'Fully charged battery': Jen Pawol Ready For History As MLB's First Woman Umpire

Jen Pawol was in her hotel room in Nashville, Tennessee, when she got the call she had awaited for a decade.

She was going to make her major league debut this weekend, becoming the first female umpire in a century and a half of big league baseball.

"I was overcome with emotion," Pawol recalled Thursday, two days before she breaks a gender barrier when she works the bases during Miami's doubleheader at Atlanta. "It was super emotional to finally be living that phone call that I’d been hoping for and working towards for quite a while, and I just felt super full — I feel like a fully charged battery ready to go."

Her voice quavering with emotion, Pawol talked about getting the news during a Wednesday conference call with director of umpire development Rich Rieker and vice president of umpire operations Matt McKendry.

Pawol thought back to her long road. In the early 1990s at West Milford High School in New Jersey, she had a summer conversation with Lauren Rissmeyer, the third baseman on the school's softball team.

"'Do you want to come umpire with me?'" Pawol remembered being asked. "I didn’t think twice about it. Lauren’s doing it, so I’m going to do it."

Pawol's pay was $15 per game.

"She took a field and I took a field," Pawol said. "It was a one-umpire system. I had no idea what I was doing, but I got to put gear on and call balls and strikes, so I was in."

A 1995 graduate at West Milford, which inducted her into its Athletic Hall of Fame in 2022, Pawol became a three-time all-conference softball selection pick at Hofstra.

After umpiring NCAA softball from 2010-16, she was approached by then-big league ump Ted Barrett at an umpire camp in Binghamton, New York, in early 2015.

"Moreso than any female that I’d seen, she