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lite.cnn.com - on gopher - inofficial
ARTICLE VIEW:
Jen Pawol feels like ‘fully charged battery ready to go’ ahead of
breaking big league gender barrier
By Associated Press
Updated:
8:42 PM EDT, Thu August 7, 2025
Source: AP
was in her hotel room in Nashville, Tennessee, when she got the call
she had awaited for a decade.
She was going to make her major league debut this weekend, becoming the
first female umpire in a century and a half of big league baseball.
“I was overcome with emotion,” Pawol recalled Thursday, two days
before she breaks a gender barrier when she works the bases during
Miami’s doubleheader at Atlanta. “It was super emotional to finally
be living that phone call that I’d been hoping for and working
towards for quite a while, and I just felt super full — I feel like a
fully charged battery ready to go.”
Her voice quavering with emotion, Pawol talked about getting the news
during a Wednesday conference call with director of umpire development
Rich Rieker and vice president of umpire operations Matt McKendry.
Pawol thought back to her long road. In the early 1990s at West Milford
High School in New Jersey, she had a summer conversation with Lauren
Rissmeyer, the third baseman on the school’s softball team.
“‘Do you want to come umpire with me?’” Pawol remembered being
asked. “I didn’t think twice about it. Lauren’s doing it, so
I’m going to do it.”
Pawol’s pay was $15 per game.
“She took a field and I took a field,” Pawol said. “It was a
one-umpire system. I had no idea what I was doing, but I got to put
gear on and call balls and strikes, so I was in.”
A 1995 graduate at West Milford, which inducted her into its Athletic
Hall of Fame in 2022, Pawol became a three-time all-conference softball
selection pick at Hofstra.
After umpiring NCAA softball from 2010-16, she was approached by
then-big league ump Ted Barrett at an umpire camp in Binghamton, New
York, in early 2015.
“Moreso than any female that I’d seen, she looked like she could
handle the rigors of the job physically,” Barrett said Thursday.
“But what impressed me was her willingness to learn. She seemed like
a sponge, everything that we were teaching her. I’m proud that I made
her aware of the opportunity.”
Barrett invited Pawol to attend a clinic in Atlanta and then a MLB
tryout camp at Cincinnati that Aug. 15. He invited her to dinner in
Atlanta with fellow big league umps Paul Nauert and Marvin Hudson and
their wives.
“I warned her: `Look, this is what you’re up against. It’s going
to be 10 years in the minor leagues before you sniff a big big
field,’” Barrett said.
Pawol was among 38 hopefuls invited to the Umpire Training Academy at
Vero Beach, Florida, and started her pro umpiring career in the Gulf
Coast League on June 24, 2016, working the plate when the GCL Tigers
West played at the GCL Blue Jays.
She moved up to the New York/Penn League in 2017, the Midwest League
after the first two weeks of the 2018 season, then worked the South
Atlantic League in 2019, the High-A Midwest League in 2021, the
Double-A Eastern League and the Triple-A International and Pacific
Coast Leagues in 2023. She was called in for big league spring training
in 2024 and ’25.
“This has been over 1,200 minor league games, countless hours of
video review trying to get better, and underneath it all has just been
this passion and this love for the game of baseball,” she said.
“This started in my playing days as a catcher and transformed over
into an umpire, and I think it’s gotten even stronger as an umpire.
Umpiring is for me, it’s in my DNA. It’s been a long, hard
journey.”
Among eight female umpires currently in the minors, she will join Chris
Guccione’s crew in Atlanta, where she expects about 30 family and
friends. She is to work the bases during Saturday’s doubleheader and
call balls and strikes on Sunday.
Pawol was at third base on Wednesday night as Jacksonville beat
Nashville in the International League when Sounds third baseman Oliver
Dunn congratulated her.
“If I make it to the big leagues,” he told her, “we will have
both worked all the levels together.”
Pawol repeatedly thanked her minor league umpiring predecessors,
mentioning several who exchanged calls or texts, including Christine
Wren, Pam Postema and Ria Cortesio. Just after her promotion to
Triple-A, Pawol met with Postema in Las Vegas.
“The last thing she said to me when I saw her was: Get it done!”
Powal explained. “So I texted her yesterday and said, `I’m getting
it done!’”
Barrett will be watching from Oregon, where he is attending Northwest
League games this weekend.
“The hopes of this are that it inspires,” he said. ”Who knows,
there’ll be a young lady watching the game on TV and says, `Hey,
I’d like to try that.’”
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