How Jessica Mendoza ignored sexism and broke barriers in baseball

Jessica Mendoza is a barrier breaker, a pioneer, a woman succeeding in what’s traditionally been a man’s job and that’s made her one of the most polarizing baseball stories of the past six months.

And that shouldn’t change as the 2016 MLB season approaches. Last week, ESPN announced that Mendoza will be a full-time analyst for Sunday Night Baseball this season. When opening day rolls around, she’ll be about eight months removed from the night she became the first female baseball analyst to call a game on ESPN.

[Previously: Jessica Mendoza joins Sunday Night Baseball in ESPN shuffle]

(ESPN) Even though Mendoza is a former softball star and an Olympic gold medalist, many baseball fans will continue with the misguided notion that a woman can’t offer analysis of a baseball game. Mendoza is used to that by now and most days she’s able to block out the critics who judge her by gender rather than her work on the air.

“I see it and I think about,” Mendoza says. “It’s not like I can completely put up this wall and it’s like, ‘Oh yeah, I just don’t pay attention.’ I do. It’s just when I start to feel it really hit home, I’m like, I don’t need to look at this anymore.”

That’s one of the issues Mendoza, 35, discussed in a wide-ranging StewPod interview that covers her reaction to the news of the full-time position at ESPN, her journey into broadcasting, how she deals with sexism and what other roles she’d like to see women take on in MLB. You can listen to the entire interview above in podcast form.

“It does help though, I have to admit, that a lot of the comments have been so based on my gender,” Mendoza says. “I’m going to have a harder time when people just attack what I’m saying. That’s what affects me more. I’m very aware of the fact that I’m a woman. So when people just come after me like, ‘She’s a woman. What is he doing?’ It’s like, what am I going to do it? It’s very true, thank you. There’s nothing I can do about that.”

She’ll have a harder time when people have a problem with her analysis or her commentary.

“That’s the stuff where, OK, now they’re coming after me,” Mendoza says. “It could be true or not, but it’s more about me and less about the sex that I am.”

Last season, when she was promoted to Sunday Night Baseball after Curt Schilling’s suspension and then called the AL wild-card game, all of this made headlines. An Atlanta sports talk jock went after her in a Twitter rant. He was later suspended by his station. Even then, in the middle of the polarization, Mendoza tried to stay centered. She didn’t listen to people overdoing it with praise and she didn’t listen to the loudest critics.

(ESPN) “Whether it was someone saying ‘Wow, she’s amazing’ — I wasn’t amazing, right? — and someone saying ‘She was horrible, women shouldn’t be doing baseball, go home, go back to the kitchen’ or whatever comments were being made, none of that, I felt like, was true. It was more somewhere in the middle. I kind of wanted to see that for what it was and not let too much of the noise affect my analysis of myself.”

So she re-watched her games, listened to her own opinions and those of her bosses and colleagues. She even got a call from ESPN’s NFL play-by-play guy Mike Tirico and took him up on an invitation to shadow him and Jon Gruden on Monday Night Football. What’s also eased her transition into the larger role at ESPN is that she’s not getting resistance from MLB players.

[Previously: Atlanta radio jock launches ugly Twitter attack on ESPN’s Jessica Mendoza]

“I think it’s a generation thing and maybe I’m being naive,” Mendoza told the StewPod. “But I feel like we’re all in this generation where we grew up understanding that inclusion on all aspects is the way we live. It’s just the way you do things — regardless of race, gender, sexuality, it doesn’t matter. We include people for who they are. If she’s going to talk hitting to me, I’m not going to go ‘She’s a woman, I’m going to walk away.’ I might expect that maybe from someone of a different generation, but I really feel like the players of today have been just, ‘Hey, I’m going to listen.’ We have these conversations and not once has one of them gave me a look like, ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about’ or walked away. Nothing. If anything, they’ve been more open curious like ‘What does she have to say?’ And that’s been cool.”

Mendoza isn’t alone this year as a baseball barrier-breaker. The Seattle Mariners recently hired Amanda Hopkins as the first full-time scout in MLB in 60 years. The A’s hired Justine Siegel as a fall-league coach, making her the first female coach in baseball. As for what’s next? Mendoza says she’d love to see a female GM.

“I would like to think,” Mendoza says, “there’s a lot of women out there out that could come in with a unique idea of how to pick and choose the right players to be successful.”

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