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Atlanta – When Jen Pawol walks to the field in Truist Park this weekend, she will not only make history, she will take care of a routine of duration through the most ungrateful work in sports.
On Saturday afternoon, Pawol will become the first referee woman to work in a great baseball season of the regular season, handling the bases in game 1 of the double header of Atlanta Braves-Miami Marlins before moving behind the plate for the end of the Sunday series.
I was sitting in a Nashville hotel room on Wednesday when the news was reduced.
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Archive: The plate referee Jen Pawol takes her position during the first entry of a spring training baseball between the Houston Astros and the Miami Marlins on Sunday, March 10, 2024, in West Palm Beach, Fla. (Photo AP/Jeff Roberson, Archive)
“I was overwhelmed by emotion,” Pawol told The Associated Press on Thursday. “It was super emotional to finally live that phone call that I had been waiting and work for quite some time, and I felt super full: I feel like a completely loaded battery ready to work.”
His path here was anything but accelerated. Pawol began baseball referee in 2016 in Rookie Ball, after years of calling the NCAA softball games. Since then, he has worked methodically through the minors: the New York/Penn League, the League of the West Medium, the South Atlantic League, Double-A and finally Triple-A in 2023. That season, it became the first woman in a triple-a referee in 34 years and the first to work in her championship.
“This has been more than 1,200 minor leagues games, innumerable hours of video review trying to improve, and below everything this passion has been and this love for baseball game,” Pawol said. “This began in my game days as a receiver and became a referee, and I think it has become even stronger as a referee. The referee is for me, is in my DNA. It has been a long and hard trip.”
A three times receiver of all conferences in Hofstra and a 2001 world champion with the US women’s softball team. Uu., Pawol first picked up the mask of a referee thanks to the invitation of a friend in secondary school in the early 1990s. She won $ 15 per game during that concert.
Angels Slugger Yoan Moncada The game is lost to take the American citizenship test
Archive: The arbiter of the Jen Pawol plate calls a strike during the third entry of a spring training baseball between the Miami Marlins and Houston Astros, on Sunday, March 10, 2024, in West Palm Beach, Fla. (Photo AP/Jeff Roberson, Archive)
“It was a ship ship system,” he recalled. “I had no idea what I was doing, but I could put equipment and call balls and strikes, so it was inside.”
She has been “in” since then, even when then, the referee of the league, Ted Barrett, warned him in a 2015 test camp that could have a decade in the minors before seeing a major league baseball stadium.
“I warned him: ‘Look, this is what you face,” Barrett said. “They will be 10 years in the leagues smaller before it strikes a major leagues.”
That prediction was almost exactly correct. Pawol’s call makes MLB the third of the “four” four “male professional sports leagues in presenting a female official, after Violet Palmer’s NBA debut in 1997 and the debut of the NFL of Sarah Thomas in 2015 It is now the Lone Holdout.
Jen Pawol follows the steps of other female pioneers
Pawol will not be alone this weekend. The 48 -year -old woman said that some 30 family and friends will be in the stands to witness her historical debut. Many of his fellow minor leagues arbitrators who opened the path before her, including Christine Wren, Pam Postema and Ria Courtesio, have already contacted congratulations.
When Posttema told him years ago to “do it!” Pawol promised that he would. “I sent him a text message yesterday and said: ‘I’m doing it!'”
Archive: Referee Jen Pawol takes her position during the first entry of a spring training baseball between the St. Louis cardinals and Washington Nationals on Monday, March 4, 2024, in West Palm Beach, Fla. (Photo AP/Jeff Roberson, Archive)
Outkick will be on the floor in Truist Park to cover the first three Pawol MLB games.
At a time when headlines often favor symbolism about merit, Jen Pawol’s journey is a reminder that the sand still matters.
Pawol is not here as a gesture of Token or a swollen public relations movement. She is here because she survived the bus walks, the heat of the summer and the lonely routine of the life of the minor leagues. And now, for the first time, a woman has reached the greats.
