Jessica Mendoza making the most of her opportunity

Last week ESPN announced baseball analyst and former All-Star pitcher Curt Schilling would not be on-air for the rest of the MLB season through the wild card game ESPN will air and will replaced by Jessica Mendoza.

On August 25th, Schilling tweeted out a picture of Hitler comparing the number of Nazi’s in pre-World War II Germany to the number of extremist Muslims. ESPN pulled Schilling from all programming that afternoon.

His replacement, Jessica Mendoza is a former All-American softball player at Stanford and played for Team USA in the 2004 Olympics in Greece and began her career with ESPN in 2014 as an analyst on Baseball Tonight. Upon promotion in Schilling’s place, fellow commentators John Kruk, along with most of America, was surprised by her expertise as evidence by a New York Times piece:

“Male, female, it doesn’t matter,” Kruk said Monday in a telephone interview. “She’s as knowledgeable as anyone I’ve ever talked to about baseball. That’s why she was arguably the best hitter in the world when she was in her prime.”

During the game, Kruk said, he received texts from people “wondering why she was in the booth talking about hitting when I was in the booth with her and to one of them, I wrote back, ‘Google search her and you’ll find out why.’ ”

Mendoza has impressed so many that she has gained a significant following adovocating for her permanent place in commentating at the national level.

Given her enormously positive reception in the first few weeks outside women sports commentary in addition to Schilling’s prolonged suspension, ESPN faces a difficult challenge in the coming weeks.

With the MLB season winding down and Schilling shut down for the foreseeable future, Mendoza has an opportunity, if she hasn’t already, to seize a regular job on ESPN as a baseball analyst.

Should Mendoza accomplish a regular spot on Baseball Tonight, she would become part of a small yet growing presence of women journalists on ESPN, a significant mark towards improvement for both women journalists and the network.

Mendoza would join an exclusive club of only 48 current ESPN anchors, reporters, analysts or contributors who are female compared to the approximately 150 male journalists ESPN currently employs.

Mendoza would represent not just a progression of woman employement at ESPN, the world leader in sports news, but also as a step towards employing women in sports news becoming more than the “traditional” anchor or sideline reporter. Mendoza would personify a movement towards women sports journalists becoming experts in specific areas of sports journalism as well.