During late August of the 2015 Major League Baseball season, Jessica Mendoza stepped into the broadcast booth to call a matchup between the St. Louis Cardinals and Arizona Diamondbacks. Having starred in her softball career at Stanford University and in several Olympic appearances with Team USA, she had grown accustomed to the parlance of the game and worked to apply that knowledge to baseball. Before the game started, Mendoza knew that she was making history as the first woman to ever call an MLB game for ESPN, a monumental occurrence that she hoped would indicate an ostensible paradigm shift promoting new voices and providing more opportunities.
The early stages of the game were routine and kept fans attuned to the action with Mendoza seamlessly providing adept insights and expertise alongside colleagues Dave O’Brien and Dallas Braden. In the fifth inning amid a commercial break, Mendoza remembers O’Brien turning to her and asking if she had ever done a baseball game before, to which she admitted that it was her first time.
O’Brien then subsequently asked if ESPN had ever had a woman call a baseball game, and she replied that the network had not. This led the play-by-play announcer to wonder why no one had told them the significance of the occurrence, and once it became public knowledge, the proceedings elicited plaudits and were subsequently covered on SportsCenter.
The timing of the game ended up proving fortuitous for both Mendoza and ESPN following Sunday Night Baseball analyst Curt Schilling being suspended by the company for inappropriate comments made on social media. As a result of the unforeseen circumstance, management decided to ask Mendoza to appear on the Sunday Night Baseball game between the Chicago Cubs and Los Angeles Dodgers. This turned out to be the only telecast of a no-hitter in the history of the Sunday Night Baseball property, with Cubs starting pitcher Jake Arrieta achieving the feat at Dodger Stadium. In the span of seven days, Mendoza had shattered glass ceilings and broken significant ground for the potential of women to contribute across coverage of the sport.
“I think some part of me was just like, ‘How has there not been more? Why is this breaking news in 2015?,’ and that made me realize we need to get this out there,” Mendoza said. “We need girls, women [and] honestly men that are hiring to know like, ‘Hey this is happening,’ and it was important for me to do a good job.”
Over the ensuing two seasons, Mendoza worked with Dan Shulman and Aaron Boone in the Sunday Night Baseball broadcast booth, traveling the country during the MLB season to call marquee matchups on the national level. The transition was not perfectly seamless, but it was facilitated by the congeniality and cognizance of Boone, who helped her demonstrate her proficiency in the sport. When Mendoza previously called softball games alongside John Kruk, she remembered providing him notes during the game to refine his terminology and assist in his analysis. In a similar manner, Boone did that for her after using vernacular more associated with softball, serving as a pedagogical device and means to trust her colleagues.
“Dave Swanson, who was our K-Zone/ISO producer, would sit with me at Starbucks every Saturday morning before a Sunday night game, and he’s an ex-minor-league pitcher but he does our K-Zone pitching stuff, and he would sit and go over the starting pitchers and talk pitches and talk all the mechanics, all the things,” Mendoza said, “and that helped educate me a ton on probably the one thing that I really needed to learn more on.”
As a college softball player, Mendoza stood out offensively and holds several school records in key categories, including batting average, hits, home runs and slugging percentage. Yet she attended Stanford University hoping to be an orthopedic surgeon but changed her mind as an undergraduate student and hoped to work in politics within education reform. After she unexpectedly made Team USA for the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, she continued playing softball in National Pro Fastpitch. During an interview, personnel at ESPN suggested she audition to take part in its growing college softball coverage in an analyst role and decided to follow through.
“I was like, ‘This is so nowhere near anything I’ve ever studied,’ but I’m like, ‘Why not try?,’” Mendoza recalled. “I had some people around me – it was like, ‘What’s the worst thing that’s going to happen?,’ and it was really, really awesome that I kind of put myself out there, I think, because in the moment, it felt so just like, ‘This is crazy,’ and then I remember sitting down in the audition and going, ‘Wait, no. This is actually [something that] feels really right.’”
Mendoza worked as a senior advisor to the general manager for the New York Mets beginning in the 2019 season while still announcing on Sunday Night Baseball, which ultimately led to concerns regarding conflicts of interest. The ordeal of balancing both ventures was somewhat arduous in that she was not permitted to enter certain clubhouses to conduct interviews and converse with the players.
Mendoza explained that other announcers held similar positions, including Rodríguez, but they were allowed in the space because of their association with a given team as a retired player. Because she did not play in the major leagues, she felt others perceiving her as a spy who could gather intel through that access. By the next year, she decided to stay with ESPN and leave her role with the Mets, eliminating potential impediments.
