Jen Pawol

Even while living in a sleepy little town in the South, you sometimes have an opportunity to rub shoulders with history.

The last thing I ever expected was to meet up with Jen Pawol, the first female umpire to call balls and strikes in major league baseball history.

 

Jen Pawol became MLB's first female umpire this year.

G'wan. Get out of here. In Lexington?

But, yes. It really happened. 

When our neighbor, Pam Zanni, knocked on our door yesterday afternoon, she wanted to know if we'd received her email invitation to join her and her husband, Jason, for their Christmas party that night. She couldn't remember if she sent us the invite or not. Umm, no. I don't think so.

"Well, come over around 6 p.m., " said Pam. "It's going to be a surprise. It's sports."

The surprise lasted maybe all of five seconds because then she added, "Jen Pawol's going to be here."

To be honest, the name "Jen Pawol" didn't set off an immediate fire alarm. I'm an old guy, memory is fuzzy these days, and besides, we're out of baseball season. My mental Rolodex was spinning. But somewhere in the next minute or so, the word "umpire" popped up in the conversation – Jason umpires professionally as a side hustle – and everything came into focus.

Pam Zanni (left) and Jen Pawol.

 Just for a refresher, in case your memory is fuzzy, too, Pawol finally reached the majors last August after umpiring baseball for about nine years at the minor league level. Then, on Aug. 9, she was called up as a fill-in ump for the Miami-Atlanta series at Truist Park.

She took the field as the first-base ump in the first game of a doubleheader that day, and you could hear the glass ceiling cracking like ice on a thawing pond all over major league baseball. Maybe everywhere. It was that historic. Baseball is America's pastime, after all.

Then, the next day, she was behind the plate. When you're the plate umpire, all 40,000 eyes in the stadium are on you. You can feel the weight of the glare. It's the game's feature position, with all the attendant pressure. Double that pressure if you're female. C'mon, man. It's balls and strikes. Meat and potatoes.

Pawol graded out well at 91 percent that day. Not bad for her first performance in the Big Show. The major league average is about 94 or so. 

Pawol ended up working 18 games last year and she'll come into the 2026 season as one of 15 minor league umps on the fill-in list. There are 76 fulltime umpires in the MLB, but with injuries, vacations, personal leave and whatnot, Pawol should have plenty of opportunities to work more games this year. And to gain more experience. She'll be 49 years old in a couple days and the ultimate goal still remains to become a fulltime MLB ump.

When she did show up at the Zanni party – she was there because of Jason's umpiring connections, plus there were at least five collegiate level umpires there last night – I think the last thing she expected was to be interviewed. I introduced myself and my wife, Kim, to Pawol and told her that I was a retired sports editor from the local paper. 

I didn't have prepared questions, or a note pad, nor did I turn on my cell phone recorder, mostly because it's hard to conduct a proper interview while standing over the horseradish dip with people milling around. But she was gracious and patient as I asked my several questions and then filed her responses away for future reference. 

MLB is introducing the Automated Ball-Strike System (ABS) this year. It's high-tech umpiring with Hawkeye cameras tracking the pitch to a player's defined strike zone. A team gets two challenges per game to question an umpire's call and doesn't lose a challenge unless the original call stands. Pawol said she was OK with that.

"I'll do whatever they tell me to do," said Pawol, who won Baseball America's Trailblazer of the Year Award. "I'll paint the bases green if they want me to." (Pawol, incidentally, is also an artist with a Master's in Fine Arts. I suppose she can paint anything she wants.) 

Doe's she have a sense of her place in breaking baseball's glass ceiling? 

"It felt empowering," said Pawol. "It gave me so much joy and satisfaction. Baseball gives me joy. It's a great game. It really is."

Does she get the support she needs for her accomplishment?

"Everybody's been wonderful," said Pawol. "And I'm grateful." 

Her cap, the one she wore in Atlanta when she made her historic MLB appearance, was requested by the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY and to which she gladly donated. So now she is enshrined in baseball history for all of posterity.

As Kim and I were leaving, we thanked Jason for the evening.

He pulled me aside for a quiet word.

"Can you believe this?" asked Jason. "If you had told me 10 years ago that I'd have a major league umpire in my house, I'd have said you were freaking crazy. This is amazing." 

 Indeed, it was. It was a home run.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Legacy president

Now our country, under convicted felon president Donald Trump, is committing piracy on the high seas by seizing oil tankers off the coast of Venezuela and brushing it off as policy. He said he'll do it again.

