In her very first week in the Sunday Night Baseball broadcast booth, ESPN baseball analyst Jessica Mendoza showcased her skills to a massive audience as Cubs starter Jake Arrieta approached and then achieved a no-hit game against the Dodgers in Los Angeles. Mendoza’s performance earned nearly as much praise as Arrieta’s did that night, and the network soon announced that Mendoza would replace the suspended Curt Schilling on the Sunday Night Baseball broadcasts for the remainder of the season.
The 34-year-old Mendoza admitted to feeling anxious before working her first live MLB game on Aug. 24, when she became the first female analyst on an ESPN MLB broadcast. But by the middle of Arrieta’s gem less than a week later, Mendoza found herself far more focused on baseball than the pressures of performing for an escalating viewership.
“I wasn’t so much thinking that more people were tuning in at the moment,” Mendoza told For the Win by phone. “It was more like, ‘there’s no way!’ I’ve watched plenty of games where you’re in the 7th, heading into the 8th, and you think it’s going to happen, and then a base hit comes. So for me it was like, during like the 5th or 6th inning, ‘OK, Dodgers haven’t had a hit yet. This could get interesting. Here we go.’ And you think about the strategy: Are they going to lay down a bunt? You think more game, not audience.
“So when the game was over, I’ve never received so many messages. That’s when I was like, ‘Oh my goodness, the whole baseball world was tuned in for the last hour of that game.’”
Jessica Mendoza, while training for the 2008 Olympic Games. (PHOTO: H. Darr Beiser, USA TODAY Sports Images)
The baseball world tuning in, it turned out, came with some ancillary benefits. Fans are not the only ones glued to their televisions during no-hitters.
“That’s probably the biggest benefit: The players are watching, and it lets me build a rapport with them so we can talk baseball,” Mendoza said. “The first MLB game I did was a Monday Night game, and no one really knew I was doing it. So walking into the clubhouse, I tried to introduce myself to people like, ‘Hey, I’m in the booth.’ And they were kind of confused, like, ‘You’re a female, I don’t understand.’
“This last Sunday, the players were coming up to me. It was night and day. I was in the clubhouse just kind of feeling my way around, and (Pirates ace) Gerrit Cole came up to me and said, ‘Hey Jessica, I watched the game last week. You were awesome. So, I just want to know — you helped Arrieta get a no-hitter, you think that could happen for me tonight?’ He was totally kidding, of course.”
Mendoza’s history with baseball dates back even further than her softball career, in which she earned gold and silver medals at the 2004 and 2008 Olympics, respectively. Mendoza’s father Gil was a longtime baseball coach at Moorpark College in Southern California, where she served as a bat girl. Before she became a four-time All-American softball player at Stanford and one of the best hitters in the softball world, Mendoza grew up playing baseball on teams otherwise full of boys.
“My introduction to sports was through baseball,” she said. “That’s all I knew.”
Mendoza is tagged out at the plate in the United States’ 7-0 victory over Greece en route to a gold medal at the 2004 Olympics in Athens. (PHOTO: Zack Gruber/USA TODAY)
The mechanics of hitting in baseball and softball are more or less the same, but the pitching styles obviously vary greatly. So Mendoza learns everything she can about the particulars from the current and former MLB players she covers and works with, appreciating the approaches of active aces like Arrieta and picking the brains of colleagues like former Cy Young Award winner Rick Sutcliffe.
“In the booth this last weekend with Aaron Boone, we really delved into the slider,” she said. “To me, as a left-handed hitter against a left-handed pitcher, we’re talking about how the slider moves away from your natural swing. For me, that was our curveball. And so it’s the same pitch, as far as movement — moving away and sort of diving down, but they’re called two different things. But that clicks: it’s like, ‘got it.’ We don’t have the slider — we have no pitch called that. But there is one that moves very similarly, so from the hitters’ perspective, now when I see it and see the Dodgers striking out on it, I’m able to understand it more.
“I went to Panama with (Royals starter) Jeremy Guthrie this year and ran some clinics down there, softball and baseball clinics. And he had to throw some bullpens, so I just caught him — and he’s throwing real-deal bullpens. I’m catching his curve and just going, ‘Dang, the break!’ It was just really cool to be able to see it, understand it, but then also apply the knowledge I have and sort of translate it that way.”
And though Mendoza recognizes that the deluge of metrics measuring contemporary baseball can be overwhelming, she does not shy away from learning about the sport’s advanced stats like some of her predecessors in the Sunday Night Baseball booth did.
“We’re going to Baltimore this weekend, the Royals are playing, so I’ve been looking at Mike Moustakas and his pull percentage from last year to this year — it’s dramatically lower,” she said, quite accurately. “So I’m looking at shift numbers, and how defensive teams have shifted the last three years versus this year. Those stats are intriguing to me, because you’re seeing it affect the way these guys now hit. And it’d be silly to try to make a point without knowing the stats that go behind it.”
The remainder of ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball schedule should give Mendoza plenty of opportunity to continue demonstrating her expertise during important games. Next week’s game between the Yankees and Mets at Citi Field will represent the conclusion of perhaps the biggest regular-season Subway Series since interleague play began, and the Sept. 27 matchup between the Pirates and Cubs in Chicago could help determine home-field advantage for the NL Wild Card game between the same two teams.
