By BVM Sportsdesk

Jenny Cavnar is set to make history as the first woman to serve as a Major League Baseball team’s primary play-by-play voice, appointed by the A’s. Her groundbreaking journey is a tribute to predecessors like Suzyn Waldman and Melanie Newman. Cavnar acknowledges the support of decision-makers like Alison Vigil and Devon Fox, leading to her current role alongside former A’s pitcher Dallas Braden. Despite the pressure, Cavnar is ready for the challenge, drawing inspiration from her broadcasting experience and the advice to “do the work” and “be you.” This opportunity symbolizes progress for women in sports and aims to normalize such hires beyond headline status, creating equal opportunities for all aspiring broadcasters.

The Big Picture

Cavnar’s appointment reflects a significant milestone in gender diversity in sports broadcasting, paving the way for more inclusive opportunities in the industry.

By the Numbers

• Jenny Cavnar is the first woman to serve as a Major League Baseball team’s primary play-by-play voice.
• She has over 18 seasons of experience as a broadcaster in Major League Baseball.

State of Play

• Jenny Cavnar appointed as the A’s lead play-by-play announcer, marking a historic moment for women in sports broadcasting.
• Her partnership with former A’s pitcher Dallas Braden adds a personal touch to the new role.
• The appointment underscores progress towards gender equality in sports commentary and sets a precedent for future hires.

What’s Next

Cavnar’s achievement opens doors for more gender diversity in sports broadcasting, aiming to make such appointments a norm rather than an exception, fostering equal opportunities for all aspiring broadcasters.

Bottom Line

Jenny Cavnar’s groundbreaking role as the A’s lead play-by-play announcer signifies a crucial step towards gender equality in sports broadcasting, emphasizing the importance of inclusivity and equal opportunities for all in the industry.

Bianca Smith is on a mission to find out how far her life-long passion for baseball can take her as a coach, and whether her fascination with Japan can make that happen in Nippon Professional Baseball.

The first black woman hired to coach by a Major League Baseball team, Smith is now a world away from America’s minor leagues, in Japan’s northern main island of Hokkaido, working as a sports advisor and coaching elementary school and middle school teams.

With her degrees in business and law, the 33-year-old Smith once saw herself as a future MLB team president, but found her true calling in uniform on the field with players.

When the Boston Red Sox wanted to keep her at the lowest minor-league level for 2023, Smith opted to move on, not knowing a dream opportunity would shortly open up and bring her to Japan.

“I have been fascinated with Japan since I was 12, just like any American kid (through) anime. Then I started reading manga,” Smith said. “I fell in love with Japan, and when I decided I was going to work in baseball, that was top of my list.”

Turned onto baseball by her mother, a New York Yankees fan, Smith’s favorite player was Derek Jeter. She was alerted to a different style of baseball in Japan after Hideki Matsui joined the Yankees.

“I have been following the Japanese national team since the first World Baseball Classic in 2006. The aspects of Japanese baseball are what I’m passionate about, the defense, the base running, the strategy, that’s why I love watching them. That’s why Japan.”

In Higashikawa, Hokkaido, she’s sharing her knowledge and experience with kids and coaches but said it’s hard to tell when coaches and parents buy into her ideas or if they’re only open because the head coach is on board.

“That’s why I’ve got all the information together so I can explain why we need to do it this way. I’ve been picking and choosing,” she said, sounding like the lawyer she trained to be.

Smith’s coaching journey has been a process of learning how to manage her need to control things, and developing communication and teaching skills to better help players.

“I don’t want to come in changing the culture because that never works,” she said. “But I am a player coach. In the pros (in the United States) they’re used to this. Even the coaches that are territorial, they’ll still listen to players. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t have a job.”

Despite her deep and sustained interest in Japan, Smith was not prepared for the ritual displays of respect she has witnessed toward coaches, parents and the field itself, or for the culture of fault finding.

