Here’s how to watch first all-female broadcast crew call Tuesday’s Orioles-Rays game
When Orioles broadcaster Melanie Newman was asked to call another Major League Baseball “Game of the Week” on YouTube, she was initially happy to be asked back again.
When she found out it was the Orioles’ game Tuesday night against the Rays, she was pleased.
But her eyes lit up when she saw the crew that would be working with her that day: Analyst Sarah Langs, reporter Alanna Rizzo and pre- and postgame hosts Lauren Gardner and Heidi Watney.
It’ll be the first time only female broadcasters will call a Major League Baseball game.
“It did register because, again credit to MLB Network, they didn’t say, ‘Oh, this is the all-female crew we’re going to staff,’ they just said this is the crew we’re looking at and gave me the names,” Newman said on MLB Network Radio on Sirus XM. “And it was that little light in the back of my head that said, ‘Wow, these are all women. Like this is a possibility to be an all-female team.’ And then of course it comes out that it in fact is.”
First pitch for the Rays-Orioles game is set for 6:10 p.m. in Kansas City. Fans can watch on YouTube (the game can be seen here) and this is the embed:
Rizzo, Gardner and Watney are MLB Network hosts, with the latter embedded with the Royals through the playoffs during their run to the 2014 World Series. Langs writes for MLB.com.
“It’s just another unique opportunity and like both Alanna and Sarah have said, it’s just that representation,” Newman said on SiriusXM. “While we don’t want to do the novelty and the rah-rah parade about it, we want people to know that if a girl sees this, or even if a little boy who maybe likes things that’s classified as something girls like, just giving each side a chance to really step out and realize that their gender doesn’t have a bearing on what their passion is. That’s the biggest part of this.”
This story was originally published July 20, 2021 at 8:38 AM.