“That was hard just because I really did enjoy my time and the things that I was learning,” Mendoza said. “It was amazing actually, but just from a career standpoint, I knew where I needed to be, so I left the Mets, and then I knew I was going to be taken off of Sunday Night Baseball, and then COVID hit.”
Mendoza found herself in a state of ambiguity, especially as professional sports were brought to a halt. A few months later, she found herself broadcasting Korea Baseball Organization games remotely while trying to figure out what she would be doing going forward. In the end, the new role sans Sunday Night Baseball grants Mendoza the ability to call more college softball, the entire Little League World Series and postseason games in October, including the World Series on ESPN Radio. In fact, she signed a multiyear contract extension earlier this year to extend her tenure with the company and looks forward to the wide array of chances to exhibit her versatility.
“To be honest, I’ve never wanted to be someone that’s pigeonholed as being one thing,” Mendoza said. “I’m not a baseball analyst [or] a softball analyst, but I’m someone that just really cares about what sports can bring to life, and I think with ESPN, I know that we can kind of share that beyond just what we’re covering on the field.”
In the broadcast analyst role, Mendoza conveys criticism when appropriate at the college and major-league levels. Whereas an error in a Little League game can be viewed as a teaching moment, she will disseminate more pronounced commentary within an MLB game, including local broadcasts for the Dodgers on Spectrum SportsNet LA. Mendoza evinces that most great athletes look to be accountable for plays they should have made and that they do not attribute things to “tough luck” or inauspicious happenstance. Conversely though, Mendoza also receives her own appraisals, but she has learned over time the sources from whom she should accept it while also maintaining high expectations.
“I’m not listening to people that I’ve never met to affect the way I evaluate my own self, so I’m pretty hard on myself in general,” Mendoza said. “Sometimes even in moments, I’m like, ‘Oh man, that was stupid,’ or, ‘God, you could have been better with that.’ I’m very, very hard on myself, and the criticism, or I guess I should put [it as] more ‘constructive feedback,’ comes from those that I know are making the decisions whether I’m in this job or not, so those are the people obviously I want to listen to, and I’ve had to really set those boundaries.”
ESPN continues to broadcast a plethora of women’s sports and enhances the coverage surrounding these events. There is cross-promotion and discussion of these games across multiple platforms within other network shows, illuminating the action and eliciting enhanced viewership. During a Little League World Series game, for example, Ravech read a promotion of a WNBA game between the New York Liberty and Los Angeles Sparks. From there, the broadcast booth mentioned Liberty forward Breanna Stewart and the season she was having, and Mendoza estimated her natural excitement spanning several minutes.
“We were able to continue this conversation that I felt like was super organic, obviously led from the promo, but still talking about women’s sports,” Mendoza said, “and we saw that with the Caitlin Clark effect where talking about [it] and being in airplanes, whatever, everyone’s talking about her, and I just want to make it where it doesn’t matter what game we’re covering – we can talk about women’s sports everywhere.”
Before the softball season entered full swing, the NCAA Division I Women’s Basketball Tournament averaged 2.2 million viewers and set records across several rounds, including the National Championship Game. That matchup, which took place between the Iowa Hawkeyes and South Carolina Gamecocks, averaged 18.9 million viewers and was the most-viewed college basketball game on ESPN platforms. Mendoza, who is inspired by women such as Doris Burke and Julie Foudy, is elated to see the progress but believes there is more progress to be made.
“I think that it’s not enough, and to be honest, I would love to see ESPN have 50% coverage of women from women – have it equal across the board,” Mendoza said. “That is not an unrealistic goal. Some people think, ‘What? That’s crazy.’ It’s not. We’ve seen it already – the growth – that it has gone, leaps and bounds over the course of the last year… and so I would challenge ESPN to continue to be the leader for not just promoting women, but also covering women.”
As Mendoza moves forward in her broadcast career, she hopes to instantiate a new archetype in which women can receive equal opportunities and coverage. Although she started calling baseball nine years ago and that there has been change, she hopes more substantial alterations are more immediate because of the remaining presence of misogyny and appearance-based criticism. Retaining the relationships she has built within the sports media business and promoting flexibility within the space, she hopes to serve as an inspiration for the next generation and continue to reach new audiences.
“Let’s try to be creative and not just follow this playbook that we’ve been following for decades,” Mendoza said. “Let’s really think outside the box and try to reach those that aren’t being reached right now.”
