ESPN analyst Jessica Mendoza is flourishing on 'Sunday Night Baseball'
Eight months after becoming the first female analyst to call a nationally televised Major League Baseball playoff game, Jessica Mendoza has settled into a rhythm.
She wakes up Monday morning already preparing for Sunday night. There are player bios to read, statistics to memorize, storylines to hone. On Tuesday, she finds a way to watch the pitchers that will take the mound again Sunday. Throughout the week, she reviews film of herself talking on TV -- "almost like studying my at-bats when I played," says the former college softball All-American and Olympic gold-medalist.
By the weekend, she's ready to roll.
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This is life for Mendoza, now in her first season as a full-time analyst for ESPN's Sunday Night Baseball. As each weekend winds down, she enters the booth for the sports giant's most high-profile MLB broadcast. She calls the game. Then Monday morning comes around and she does it all again.
The 2016 season features a nice regularity after a history-making 2015 for Mendoza. Last June, she became the first female analyst for a men's College World Series broadcast. Last October, she became the first female analyst for a national MLB Playoffs broadcast.
Now she's beamed into the living rooms of ESPN viewers every Sunday night.
"I try not to think about it as much when I'm working, it's more just doing my job, but I realize I have more of a responsibility than probably your everyday analyst," Mendoza told Mashable this week. "My expectations for myself are the highest, because I want to make sure this job opportunity is here for anyone who wants to do it."
As a woman calling a male sport in a male-dominated industry for a male-dominated viewership, Mendoza does get subjected to sexist criticism online. She typically lets her social channels cool off for a day or two before checking them after games. But her work has earned praise from peers.
“I think she is fantastic,” SNY baseball analyst Ron Darling said in April.
“I don’t think anyone in our business outworks her."
The work is real. Along with prepping for her Sunday night game Mendoza has to stay current on league-wide topics for in-game conversation. The flagship MLB broadcast of a sports media behemoth functions as a sort of weekly league check-in as well.
"Unlike most sports that play once or even a few games a week, you're talking about 30 teams that play pretty much every single day," she says. "We’re not just doing Giants-Dodgers — we’re the national game for Sunday, so there's a lot to cover."
Mendoza's favorite storylines this year include the white-hot Chicago Cubs, whose stellar play and dismal history have garnered national interest. Another is the Boston Red Sox, who are seeing young talent emerge in the final season of franchise legend David Ortiz.
"The last thing I want to think of myself as is anything different," Mendoza says.
But there's a balancing act to Mendoza's job.
She works like any professional does, while remaining cognizant of her place in the bigger picture as a trailblazing woman in a historically male-dominated field.
"Anytime I'm like, 'Ho-hum,' trying to go about my business like anyone else, I'll have a father or someone come up to me and say, 'You know, my daughter never realized she could be in the booth for sports, and now that's what she wants to do,'" Mendoza says.
Mendoza still has her own network of support, as well, which includes tennis legend Billie Jean King. The pair recently had dinner together.
"It's amazing what she did in the 70s and now here we are and it's 2016," Mendoza says.
"She's sitting down with me after one of my broadcasts, giving me feedback, pushing me."
Mendoza and King met up when Sunday Night Baseball was in New York City for a game. Mendoza lives in Southern California with her husband and two children, but her new gig puts her in a different city nearly every weekend.
This Sunday, Mendoza and her broadcast partners will call the Giants vs. Dodgers game from San Francisco. That trip will represent a happy homecoming of sorts for Mendoza, who was a college softball All-American at Stanford in the early 2000s.
She'll see her freshman year dorm-mate, who's now living in San Francisco. Mendoza plans to visit other friends, too, and get nostalgic at some old haunts. Then it will be Sunday and -- just like every other weekend -- she'll go to work calling Major League Baseball games for a national TV audience.
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Sam Laird is Mashable's Senior Sports Reporter. He covers the wide, weird world of sports from all angles -- as well as occasional other topics -- from Mashable's San Francisco bureau. Before joining Mashable in November 2011, his freelance work appeared in publications including the New York Times, New York Times Magazine, Slam, and East Bay Express. Sam is a graduate of UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz, and basketball and burritos take up most of his spare time. Follow him on Twitter @samcmlaird.
