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Atlanta – When Jen Pawol enters the Trist Park field this weekend, she will not make history – she will take a version of several decades through the ungrateful work in sport.
On Saturday afternoon, Pawol will become the first female referee to work a major baseball match of the regular season, managing the bases of match 1 of the double head of Atlanta Braves-Miami Marlins before moving behind the marble for the final of the series on Sunday.
On Wednesday, she was sitting in a Nashville hotel room when the news fell.
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File – The marble referee Jen Pawol takes up his position during the first round of a training baseball match in the spring between the Astros of Houston and Miami Marlins on Sunday March 10, 2024, in West Palm Beach, in Florida. (Photo / jeff dresserson, file)
“I was overwhelmed by emotion,” Pawol told the Associated Press on Thursday. “It was super emotional to finally live this phone call that I hoped and that I had been working for a long time, and I felt super full – I feel like a fully busy battery ready to leave.”
His way here was anything but accelerated. Pawol started to arbitrate baseball in 2016 in Rookie Ball, after years of call for NCAA softball matches. Since then, she has made her way methodically through minors-New York / Penn League, Midwest League, South Atlantic League, Double-A and finally Triple-A in 2023. This season, she became the first woman to the referee in Triple-A in 34 years and the first to work on her championship match.
“It has experienced more than 1,200 minor league games, countless hours of video review trying to improve, and below all of this has just been this passion and this love for baseball game,” said Pawol. “It started in my days of play as a receiver and turned into a referee, and I think it has become even stronger as an arbitrator. The referee is for me, it is in my DNA. It was a long difficult trip.”
Treo-conference three confections in Hofstra and 2001 world champion with the American female softball team, Pawol first took the mask of a referee thanks to the invitation of a friend in the school in the early 1990s. She won $ 15 per match during this concert.
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File – Marble referee Jen Pawol called a strike during the third round of a training baseball match in the spring between the Marlins of Miami and Houston Astros, Sunday March 10, 2024, in West Palm Beach, in Florida. (Photo / jeff dresserson, file)
“It was a system to a Umpire,” she recalls. “I didn’t know what I was doing, but I was able to put equipment and call bullets and strikes, so I was in it.”
She has been “in” since – even when the Big League referee, Ted Barrett, warned her in a 2015 test camp that this could take a decade among minors before seeing a major league stadium.
“I warned him:” Listen, that’s what you face, “said Barrett.” It will be 10 years in the minor leagues before sniffing a large league field. “”
This prediction was almost exactly correct. Pawol’s call made MLB the third of the “four big” male professional sports leagues to present a female official, after the beginnings of Violet Palmer at the NBA in 1997 and the beginnings of Sarah Thomas NFL in 2015. Thomas continued to work the Super Bowl LV between the Buccaneers of Tampa Bay and the Kansas City chefs. NHL is now the only Holdout.
Jen Pawol follows the traces of other female pioneers
Pawol will not be alone this weekend. The 48 -year -old said that thirty family members and friends will be in the stands to attend his historic beginnings. Many of her minor league comrades who opened the track in front of her, notably Christine Wren, Pam Posted and Ria Cortesio, have already contacted congratulations.
When posted told him years ago to “do it!” Pawol promised that she would. “I sent him a text yesterday and I said:” I do it! “”
File – Referee Jen Pawol takes up his position during the first round of a spring baseball match between the cardinals of St. Louis and the Nationals of Washington on Monday March 4, 2024, in West Palm Beach, in Florida. (Photo / jeff dresserson, file)
Outkick will be on the field at Trist Park to cover the first three games of the Pawol MLB.
At a time when titles often promote symbolism on merit, Jen Pawol’s journey is a reminder that the grain still counts.
Pawol is not there as a gesture of token or an inflated public relations movement. It is here because it has survived bus walks, the bubble summer heat and the lonely grind of the life of the minor leagues. And now, for the first time, a woman has arrived at Bigs.