It's pretty outrageous stuff. In fact, Trump's presidential legacy (I prefer to call it his criminal legacy) as he enters the middle of his second term seems to be nothing more than one outrage followed by another outrage of even greater proportion.

I think this all started in his first term when he addressed the border issue in 2017-18 by separating families – parents from their children – who were seeking asylum from the horrors of their own oppressive nations. Instead, many of those parents seeking new lives found themselves prosecuted as illegal aliens and deported while their children were put in cages and placed in the care of the Department of Health and Human Services. Remember that? More than 5,500 kids were separated from their parents. To this day, about 1,200 children are still looking to rejoin their families – if they can find them.

Thanks, Trump. 

I thought that was impeachable stuff, but no. America's political backbone for presidential outage was dissolving.

The next big outage came with the Covid-19 pandemic. Huge numbers of People were dying worldwide at an accelerated rate. When the pandemic hit American shores, Trump claimed it was only "one or two" people who were dying in this country and the virus would be contained before it got worse. Instead, within weeks, hospitals were overwhelmed. There were not enough ventilators to go around. Corpses had to be placed in refrigeration trucks serving as morgues and bodies were often buried in mass graves. Oh, you forgot that part, did you?

Trump, to his credit, initiated Operation Warp Speed in 2000 in an effort to find a Covid vaccine. And it happened. In a miracle of modern medical research, mRNA vaccines were developed, reviewed and reviewed again (with over 600 peer reviews). To this day, the vaccines are credited with saving 14 million lives globally. This is about the only moment where I can find that Trump actually did something good for the country.

But then he came down with the virus.. His life was saved by a cocktail of medicines that only a president could afford. When he returned to the White House, he defiantly ripped off his mask, thus invigorating – if only metaphorically – the anti-vaxxer movement. Hundreds of thousands of people continued to die by refusing to be vaccinated.

The legacy of the anti-vaccination movement is that now measles – an illness once eliminated in this country – is now back and flourishing because there is resistance to getting measles shots. What other empirical evidence do you need that the shot works? Measles vaccines, no measles. No vaccine, measles returns. There. Believe the science. Same for Covid. Same for flu. Same for anything that requires a vaccine. And, no, shots do not cause autism. Period.

Then came Jan. 6 2021 when Trump-inspired conservative hooligans (Three Percenters, Oath Keepers, Proud Boys) stormed the Capitol in an effort to halt the ceremonial electoral count to affirm Joe Biden as president. That was a horrifying moment in American history where a coup to overthrow the government actually took place in front of our eyes.

We had a four-year hiatus from Trump as the economy grew and inflation dropped to 3 percent from a world-wide high of 9 percent, but then Trump was somehow elected as president again, this time bringing with him Project 2025. You remember Project 2025. It was a blueprint for American as seen by the ultra conservative Heritage Foundation. It's basically a primer on how to make America white again in the face of demographics that show the country is actually becoming browner. Some folks are frightened of that.

What Project 2025 brought us, among other things, is the absurdly named Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the elimination of American influence in third-world countries (America first!), the elimination of climate protections, the call for mass deportations of all those brown-skinned people, and a host of other anti-American actions (read the Constitution) that are printed in over the project's 900 pages.

Meanwhile, the Epstein files are about to surface. Trump, who has been declared an adjudicated rapist by a Federal judge following the E. Jean Carroll lawsuit. Trump was also found guilty on 34 counts for falsifying his business records in an attempt to pay off porn star Stormy Daniels for a sexual affair between the two. So why should a connection to a known pedophile like Jeffrey Epstein surprise us?

Rape. Porn star. Pedophilia. Those words are not often associated with active U.S. presidents.

That pretty much brings us to now, where this country is seemingly committing war crimes by blowing up alleged drug traffickers in their speedboat. The premise is that the speedboats are ferrying drugs across 1,000 miles of water from Venezuela to the United States. So instead of relying on due process to stop them, Trump is blowing them up without evidence. So far, nearly 90 people have been killed, and for what? Fentanyl does not come from Venezuela, it comes from China and is manufactured in Mexico. Cocaine comes from Venezuela, but most of the deliveries are destined for European markets. So good. We're making Europe safe again.

And we might be committing war crimes – or murder – if we're blowing up survivors clinging to wreckage with follow-up missile strikes. 

