11/11/2023 0 Comments Female baseball commentator![]() There was a feeling of, it’s always been that way so that’s the way it always will be. Where women kind of congregated toward the sideline role. Why do you think that is? I just think it’s one of those things where, for so long, and not through anyone’s fault, it was normalized. We see a fair number of female reporters on the sidelines, but so few in the broadcast booth. They’ve all been really kind and gracious about doing that. I only knew three of the guys so when the season got shut down, I was like, “Crap! How do I play catch up and learn about the team when the whole team has just been sent home?” So we launched a digital show for Orioles Instagram called “The Grind” where I would sit down and just have coffee virtually with a player once a week. It must’ve been hard to get to know the players in the midst of a pandemic. They made everything that I never even thought possible happen. So when the Orioles came to me and said we want you to do both, I was like this is it. And everybody said you have to choose at some point. ![]() In my years in this industry, people have asked, “Do you like play-by-play or do you like sidelines?” Well, I don’t really prefer one of them-they’re so different, I like them both. And you have a very unique role with the team. Īfter working in the minors for many years, you got called up to the “bigs” with the Orioles. ![]() I’m never going to pretend I have the athlete mind to say, “Oh yeah, he should’ve broken left instead of right.” That’s getting out of what I know and that’s when people see through that-when you start making up stuff. Any color analysis that I do is more of a human background to kind of flesh out the athlete as a whole versus breaking down why they did a certain play. For lack of a better word, you be a yes man until you get to that point. So when it came to the fact that someone said, “Hey, we’re going to put you in the booth,” it was a little nerve wracking-I was like, “What am I going to bring to the table?” But I still trusted it. And my college advisor said, “Hey, we want to put you in broadcasting.” And I said, “Okay.” And then they said, “Hey, we want you to do a sideline series.” And I said, “Okay.” I trusted the other people around me who had more experience than me every time they wanted me to go in a different direction. So how did you get into sports broadcasting? I started out as a print journalist. Bottom line is, I can’t go out and field ground balls. I always tell the, when they walk out in the hallway of the hotel and see me working at 2, 3 o clock in the morning because I couldn’t get wi-fi in my own room and they just say, “I don’t know how you do it.” And I say “I can do the long hours. But it’s just funny when I look back at it now, I think that’s the reason why I went in the direction of pivoting toward the human interest side of the sport rather than trying to be the person who gets hyper analytical and breaks down the mechanics. Everybody always thinks, oh you played soft ball. But contact, hand-eye coordination-heavy sports, no. Then I did dance and cheerleading and stuff like that. I had one not great year of running track and field back in high school. We always joke, I did not inherit the athletic gene in the family. But you just organically came to love it. Most women who are really into sports either played sports or have a whole lot of brothers. And once we started going to baseball games, for whatever reason, my brain just latched onto that 10 times harder and I wanted to know every little detail about the sports. I never realized until I got older and would watch the way other kids were at sporting events and they would want to get souvenirs or cotton candy and my sister and I were the ones that were plugged into our seats, asking our parents about things that were going on, being in awe of our dad’s. So that’s what we did for fun-me, my mom, dad, and sister were just always at different events. We lived in the heart of SEC Country when it came to football. Living in Atlanta, there was just so much going on, especially given that it was the mid ’90s so we had the Olympics and the Braves were on a streak. How did you get into sports? I grew up around sports. We chatted with Newman over Zoom, where she discussed her unprecedented new role, muting haters on Twitter, and how the human side of sports is her jam. It’s hard to believe, but Melanie Newman, 29, is the first female broadcaster to do play-by-play for the Baltimore Orioles in the team’s history-and only the fourth female in the broadcast booth in all of Major League Baseball.
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