The first pitch of the first live professional baseball game to be broadcast on ESPN this season came on May 5 via satellite from South Korea. It was an unconventional start to a never-before season that was put on pause in the United States due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
At the time Korean baseball was the only game in town, and while the game looked familiar lots of other things were different — including the voice coming from the broadcast booth which was, for the first time, a woman’s.
Jessica Mendoza began this most unusual baseball season as the first woman to broadcast a professional baseball game live on ESPN, and with the first pitch of the 2020 World Series Tuesday night, she’s ending it as the first woman to serve as a World Series analyst.
A standout softball star, Jessica played outfield for Stanford University from 1999 to 2003, where she holds career records for batting average (.416), hits (327), home runs (50) and runs (230). She was named first-team PAC-10 and NCAA All-American all four years — one of only five women at the time to do so. Her junior year, Jessica led Stanford to its first ever College World Series.
She graduated from Stanford with both bachelor’s and masters degrees, and in 2004 was named starting outfielder for the United States Olympic team. That summer, Team USA won the gold medal at the Athens Olympics, and four years later the silver medal in Beijing (after which softball was eliminated as an Olympic sport).
As a member of the US women’s national softball team from 2001 to 2010 Jessica is a three-time World Champion, three-time World Cup champion, and a two-time gold medalist at the Pan American games (including in 2007, when she went 11 for 16 with 16 RBIs).
(We should also note that she won one of those world championships and a World Cup, and made it to two professional softball league championship games, AFTER returning from maternity leave.)
In 2019, she was inducted into the National Softball Hall of Fame.
While those are Jessica’s athletic bona fides, she’s been no less groundbreaking as a broadcaster.
Jessica began her media career with Yahoo! Sports as a field reporter, then joined FOX Sports as lead softball analyst. She signed on with ESPN to cover the Women’s College World Series and do sideline reporting for college football. She added the Men’s College World Series to her beat, and joined the broadcast team for the Little League World Series.
It was on a Monday night in 2015 — Aug. 16, to be exact — that Jessica made history as the first woman in the ESPN broadcast booth during an MLB game. Another first came a few months later during the American League Wild Card game, when she became the first woman analyst for a postseason game.
ESPN added Jessica to Sunday Night Baseball for the 2016 season, and she appeared for three years. She also appears regularly on Baseball Tonight, Sports Center, and several other ESPN studio programs.
In 2019, Jessica joined the New York Mets as a senior adviser to the general manager, which critics rightfully called a conflict of interest with her ESPN duties. In response (and in part due to controversial comments she made regarding the Houston Astros cheating scandal) ESPN dropped Jessica from Sunday Night Baseball. (Her ESPN colleague Alex Rodriguez, who served as an adviser to the New York Yankees from 2017 through 2018 and was in negotiations this season to buy the New York Mets, was only recused from Mets games.)
To avoid any appearances of a conflict, Jessica resigned her position with the Mets in February 2020 and signed an extension of her ESPN contract, expanding her broadcast duties to include a package of MLB games as well as playoff and World Series games. It’s an expanded role that has her broadcasting on both radio and television.
If you haven’t heard her call a game yet, you can catch Jessica tomorrow night on ESPN radio for Game 3 of the World Series between the Tampa Bay Rays and the Los Angeles Dodgers. First pitch is at 7:08 pm Central Time.
Top photo: Phil Ellsworth ESPN Images