Woman Knocks Her MLB Announcing Gig Out of the Park
On Sunday night, Jessica Mendoza became the first woman to announce a Sunday Night Baseball broadcast for ESPN. And she killed it.
“Jessica Mendoza is making interesting, intelligent points and I am learning things. Please keep her in this booth @espn” wrote one Twitter user.
“Jessica Mendoza knows more about baseball than you do,” quipped another.
Mendoza got her chance in the booth after ESPN suspended one of its regular announcers, Curt Schilling, for a tweeting a meme that compared Muslims to Nazis. Proving that great things can indeed come out of terrible things, she made the most of it. Fans and journalists praised Mendoza, a former Olympic softball champion, for her “excellent” commentary and “sharp analysis.” She was so good that Dan Levy at Awful Announcing even asked whether she should permanently replace Schilling in the Sunday Night Baseball slot.
Alas, ESPN has already announced that Schilling will be back next week. But the higher-ups have definitely taken notice of Mendoza, and they’ve slotted her in for additional on-air analyst assignments in the near future. If you want to see her pop up in analyst roles more frequently, we recommend tweeting at ESPN and telling them so. By all accounts she’s more than deserving!
About the Author
Julianne Helinek is Take The Lead's blog editor and writer of the newsletter Take The Lead This Week. She thinks the women she knows are too talented not to be running the world, and she’s especially interested in bringing more men into the gender equality conversation. Julianne is an MBA student at NYU’s Stern School of Business. For more on feminism in the business school world, follow her on Twitter at @thefeministmba.