“It’s one of the first things I saw. In a practice game, a kid makes one mistake, they pull them and make them practice for 30 minutes, next to the game, that same mistake they messed up,” Smith said.

When the head coach eventually asked how mistakes are dealt with in America, Smith told him.

“You put him back in,” she said. “You talk to him quickly and then put him back in. If they know that if they make one mistake they’re going to get pulled, they’re going to be afraid to make a mistake. They’re going to play it safe on every play.”

Smith has been willing to lead by example through her efforts to learn languages and communicate in them as best she can, mistakes and all.

How analogous is a willingness to make mistakes in a foreign language and a willingness to make mistakes in baseball?

“It’s completely the same,” Smith said. “You’re not going to get better if you don’t push your limits and try to go past them.”

Coaching kids has pushed her to be even better at simplifying techniques in order to demonstrate them.

“It comes in handy as a coach, particularly working with people who don’t speak your language,” she said.

“A good coach is able to take a complicated idea and simplify it for anybody. Being a lawyer is just like being a coach,” she said. “A lawyer has to break down the law for someone who doesn’t understand it and take the important parts that actually apply to them.”

As an advocate of the player-first coaching that is gradually making headway in Japanese pro baseball and who shares its compulsion to plan everything that can be controlled, Smith would seem to be an attractive hire for a Japanese pro team.

But she said, the team would have to genuinely want her to empower players to develop their own styles rather than lecture them on doctrine and dogma.

“I want you to take control of your own development because you know your body better than I do,” she said. “I could not coach for an organization that would not let me have that kind of freedom with my players.”

(By Jim Allen)

Julia Kreuz | MLB

Jen Pawol has been steadily moving up the umpires ranks over the course of her eight-year career, and she is now one step closer to the Majors with the Monday announcement that she will be the first woman since 2007 to work in Major League Spring Training games. This is a crucial step in Pawol’s effort to become the first female umpire in the Majors, a goal that’s significantly closer today than yesterday.

Whenever MLB needs fill-in or additional umpires during the regular season, it draws from the group of Triple-A umpires that are named to the MLB Call-Up list that is made up exclusively of umpires that had been invited to MLB Spring Training. After firmly standing her ground while the pool of candidates narrowed around her, Pawol’s odds have never been more favorable.

She’s had nearly a decade to build up to this moment.

Pawol started her career on June 24, 2016, in the Gulf Coast League. At the time, Pawol was the seventh woman to umpire in a Minor League game, following in the footsteps of Bernice Gera (1972), Christine Wren (1975-77), Pam Postema (1977-89), Theresa Cox Fairlady (1989-91), Ria Cortesio (1999-2007) and Shanna Kook (2003-04). Cortesio was the most recent female umpire to work a Spring Training game.

Not since Postema, though, has there been this much momentum in a woman’s quest to officiate in the Major Leagues.

The 47-year-old Pawol is one of nine women scheduled to work on-field roles in the Minor Leagues this season. Yet, the list of female umps who have made it as far as Triple-A is significantly shorter: Postema, who was also the first woman assigned to Major League Spring Training games, and Pawol. The league has put a real effort into growing those numbers in recent years. If you open the testimonial page of MLB’s umpire camp website, two of the first four videos you’ll see feature women. One of them is Pawol, and the other is Isabella Robb, who became a professional umpire in 2022.

Pawol first attended an MLB/MiLB tryout camp in 2015 in Cincinnati, at the suggestion of long-time umpires Ted Barrett and Paul Nauert, whom she’d met at an ump clinic in Atlanta the year prior. Pawol was among 38 people invited to the league’s Umpire Training Academy in Vero Beach, Fla. That led to her Minors assignment in ’16.

Pawol kept rising from there. From the GCL, she moved through the ranks all the way to Double-A in 2022 and Triple-A in ’23.

But she and the game go back way further than that.

