Jen Pawol, ready to break the gender barrier in MLB
Jen Pawol will be a referee of the Marlins vs Braves series and will be the first woman in the history of the MLB to do so
New York – Jen Pawol He was in his hotel room in Nashville, Tennessee, when he received the call he had expected for a decade.
I was going to debut in the big leagues this weekend, becoming the first arbitrator woman in a century and a half of major league baseball.
“I was very excited,” Pawol recalled on Thursday, two days before breaking the gender barrier when working on the bases during the double migraler of Miami Marlins against Atlanta Braves. “It was super emotional, finally, to receive that phone call I had been waiting for and for which I had worked for so long, and I felt completely full. I feel like a completely charged battery, ready to start.”
With the voice trembling for emotion, Pawol talked about receiving the news during a telephone conference on Wednesday with the director of Referees Development, Rich Rieker, and the Vice President of Referee Operations, Matt Mckendry.
Pawol remembered his long way. In the early 90s, in the West Milford High School in New Jersey, he had a summer conversation with Lauren Rissmeyer, the third base of the school’s softball team.
“Do you want to accompany me as a referee?” Pawol recalled that he was asked. “I didn’t think twice. Lauren does it, so I do it.”
Pawol’s salary was $ 15 per game.
“She played in the field and me too,” Pawol said. “It was a single referee system. I had no idea what I was doing, but I had to put on the team and mark balls and strikes, so I was inside.”
Graduated in 1995 of West Milford, an institution that incorporated it into the Athletics Hall of Athletics in 2022, Pawol was selected three times for the Softball Team of the Conference in Hofstra.
After arbitrating the NCAA softball team from 2010 to 2016, the then arbitrator of the Major Leagues, Ted Barretthe approached her in a referee camp in Binghamton, New York, at the beginning of 2015.
“More than any other woman she has seen, she seemed to physically endure the rigors of work,” Barrett said Thursday. “But what impressed me was his willingness to learn. It seemed like a sponge with everything we taught him. I am proud to have let him know the opportunity.”
Barrett invited Pawol to a clinic in Atlanta and then to a MLB test camp in Cincinnati that August 15. He invited her to dinner in Atlanta with her fellow arbitrators of the Major Leagues, Paul Nauert and Marvin Hudson, and her wives.
“I warned him: ‘Look, this is what awaits you. They will spend 10 years in the leagues minor before you can step on a major leagues,” Barrett said. Pawol was among the 38 candidates invited to the Referee Training Academy in Vero Beach, Florida, and began his professional career as a referee in the Gulf Coast League on June 24, 2016, working on the dish when the West Tigers of the GCL played against the GCL tiles.
It amounted to the New York/Penn League in 2017, to the Liga of the West media after the first two weeks of the 2018 season, and then worked in the South Atlantic League in 2019, the League of the West Western Middle A high -to -high class in 2021, the East A League and the International Leagues and the Coast of the Pacific of Triple A in 2023. 2024 and 2025.
“They have been more than 1,200 minor leagues games, countless hours to review videos to try to improve, and at the bottom of all this the passion and love for baseball have been,” he said. This began in my time as a recipient and became a referee, and I think it has strengthened even more as an arbitrator. Arbitration is for me, it is in my DNA. It has been a long and hard path, “he said.
Pawol is among the eight referees they currently play in minors. For its major leagues, Chris Guccione team will join in Atlanta, where you wait for some 30 family and friends. The bases will work during the double billboard on Saturday and sing balls and strikes on Sunday.
Pawol was on third base on Wednesday night when Jacksonville beat Nashville in the International League when the third base of the Sounds, Oliver Dunn, congratulated her.
“If I get to the big leagues,” he said, “we will have worked together at all levels.”
Pawol repeatedly thanked his predecessor referees of the minors, mentioning several who exchanged calls or text messages, such as Christine Wren, Pam Postema and Ria courtesy. Just after his promotion to Triple-A, Pawol met with posting in Las Vegas.
“The last thing he told me to see her was: ‘Do it!'” Powal explained. “So yesterday I wrote: ‘I’m going to do it!'”
Barrett will be watching the game from Oregon, where he will attend the Northwest League Games this weekend.
“I hope this inspires,” he said. “Who knows, maybe some young woman see the game on television and say: ‘Hey, I would like to try'”.