And now, we're taking control of oil tankers. This one, nautically named The Skipper, flies the flag of Guyana, which makes its seizure problematical under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. 

It could be piracy instead. 

The idea behind this seizure is that the oil is under US sanction – it cannot be sold – but by doing so, the United States might be able to effect regime change in Venezuela in an effort to remove president Nicolás Maduro from office.

Or perhaps the US can muscle Venezuela into a war. I mean, why not? Venezuela has the richest oil reserve in the hemisphere. Why can't it be ours? Naaaa. That's ridiculous.

Isn't it? 

The litany of outrages might speak differently. 

 

Adrift...

 "Meaning of 'Respect and Protection' of the wounded, sick and shipwrecked. The wounded, sick and shipwrecked must be respected and protected at all times. This means that they should not be knowingly attacked, fired upon or necessarily interfered with."

            – Department of Defense Law of War Manuel, section 7.3.3 Shipwrecked, P. 451

 

On Sept. 2 of this year, the Department of Defense, under Secretary Pete Hegseth, began its campaign of attacking and destroying alleged drug-running speedboats from Venezuela in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean. These attacks have been done without due process and without the approval of Congress. Mostly, they appear to be deadly operations conducted by a rogue Department of Defense.

The very first in the series of drone attacks – there have been 22 so far, resulting in 88 deaths – took nearly everyone by surprise because after the boat was destroyed, two survivors were seen to be clinging to the wreckage of the hull. They were in the water for perhaps up to an hour as the DoD tried to figure out what to do next because, well, they didn't plan for this. The survivors were seen waving their arms, probably in distress, perhaps to catch the attention of aircraft seen overhead.

What to do next should be explained in the DoD's own Law of War manual, which states that shipwrecked persons cannot be knowingly attacked or fired upon. Section 7.3.3 of the manual draws much of its language from the Geneva Convention of 1949 regarding humanitarian rules and international standards, which says the sick and wounded are to be retrieved and given care. Not blown up.

Instead, the DoD responded with a second attack, this one incinerating the two survivors.

I don't know if the DoD's manual carries the weight of law or if it's just a collection of suggestions. But there is international law. There is maritime law. There is The Hague and the Court of International Justice. There is the International Criminal Court. 

This entire violent operation puts our country in a difficult position. The Trump administration insists we are in a war with narco-terrorists and the attacks are therefore justified if we are to stop the flow of drugs crossing our borders.

But only Congress – not the president – has the Constitutional power to declare war on a sovereign nation. So here we are: we are either a nation at war committing war crimes (as suggested by the DoD's own manual regarding shipwrecked survivors not to be fired upon), or we are a nation committing murder on the high seas. Take your choice.

After last week's congressional hearings into the matter (where video of the second "double tap"strike was seen) the supposedly bi-partisan meeting predictably retreated to party lines. Arkansas Republican Senator and former veteran Tom Cotton absurdly claimed the video he saw showed the survivors trying to flip the bow half of their overturned motorless boat in order to continue their mission, adding that the attack was "righteous." Republican Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, by contrast, said the attack was an "extrajudicial killing."

Virginia Democrat Senator Mark Warner asked "Are they drug boats, are there narco traffickers on those boats?. If there are, why don't you interdict them and show the world rather than simply blowing them up – to make sure that sailors are not doing something that's inappropriate?"

Warner makes valid points. Usually, it's the Coast Guard that intercepts and boards alleged drug boats, bringing with them due process. That's their job description. That way there's little question whether the crew of the targeted speedboats are running drugs. That's how you show us the evidence. 

In addition, if the crew are found to be running drugs, you then have actual living prisoners – not cadavers – to interrogate for more information about the cartels. Why has the Coast Guard's mission seemingly been abandoned in favor of lethal assaults – which might include illegal orders, thus putting our servicemen in legal jeopardy? This is exactly what the six Democratic congressmen were talking about a few weeks ago when they cited the Uniform Code of Military Justice that a serviceman has a duty to disobey an illegal order.

Interestingly, the Coast Guard has noted that in at least  25 percent of their boardings of suspected boats, no drugs were found. Extrapolate that statistic to the government's war on suspected narco terrorists, then you could possibly presume that 22 of the 88 dead were ... simply murdered without cause.

We are treading strange and murky waters with a dangerous undertoe here. Do these assaults make our country look strong or out of control? Are we an humanitarian nation, or are we a ruthless oligarchy without a moral compass?

Are we a nation that believes in the rule of law?

Or are we not?