Jen Pawol<\/a> was in her hotel room in Nashville, Tennessee, when she got the call she had awaited for a decade.\n <\/p>\n\n 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.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cI was overcome with emotion,\u201d Pawol recalled Thursday, two days before she breaks a gender barrier when she works the bases during Miami\u2019s doubleheader at Atlanta. \u201cIt was super emotional to finally be living that phone call that I\u2019d been hoping for and working towards for quite a while, and I just felt super full \u2014 I feel like a fully charged battery ready to go.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n 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.\n <\/p>\n
\n 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\u2019s softball team.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201c\u2018Do you want to come umpire with me?\u2019\u201d Pawol remembered being asked. \u201cI didn\u2019t think twice about it. Lauren\u2019s doing it, so I\u2019m going to do it.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n Pawol\u2019s pay was $15 per game.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cShe took a field and I took a field,\u201d Pawol said. \u201cIt 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.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n 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.\n <\/p>\n
\n 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.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cMoreso than any female that I\u2019d seen, she looked like she could handle the rigors of the job physically,\u201d Barrett said Thursday. \u201cBut what impressed me was her willingness to learn. She seemed like a sponge, everything that we were teaching her. I\u2019m proud that I made her aware of the opportunity.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n 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.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cI warned her: `Look, this is what you\u2019re up against. It\u2019s going to be 10 years in the minor leagues before you sniff a big big field,\u2019\u201d Barrett said.\n <\/p>\n
\n 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.\n <\/p>\n
\n 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 \u201925.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cThis 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,\u201d she said. \u201cThis started in my playing days as a catcher and transformed over into an umpire, and I think it\u2019s gotten even stronger as an umpire. Umpiring is for me, it\u2019s in my DNA. It\u2019s been a long, hard journey.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n Among eight female umpires currently in the minors, she will join Chris Guccione\u2019s crew in Atlanta, where she expects about 30 family and friends. She is to work the bases during Saturday\u2019s doubleheader and call balls and strikes on Sunday.\n <\/p>\n
\n Pawol was at third base on Wednesday night as Jacksonville beat Nashville in the International League when Sounds third baseman Oliver Dunn congratulated her.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cIf I make it to the big leagues,\u201d he told her, \u201cwe will have both worked all the levels together.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n 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.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cThe last thing she said to me when I saw her was: Get it done!\u201d Powal explained. \u201cSo I texted her yesterday and said, `I\u2019m getting it done!\u2019\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n Barrett will be watching from Oregon, where he is attending Northwest League games this weekend.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cThe hopes of this are that it inspires,\u201d he said. \u201dWho knows, there\u2019ll be a young lady watching the game on TV and says, `Hey, I\u2019d like to try that.\u2019\u201d\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Facebook Tweet Email Link New York AP \u00a0\u2014\u00a0 Jen Pawol was in her hotel room in Nashville, Tennessee,…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":128358,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[51,50,52],"class_list":{"0":"post-128357","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-news","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-stories"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128357","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=128357"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128357\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/128358"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=128357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=128357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=128357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}