A New Jersey native, Pawol was inducted into the West Milford High School Athletic Hall of Fame in 2022 after graduating in 1995 as a three-year all-state athlete in softball and soccer. That earned her a softball scholarship with Hofstra University, where she played in Division I as a catcher. Around that same time, a young Pawol also began umpiring softball games, a practice not uncommon for college backstops looking to get a better feel for the strike zone.

She added a World Championship with the U.S. Women’s softball team in Toronto in 2001 before converting into an NCAA umpire for both softball and baseball.

Becoming a reference for the generations after her is a fortunate bonus for Pawol en route to the main goal. But that’s usually how it goes for pioneers. Like the women who paved the way before her, Pawol is forging a path that’s wider than herself.

Nakken stepped in for the ejected first-base coach Tuesday vs. Padres

by: Dayn Perry | CBS Sports

In the third inning of Tuesday night’s game between the Padres and Giants (SD-SF GameTracker), San Francisco’s Alyssa Nakken made MLB history when she stepped in to the fill the role of first-base coach.

Richardson was ejected in the top of the third by first-base umpire Greg Gibson while apparently instructing the defense. As for Nakken, here she is fulfilling some of the usual duties of the first-base coach.

Nakken, 31, has been a part of the Giants organization since 2014, when she started as an intern in baseball operations. She now serves as a major league assistant coach on manager Gabe Kapler’s staff. In the past, she’s worked on outfield and base-running instruction, and in January of 2020, she became the first woman to hold a full-time coaching position in MLB. 

“I feel it’s my job to honor those who have helped me get to where I am,” she told MLB.com not long after ascending to that position. “Coaching, I never saw it. This job has kind of been hidden for so long. I’m so excited to be in this role for the challenge and the opportunity to make an impact for this organization that I love. But also, I’m excited that now girls can see there is a job on the field in baseball. It’s really cool.”

Nakken previously coached first base during a “summer camp” exhibition game in July of 2020, but Tuesday marked the first time a woman has coached on the field in a regular-season game. 

By: Morgan Smith | CNBC

Rachel Balkovec will become the first female manager in affiliated professional baseball after the Yankees tapped her to lead the Tampa Tarpons, their Low-A affiliate team, according to the Athletic. 

This isn’t the first glass ceiling the 34-year-old has shattered in baseball, either. The Omaha native has been a professional baseball coach for 10 years and has often been the first woman to hold different jobs within the sport. 

The announcement comes after a series of other firsts for women in baseball over the last two years. Last year Bianca Smith made history as the first Black woman to coach in professional baseball after joining the Boston Red Sox staff and in 2020, Kim Ng became first female general manager of the MLB for the Miami Dolphins. 

Balkovec started her career in 2012 as a strength and conditioning coach for the St. Louis Cardinals’ minor league team. She left in 2015 to be the Houston Astros’ Latin American strength and conditioning coordinator, making her the first woman to hold that position.

She took a few years off from American professional baseball to complete a master’s degree in biomechanics at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands and was hired by the Yankees shortly after graduating in 2019 as a minor-league hitting coach, becoming the first female full-time hitting coach in an MLB organization. 

Her interest in biomechanics has helped Balkovec better understand how to use science to improve players’ swings and movements. “For example, if there is a restriction in movement, can they spot those types of things,″ Balkovec said in 2019, according to the New York Post. 

She continued: “How is that going to affect their swing mechanics and the ability to get something done in a game situation? Also, the visual side of things, what are the best strategies of things [like] picking up the ball for recognizing a pitch?”

Balkovec, who was a catcher for the softball teams at Creighton University and the University of New Mexico, has called the challenges she has faced while working in a male-dominated sport “an advantage.” 

“I had to do probably much more than maybe a male counterpart, but I like that because I’m so much more prepared for the challenges that I might encounter,” she told the Associated Press in 2019. 

It’s also important, Balkovec added, to be persistent and not lose hope in the face of unequal opportunities. 

“My mom always used to say, life’s not fair,” she told the Associated Press. “So is it fair? No. Does it matter? No. You have to keep standing at that door banging on it.”