It was, she said, the day “the dream came true”. Jen Pawol, a 48-year-old former art teacher, made US sporting history at the weekend when she became the first female umpire of a Major League Baseball game during the regular season.
Pawol, whose debut came on Saturday in a game between the Miami Marlins and Atlanta Braves, was given a standing ovation as she arrived on the pitch. Supporters held up signs reading “Pawol making HERstory” and “the time has come for one and all to play ball” – a nostalgic reference to A League of Their Own, the classic sports film about a women’s baseball league during the second world war.
Pawol told reporters: “Wow, just incredible, the dream came true … the dream actually came true today.” She added: “It was pretty amazing when we took the field, and it seemed like quite a few people started clapping and saying my name, so that was pretty intense and very emotional.”
Although MLB has had female coaches and general managers, there had, until this weekend, never been a female umpire in a regular season game. “I’m aware of the gravity. I’m aware of the magnitude,” she said, as quoted by MLB.com.
Growing up in Long Island, New York, where baseball was always on the television, Pawol said she had always known she wanted that to change. “I had it [umpiring] in my DNA,” she has said.
Pawol “begged” her parents to let her play baseball when she was a child. But at the time, girls played softball, and so she did that instead, according to a profile in The Athletic in 2023.
Her first experience as a softball umpire came in 1990 when a friend asked her to work a game with her. Pawol also got a master’s degree in painting from Hunter College in New York and, alongside sport, worked as an art teacher.
She had been umpiring softball for about 10 years before being invited in 2015 to attend a one-day MLB umpiring camp in Cincinnati. That was when she realised her dream of becoming a major league umpire was within reach, she said on Saturday.
“I made a point to get there as soon as I could, to give it my best shot,” Pawol added. After that, she won a scholarship to MLB’s umpire academy, saying: “When I realised I could be a major leaguer, I just went for it.”
In an interview with MLB.com in 2022, Pawol said she was encouraged to attend the one-day camp after someone told her how welcoming the MLB umpire camps were for women. “As soon as I heard that, I went and checked it out for myself, and they were right,” she said. “I think more women need to know that it’s a safe environment, it’s welcoming, it’s incredible. I went in 2015 … I had an amazing time, I felt like it was going to be a great day, and it turned out to be amazing and it was going to change my life, actually.”
Despite the progress, in an interview with MLB.com in 2016, the year Pawol became professional, she said she was well aware of the additional scrutiny on her.
“I can control my hustle, my calls, my professionalism. But gender and colour and things like that, no one can control those,” she said. “I can see why people are talking about it, asking those questions, because of the rarity of women being involved.”
But the trailblazer steadily rose through the ranks and in 2023 became the first female umpire to reach Triple-A: the highest level of play in US minor league baseball.
After the game on Saturday, Pawol donated the hat she wore to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, which she visited as a child.
She returns to the field on Sunday, when she will stand behind home plate in the last match of a three-game series.
