Play-by-play announcers seemingly cursing what happens on a baseball field is a nightly occurrence. Normally this is simply ignored with a laugh.
But when Jenny Cavnar did it on May 30, the new voice of the Oakland A’s faced relentless criticism online.
Playing on the last name of Tampa Bay Rays outfielder José Siri, Cavnar said, “Hey Siri, this isn’t your night” after swinging and missing a pitch. Moments later, in the bottom of the ninth inning, he hit a game-tying home run.
“Get back in the kitchen, ma’am,” read one response on social media.
“I really need to know how he got this job,” said another.
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Reddit commenters called Cavnar a “colossal failure” with “no sense of baseball.” More than 600 people signed a Change.org petition calling for her to be fired from her job.
But she hasn’t been the only broadcaster to hear it from fans.
Just three days later, on June 2, KeynoteUSA announcer Dani Wexelman said a James Madison baseball player’s favorite color is “green trees” after hitting a home run over the wall into a forested area. Wexelman was mocked online for the call and faced requests to “bring back the teleprompter.”
However, when MLB Network’s Greg Amsinger announced a “No Hitter Alert” at the start of a game last month, only Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto immediately give up a home runReaders called the moment “hilarious” and “the funniest.”
The discrepancy between these responses has led some experts to call it sexism.
“There’s this idea among some that women don’t belong in men’s sports,” Guy Harrison, an assistant professor of sports media at the University of Tennessee, told KeynoteUSA. “I have no doubt that the response to the commenters is rooted in sexism.”
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This resistance comes at a time when women continue to break barriers in baseball, both on the field and in the executive ranks.
In 2020, Kim Ng became the first woman in MLB history to serve as general manager after being hired by the Miami Marlins. Two years later, Kelsie Whitmore joined the Staten Island FerryHawks of the Atlantic League, becoming the first woman to sign a contract with an MLB-affiliated league. Then, in February of this year, Cavnar became the first woman in MLB history to serve as a team’s regular announcer.
In the NBA this year, KeynoteUSA’s Doris Burke was a commentator for the Finals between the Boston Celtics and the Dallas Mavericks. It was the first time a woman worked as a television game analyst for a championship game in one of the four major professional sports leagues in the United States.
However, despite advances in industry sectors, data shows that women often do not receive the same respect as men for doing the same job.
A study published in 2022 by Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly found that audiences often experience a social identity crisis when female broadcasters call men’s sports. It stems from the perception that they are less competent and less informed than their male counterparts.
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“Sports broadcasting has been completely bogged down by lukewarm acceptance or outright rejection by female journalists and broadcasters, in what is often a masculine form of overt gender bias,” the report reads. “As the public becomes a little more tolerant, sports broadcasts, paradoxically, present female journalists as the other side in relation to their male counterpart.”
Studies show that women make up more than 40% of baseball fans and greatly influence the results of many teams. Cheryl Cooky, a professor of women’s, gender and sexuality studies at Purdue University who studies the representation of women’s sports in the media, believes the contrast represents the push and pull of progress present in almost any industry.
“There’s a way that knowledge about sports is gendered male and there’s a way that it’s policed,” Cooky said. “There is a subset of sports fans who are really interested in keeping the sport for, by and around men.”
But as women continue to make inroads in male-dominated sports, Cooky sees a potential tipping point approaching.
“There is a possibility that we are on the cusp of significant social change,” he said. “The danger for me is… that the effect wears off and we return to normal functioning.”
Cavnar, for his part, chooses to ignore the noise. The 2021 Colorado Sports Anchor of the Year and five-time Emmy winner knows she belongs in the big leagues.
“I can only control what’s in front of me and the focus has always been on work and being true to myself,” said Cavnar, who calls the A’s for KeynoteUSA Sports California. “I rely on advice and feedback from the people who have helped me get to this point and those I admire in the business, and that’s not something you would find reading reviews online.”
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