a judge. Umpiring is for me, it’s in my DNA. It’s been a long, tough journey.”
Pawol, a three-time all-conference Catcher at Hofstra and a world champion in 2001 with the American woman’s softball team, first picked up a judge’s mask thanks to a friend’s invitation in high school in the early 1990s. She earned $ 15 per Fight during this concert.
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File – Home Plate Umpire Jen Pawol calls a strike during the third round of a spring training baseball match between Miami Marlins and Houston Astros, Sunday March 10, 2024, in West Palm Beach, FLA. (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson, File)
“It was a one-dumpling system,” she remembered. “I had no idea what I was doing, but I have to put gear on and call balls and strikes so I was in.”
She has been “in” ever since -even when that time -the Big League judge Ted Barrett warned her on a 2015 tryout camp that it could take a decade in minors before she wanted to see a Major League Ballpark.
“I warned her,” Look, that’s what you’re against, “Barrett said.” It will be 10 years in the smaller leagues before you sniff a big league. ” ”
This prediction was almost accurate. Pawol’s call-up makes MLB the third of the “big four” men’s professional sport leagues to include a female official after Violet Palmer’s NBA debut in 1997 and Sarah Thomas’ NFL debut in 2015. Thomas continued to work the Super Bowl LV between Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Kansas City Chiefs. The NHL is now the lonely teamout.
Jen Pawol follows in other female trailblazers’ footsteps
Pawol won’t be alone this weekend. The 48-year-old said about 30 family members and friends will be in the stands to witness her historic debut. Many of her colleagues with smaller leagues who burned the path before her, including Christine Wren, PAM EDEMER and RIA Cortesio, have already reached congratulations.
When the Poema asked her years ago to “get it done!” Pawol promised she would. “I texted her yesterday and said, ‘I’ll get it done!'”
File – Umpire Jen Pawol takes his position during the first lap of a spring training baseball match between St. Louis Cardinals and Washington Nationals Monday, March 4, 2024 in West Palm Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson, File)
Outkick will be on the ground in Truist Park to cover Pawol’s first three MLB game.
In an era where headlines often favor symbolism of profits, Jen Pawol’s journey stands as a reminder that Grit still matters.
Pawol is not here as a token gesture or a puffed PR movement. She is here because she surpassed bus trips, the dazzling summer heat and the lonely grinding of less league life. And now, for the first time, a woman has reached it big.
