ESPN baseball analyst Jessica Mendoza racking up firsts in booth

Jessica Mendoza went where no woman was permitted to go before Tuesday night. The reaction was both encouraging and predictably horrifying.

Mendoza broke one of the sports industry’s most enduring barriers during the Astros-Yankees game on ESPN when she became the first woman to offer color commentary during a major-league playoff broadcast.

As breakthroughs go, this is a small but telling one. Women have made inroads in every aspect of sports journalism over the past 40years, becoming reporters, columnists, studio hosts and sideline reporters. But they have remained almost invisible in one sub-realm: broadcast commentary. Opinions and analysis in sports broadcasting have remained the nearly exclusive preserve of men.

Mendoza, 34, had the résumé to get past the no-girls-allowed sign for one of America’s major team sports: A four-time All-American softball player at Stanford and a two-time Olympic medalist in the sport, she has appeared on ESPN since 2007. Until this summer, her assignments have mostly been on the periphery, covering softball and as a sideline reporter on college football games.

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Her big break came in late August, when she did the analysis during a game between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Arizona Diamondbacks, the first woman so employed on a national broadcast. Tuesday’s wild-card playoff game at Yankee Stadium was her biggest stage yet: a win-or-go-home affair for both teams that was widely followed by baseball fans.

Mendoza said Tuesday’s contest induced some anxiety, primarily because of the intense interest around it. “To be honest, I couldn’t wait for the first pitch,” she said Wednesday from her home in Southern California. “I couldn’t really eat. I couldn’t breathe. I could feel the nerves because of all the attention surrounding this game.” But like the big games she’s played in, Mendoza’s jitters settled down after the first pitch. “I felt like I gave good information,” she said. “I did my job.”

Some of the reaction to Mendoza on social media was, perhaps predictably, cruel. Along with the usual raw misogyny, several men questioned whether anyone who hadn't played the game could analyze it (apparently they've never heard of legendary baseball announcers Vin Scully, Jack Buck or Red Barber). One tweeter bared what may be the male sports fan's psyche: "Why do I turn on baseball and hear a woman's voice in the broadcast booth?!? We watch sports to get away from women."

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Mendoza shrugs it all off: “I haven’t read any of it, and I don’t intend to,” she said.

The more interesting reaction may have been the support Mendoza received. Among her 200 postgame texts were congratulatory messages from ESPN colleague Mike Tirico and CNN sports anchor Rachel Nichols. Mendoza's professional reviews were positive, too: "Jessica Mendoza is good at her job," wrote Yahoo baseball blogger Mike Oz. "And that's more crucial than any other sentence in this post. She's insightful and interesting and offers a different perspective. If you don't want to hear different voices and different opinions while watching sports, then why not just watch black-and-white VHS tapes from the good ol' days?"

ESPN won’t televise any more games this season, so Mendoza will have to wait until next season to get back in the booth. But she will be part of the network’s studio coverage of the playoffs and World Series, said an ESPN spokesman, Ben Cafardo.

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A high-profile gig on the self-styled "Worldwide Leader in Sports" could make Mendoza a door opener for other women in sports broadcasting, said Julie DiCaro, an anchor and columnist for a Chicago sports-talk station.

"Those who came up after Title IX grew up with sports as much as our brothers did," said DiCaro, who has chronicled the abuse outspoken women in sports receive on social media. "Having women out there now in visible roles is important for young girls. It's something to shoot for."

But Marie Hardin of Penn State, who studies women in sports journalism, said one high-profile woman doesn't change a basic fact. The number of women in sports media remains stubbornly static. An Associated Press Sports Editors survey of 150 newspapers and Web sites in 2014 found that 90percent of sports editors and assistant sports editors, and 87percent of sports columnists and reporters, are men. The percentages have changed so little since 2006 that researchers gave the sports-news media a grade of F for its gender-hiring practices, the fourth straight failing grade in the survey.

So, Mendoza’s ascension may be one small step for women, Hardin says. But the giant leaps, if any, remain well over the horizon.

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