‘It’s not just a one-person fight anymore’
Orioles announcer Melanie Newman joins small club of female play-by-play voices
BALTIMORE — Melanie Newman walked into a silent Camden Yards, devoid of any human souls but the security guards, her broadcast partner Geoff Arnold and their sound engineer.
The setting was so unusual, so austere, that she did not have much cause to contemplate her small revolution, to imagine all the ears that would be hearing an Orioles game narrated by a female voice for the first time.
The on-air light flashed and off she went, telling the story of another ballgame.
When Newman called a Salem (Virginia) Red Sox game last year with her friend Suzie Cool, a pack of reporters showed up to chronicle the first all-female booth in baseball history. But thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, there was no such hullabaloo last month when she became the first woman to handle play-byplay on an Orioles game.
That was just fine with the 29year-old Georgian, who’s proud of what she’s accomplished but does not want her story to eclipse the game she’s broadcasting on a given night.
“I prefer to make things about the guys,” she said. “My story will get told eventually, but I want to tell theirs.”
For all the battles women have fought to carve out a vital place in sports media, you can still count on one hand the female announcers who’ve called play-by-play on a Major League Baseball broadcast. The current roster includes Suzyn Waldman, who called her first New York Yankees game in 1992, and Jenny Cavnar with the Colorado Rockies. Jessica Mendoza works as an analyst on ESPN telecasts.
The women in this small club have become used to demeaning comments, and far worse, from fans who say they’re not “comfortable” with a female voice bringing the games into their homes night after night.
Waldman, who maintains an active texting friendship with Newman, had to exit stadiums with a security detail when she began reporting on the Yankees in the late 1980s. Fans mailed her envelopes stuffed with soiled toilet paper and used condoms. She still feels “tolerated, not totally accepted.” But she sees in Newman the same toughness that carried her through those awful days, along with a generational optimism that was harder to come by 30 years ago.
“If you can look yourself in the mirror and say, ‘I have something that nobody else has,’ then keep going,” Waldman said. “She looks in the mirror, and all she wants to be is the first Melanie Newman. That’s a very good thing for her.”
Starting in college
Newman was largely unaware of this history when her interest in broadcasting blossomed at Troy University in Alabama. When she earned her first professional baseball announcing job for the Mobile BayBears, an Arizona Diamondbacks affiliate, she had no idea her friend Justin Baker, who had put her in the booth, was shielding her from a flood of hateful messages.
“My parents never made me feel like I was doing something weird that other women didn’t do. Baker never made me feel that way,” she said. “I was in a very normalized environment that kind of allowed me to have my head in the sand and not realize that people outside were talking about how weird it was. I got to focus just on growing my craft.”
Baker said his job was even threatened by executives. “People would say, ‘Hey, she’s a nice girl, she’s great at all these things, but maybe you could limit her innings,’ ” he recalled. “And I basically said, ‘No, I’m not going to do that, because I think she can get a lot better at this. But we’re never going to know if we don’t give her the opportunity.’ ”
To this day, Newman sees herself more as a workaholic opportunist who loves her job than as a crusader.
“There is just a dogged determination that I really have not seen many times,” said former Hampton Roads voice Bob Rathbun, the current voice of the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks and an early mentor to Newman.
Once shy
Here’s a strange fact about the person who would go on to win pageants, be named “Most Outstanding Woman” at her university and crash through barriers as a baseball announcer: She was reluctant to say much of anything as a high school student coming of age near Atlanta.
“I was extremely introverted,” she said. “I had three friends, and that was it. I said something to one of my friends at our lockers one day, and I’ll never forget, a kid turned around and shouted, ‘Wow, I heard Melanie talk.’ ”
She grew up in a sports-obsessed area, with the sprawling East Cobb amateur baseball complex 10 minutes down the road and the brilliant Atlanta Braves teams of the 1990s playing 30 miles away. She actually did not root for the home team; her mother, Susan, hailed from a Red Sox-loving Boston family, and her father, Mike, was an Army brat who fancied the Texas Rangers.
Newman loved to lock her eyes on the games, peppering her father with questions about how plays worked or why calls went the way they did.
Newman thought she wanted to become an early-childhood teacher when she went off to college, but her mother, a veteran educator, said no way. She’d be making a 30-year commitment to one of the lowestpaying careers in the country. “So I always joke that I one-upped her by picking an even less stable, lowerpaying job,” she said with a laugh.
The path to broadcasting began at Troy, a university of 17,000.
“She was very shy,” said Ricky Hazel, the former Troy sports information director who handed out Newman’s first assignment, a soccer game. “I just told them, ‘More than likely, no one’s going to be watching this, so don’t worry about it. Have fun.’ She just took it and ran with it.”
Getting to MLB
When Newman first talked with Orioles officials in February, she felt an instant kinship over broadcasting philosophy. But the call offering a full season in Baltimore left her “in shock.” When she saw Orioles third baseman Rio Ruiz, whom she’d known in the minors, his face lit up. Arnold, her radio partner, is also an old pal from the Carolina League.
“Talent matters in this industry,” he said. “But a lot of it comes down to: Who are the people willing to stick it out the longest and never lose sight of what they want to do?”
So many female friends and colleagues, her “tribe,” have touched base since she called that first Orioles game Aug. 4.
“There’s multiple of us now,” Newman said. “It’s not just a oneperson fight anymore.”