Local Baseball Scholar: Jen Pawol’s MLB Debut Is Historic — But Can She Survive MLB’s Macho Umpire Culture?
Opinion Advocates for ideas and draws conclusions based on the author/producer’s interpretation of facts and data.
On Saturday, August 9, Jen Pawol will become the first woman to umpire a regular season Major League Baseball (MLB) game. This groundbreaking achievement for MLB and for Pawol should be celebrated, but MLB is behind the times in employing female officials. The NBA hired its first female referees in 1997; the first woman to officiate an NFL game was in 2015; and Major League Soccer employed occasional female referees in 1998 and hired its first full-time female referee in 2020.
Being the first female umpire in MLB history is an impressive feat that reflects Pawol’s years of hard work but sticking around as an MLB umpire is something else entirely. The history of pioneering umpires in MLB history indicates that for Pawol to stick around, she is going to have to blend into MLB’s conformist umpire culture.
That umpire culture includes the mechanics of making calls, of course, but historically has included body type as well. In the early 2000s, one of the two umpire schools whose graduates regularly went into minor league baseball tended to promote alums who, in the words of author Bruce Weber, “conform[ed] to more of a physical type, strapping and athletic, young men.”
It also comes with a worldview. Weber, who wrote one of the best books on umpires 2009’s, As They Seem ‘Em, concluded “that a land of umpires exists” with “citizens, laws, and a culture.” He explained, “Umpire nation is a place buried deep in the conservative, middle-American heart. … It’s a place where the playing of the national anthem before a ball game is serious business, where women are discomforting, […] homosexuals are unwanted, and liberals tend to keep their opinions to themselves.” In short, women faced serious hurdles to fitting in with MLB umpires; it wasn’t until 2006 that MLB clarified that its use of male pronouns for umpires in its rulebook applied to women as well.
Emmett Ashford, the first Black person to umpire an MLB game, made his debut in 1966, nearly 20 years after Jackie Robinson. When he broke into MLB, Ashford was distinctive beyond his skin color. He was, in his daughter’s words, “one of the most flamboyant […] figures on the baseball diamond.” As Ashford recalled, “I never went to an umpiring school because they didn’t accept blacks in those days. So I developed my own style of officiating.” That style meant other umpires regularly criticized him. Dave Pallone wrote that Ashford “was always jumping up and down and waving his arms and looking ridiculous.” Ashford recalled that “most of the problems I had with umpires were not technically a matter of race, but a matter of my different kind of style.”
Pallone umpired MLB games for 10 years before he was fired and publicly outed. Although he mastered the mechanics of umpiring, in a lot of other ways, he struggled to fit in. Pallone wrote that “I knew I had to control my feelings about any man I was sexually attracted to, or even thought of being sexually attracted to” to maintain his career as an umpire. In retrospect, he recognized that the stress of staying closeted made him worse at his job. After he was fired, Pallone concluded, that “baseball was living a hidden life, too. Publicly, it pretended to be inclusive and fair, but it was close-minded and biased behind its mask.”
In 2014, Dale Scott became the first MLB umpire to publicly come out as gay while an active umpire. For decades, he hid his true self from fellow umpires from whom he sometimes heard homophobic comments. As he recalled, “I did not show any emotion on the outside, but inside I was sad and hurt.” By the early 2000s, several umpires had told Scott they knew he was gay and long-since having established that he fit in, he decided to come out publicly.
Pam Postema, who until Pawol in 2023 was the only woman to umpire AAA baseball, started her career in 1977. After being released in 1989 following six years in AAA, Postema filed a lawsuit against MLB for gender discrimination that was settled out of court. Throughout her career, Postema consciously did everything she could to fit in with the other umpires, both on and off the field. She cut her hair short and used a lower voice when making calls. She wrote that she “thought that if I went drinking with the other guys, maybe they’d treat me less as a woman.” When that did not work, she tried to fit in with gendered expectations and employed “a beauty consultant” to rework her wardrobe. As she recalled, “the whole clothing experiment hurt my credibility with my partners. They’d see me walk into the umpires’ locker room dressed to the nines, but then couldn’t separate the woman from the umpire an hour later.” Despite her best efforts, she could not fit in. As Postema wrote, “I took more [abuse] than anybody—just because I was a woman, a she instead of a he. In professional baseball, there is no worse crime.”
If MLB umpiring culture has changed, maybe Pawol can fit in and stick around. Certainly current technology can relatively easily show if Pawol is on par with male umpires, which might help her to fit in. That same technology, however, will also make life harder for her because it is so easy to broadcast her mistakes everywhere and with the vitriol directed at female athletes online, she will likely be a target for misogynists, making her stand out even more.
Seth S. Tannenbaum, Ph.D. is assistant professor of sport studies at Manhattanville University where he teaches classes that include “Baseball and American Society.” His book, Bleacher Seats and Luxury Suites: Democracy and Division at the Twentieth-Century Ballpark, will be published by the University of Illinois Press in 2026.
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